Never Get Angry Again Read online

  “What do you know?” the man finally said. “Zombies do bleed!”4

  THE MASK THAT DOESN’T COME OFF

  Denying reality comes with a price. Exhausted and on edge, our ego edits our world to eliminate anything that will hurt or reveal us, either to ourselves or to others. Preoccupied with potential threats to our self-image, we are on constant guard. We hide behind a carefully crafted façade, and the identity that we build to shield ourselves soon becomes a shell encasing us. Over time, we fall into a hellish gap of unrealized potential, our true self weakens, and we feel hollow inside. We no longer live for ourselves. We exist only to protect our image, the ego. This includes all of the games we play and the masks we wear to show the rest of the world what we believe is the necessary persona.

  We may not even realize how much of our attitude and behavior—indeed, our values and beliefs—we style to avoid self-reflection, to compensate for self-hatred, and to project an image that betrays neither. In the exchange, we lose ourselves, contorting to the rules demanded by others to win their praise. Unsurprisingly, we never feel truly satiated. When we don’t love ourselves, we can’t give love, and we can’t feel loved. Even when the supply of affection and adulation is plentiful, we experience a different reality—an endless flow of tainted love. Ultimately, we remain empty and angry inside.

  Imagine pouring water into a cup that has no bottom. As you pour in the water, the cup feels and looks full. As long as the cup is constantly being filled, we feel content. But the minute someone stops filling it (with undivided attention, respect, or adoration), the cup quickly empties, and we are left as thirsty as ever. A shattered cup will never be full, and our thirst can never be quenched, no matter how much we receive. King Solomon, the wisest of men, wrote, “A lacking on the inside can never be satisfied with something from the outside.”5 People who seek self-esteem from external sources can never be truly content. They are the very epitome of a bottomless pit.

  We are hardwired to love ourselves, but when we can’t nourish ourselves through good choices and thus gain self-respect, we turn to the rest of the world to feed us. We make a desperate but futile attempt to convert their love and respect into feelings of self-worth. Our ever-shifting self-image becomes a direct reflection of the world around us. Our mood is raw and vulnerable to every fleeting glance and passing comment.

  We erroneously and frantically believe, If they care about me, then maybe I’m worth something, and then maybe I can love me. Yet it doesn’t work, and herein lies the basis for many failed relationships. When we lack self-esteem, we push away the very people we so desperately want in our lives because we can’t fathom why anyone would love someone as unlovable as ourselves. And whatever affection or kindness forces its way through to us, we hardly embrace it. Such overtures don’t serve to comfort but, rather, to confuse us; and the ego’s mandate is clear: reject others before they have a chance to reject us.

  To compound matters, the less self-control we have, the more desperately we manipulate events and people around us, especially those closest to us—either overtly or passive-aggressively. We intuit that self-control fosters self-respect, so when we cannot control ourselves, we need to feel as if we are in control of someone, something, anything, to feel a sense of power (the intricacies of which are further detailed in Chapter 4). Low self-esteem can thus trigger a powerful unconscious desire to usurp authority, to overstep bounds, and to mistreat those who care about us. When we don’t like who we are, we cannot help but become angry with ourselves. Then we take it out on the world around us and on the people who care most about us.

  3

  Isolated from Ourselves, Disconnected from Others

  For better or worse, our emotional, spiritual, and physical well-being feasts on, and fuels, the quality of our relationships—past and present. The previous chapter explained that people with low self-esteem have difficulty receiving love; indeed, they cannot easily give love, either. We can only give what we have. We give love. We give respect. If we don’t have it, what do we have to give?

  GIVE AND TAKE

  Love is limitless. A parent does not love her second child less because she already has one child. She loves each child, gives to each child, and does not run out of love. Compare this to someone who acquires a work of art that he “loves.” Over time, his fascination with the piece wanes, and when he acquires a new work, all of his attention, affection, and joy are redirected from the old art to the new art because, in truth, he does not care for his art. He cares for himself, and his art makes him happy. He is not giving to his art; his art gives to him, and so he takes. A person may say, “I love cookies.” He doesn’t. He enjoys eating cookies. If he truly loved cookies, then he would keep them out of sight and safe. Love is not selfish.

  Moving to a more profound scenario, it should come as no surprise that anger is easily triggered when we focus on our own pain and how difficult life is for us. For instance, when faced with a present or impending loss, the egocentric person grieves less for the other, and more for himself. His loss. His guilt. His woe. The less the ego is involved, the less stuck we will become, because normal feelings of sadness are processed healthily rather than suppressed, masked, or channeled away from the healing process. Let’s consider the four stages of grief: denial, anger, depression, and acceptance. The first three stages are ego-based. Only when we loosen the ego’s grip can we move toward acceptance.

  Herein lies the often-blurred distinction between lust and love. Lust is the opposite of love. When we lust after someone or something, our interest is purely selfish. We want to take, to feel complete. When we love, however, we focus on how we can give, and we do so happily and eagerly. When someone we love is in pain, we feel pain. When someone we lust after is in pain, however, our thoughts go to how it will affect us in terms of our own inconvenience or discomfort. What does this mean for me, not you?

  When a person suffers from low self-esteem, he takes what he needs in an attempt to make himself feel whole, which is why the last person you want trying to love you is someone who doesn’t love himself. This person cannot really love, he can only control and take. The more self-esteem we have, the more complete we are. Receiving, after all, is a natural and reciprocal consequence of giving. When we only take, however, to fill a constant void, we are left empty, and are forced to continue taking in a futile quest to feel fulfilled, which only reinforces our dependency and exhausts us emotionally and physically.

  Since self-esteem endows us with the ability to both give and to receive, some people with low self-esteem may have great difficulty accepting favors and expressing gratitude because needing or receiving help can trigger feelings of inadequacy. If the discomfort is severe, he may develop hostile feelings toward the very person extending the offering, because the giver brings increased awareness to his insecurities and shortcomings.1

  Through this paradigm, we learn how to tell whether someone has high or low self-esteem; it is reflected in how he treats himself and others. A person who lacks self-esteem may indulge in things to satisfy only his own desires, and he will not treat others particularly well (a product of an arrogant mentality). Alternatively, this person may cater to others because he craves their approval and respect, but he does not take care of his own needs (a product of the doormat mentality). Only someone who has higher self-esteem can give responsibly—love and respect—to both himself and others.

  EMPATHY VS. SYMPATHY

  This brings us to another marked distinction, between sympathy and empathy. The former means that we feel pity for a person’s situation, but we are disinclined to exert ourselves to alleviate his plight. A person may be very sensitive to the suffering of others, but if he merely sympathizes, he is consumed with his own pain and is then motivated primarily to reduce his own suffering—usually by means of escapism and indulgence—rather than help the person who actually feels pain. He often wishes he were unaware of the sorrow around him so as not to suffer as a result.

  The ty
pical characteristics of the egocentric mentality are arrogance and bravado, but even a highly sensitive person who is seemingly void of ego can also be self-centered and selfish. He is absorbed in his own pain, filled with self-pity, and he can’t feel anyone else’s pain while drowning in his own. Such a person experiences no real connection to anyone outside of himself, despite his seemingly noble nature. Without genuine humility, he will not—cannot—burden himself unless he receives a larger payout in the form of acceptance or approval. His taking is disguised as giving. His fear is dressed up as love. (He may also be motivated by the need to assuage feelings of guilt or inadequacy, yet still, his aim is to reduce his own suffering, not someone else’s).

  Empathy, by comparison, is the capacity to share another’s emotions and feel his pain, rather than to merely feel sorry for him. The person with empathy feels grateful for knowing about others’ troubles because he genuinely wants to alleviate their suffering. Moral development, rather than just moral thinking, is what moves a person to altruistic behavior. In fact, sociopaths have been shown to possess excellent moral reasoning but feel no need to act befittingly—this requires empathy.2

  Parenthetically, the ease with which we rise above our own problems and shift attention to the welfare of another is a reliable marker of emotional health. While we all are, to some extent, self-absorbed—particularly when we struggle with personal challenges—the intensity and duration are revealing. Almost anyone can be warm, kind, and generous when he is in a positive mood. However, a true indicator of emotional health is when a person can respond to the needs of another with care and patience even while in a low emotional state or under physical distress.

  A person who is not self-centered feels humility and a connection to others. The wall of I am me and he is he is broken down, and where there is no ego, there is connection, a bond. For this reason we naturally feel empathy more easily for children, the elderly, the sick, or even animals, because we see their vulnerability via their ego-free appearance. They look the part. We experience this in our own lives in different ways, to different degrees. A person bangs into us on a busy street and we turn around, annoyed, only to find that he’s blind or otherwise handicapped and is simply trying to get past us. We see his limitation, we feel for him—our “heart goes out to him”—and our anger dissipates. Or maybe a coworker spills coffee on your desk and dashes away. You’re about to walk into her office and pounce, only to learn that her child is sick in the hosptial. Anger cannot exist where there is no separation, no “I” to get in the way, but when we are self-focused, the ego cuts the cord. Fundamentally, anger is a disconnection—to avoid pain, to inflict pain.

  To be a part of someone’s life we need to create a space for that person. If one is too self-absorbed, there is no room for anyone else, and such a person is trapped in the tomb of his own suffering because his capacity to connect with others is strained, if not altogether severed. Physical isolation—or even simply being ignored—is painful. In fact, studies show that feeling alone or experiencing loneliness, more than any other factor, causes extreme stress and an overall weakening of the immune system. The pain of isolation is not just a metaphor. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scans reveal that two areas of the brain where we process physical pain—the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex and the anterior insula—become activated when we experience feelings of social rejection.3 The lower the self-esteem, the weaker the connection to our true selves—the soul—and to the true selves of others—as such, our ability to give love and to receive love erodes. We suffer. Our relationships suffer. Everyone suffers.

  SMOKE AND MIRRORS

  We should note that people often mistake confidence for self-esteem, but the two are quite different. Confidence is how effective we feel within a specific area or situation, while self-esteem is defined as how much we recognize our inherent worth and feel deserving of happiness and good fortune. Self-esteem is shaped by the quality of our choices rather than by the assets at our disposal. A person who attempts to fortify his self-image by taking pride in a specific trait may exhibit signs of high self-esteem to the untrained eye, but, in fact, such an individual often suffers from low self-esteem, because all he has is an inflated ego.

  When a person suffers from very low self-esteem, it doesn’t matter how accomplished he appears, he depends on everyone and everything to boost his faltering self-image. The research is clear: A person’s inflated sense of self does not derive from self-esteem, but from self-loathing.4 Don’t fall into the trap of believing that a person with an inflated ego likes himself; ego and self-esteem are inversely related. No matter how much a person appears to be happy with himself, if he is egocentric, that person suffers with feelings of inferiority. This statement is not conjecture, but a law of human nature; it is psychological math.5

  4

  Step Right Up and Choose Your Reality

  Each circumstance we encounter is like a blank book until we write the script with our thoughts. For instance, when someone acts rudely toward us, it doesn’t mean anything. This person’s words or deeds cause us to feel bad about ourselves because of our self-image. What does his opinion really have to do with our self-worth? Nothing. But that’s just what the ego does—it makes everything about us. The greater our self-esteem, the less quick we are to take offense because when we love ourselves, (a) we don’t assume that someone’s actions mean he doesn’t respect us; and (b) even if we do come to that conclusion, we aren’t angered, because we don’t need his respect in order to respect ourselves.

  We often unconsciously evaluate a situation to determine how personally we should take it and thus how offended we should feel. For example, a car cuts us off on the road, and we are curious to see what the driver looks like. Why? Based on the driver’s appearance, we try to determine if the action was deliberate. An elderly man, wearing a gray fedora and driving a 1983 Oldsmobile would not enrage us as much as a young man smoking a cigarette with music blaring from his car’s open windows. Most of us would assume that the older gentleman simply didn’t see our car while the young man did it to us on purpose, because he doesn’t respect us and doesn’t care. Do you appreciate the absurdity of this? We get cut off on the road, and then we speed up to see what the offending driver looks like so we can decide how angry we should become.

  Whatever the situation or circumstance—the question we ask ourselves is always the same: What does this mean? That’s what anger comes down to; it’s not only that you take it personally. Rather, it’s the belief that, This person treated me this way because there’s something wrong with me—something broken or flawed. As we discussed in Chapter 2, if you don’t love and respect yourself, then you can’t imagine why anyone else would have positive feelings toward you. I don’t like me, so you must not like me. We connect the dots of someone else’s behavior to arrive at a place of hurt. We assume that the person has treated us this way because, They know the truth. This frightful thought makes us question our self-worth: Maybe I deserve this.

  We often experience more pain when we feel disrespected by a smart, wealthy, or attractive person. Via the ego, we believe that this individual has more value, and so his treatment of us is of greater significance. Indeed, our relationship to the person also shapes the impact. If a crazed person starts screaming at us, we will likely be minimally affected by the encounter—but what if it’s a close friend, a respected colleague, or a loved one? Why are we more inclined to feel hurt and prone to become angry? Because this person knows us inside and out—the good, the bad, and the ugly. This can cause us to more easily question our self-worth. This person really knows me. Maybe there’s something to it?

  The flaw in this thinking is a corrupted correlation between a person’s knowledge of us and his treatment of us. Just because someone knows you well, it doesn’t make him healthy. If a person has one hundred percent self-esteem, speaking theoretically, he would approach the entire world with love and respect. When conversing with a rude person, for exampl
e, he would be filled with empathy. His singular thought would be, How much pain must this person be in to treat someone as wonderful as me so poorly? Again, we can only give what we have. We give love. We give respect. How someone behaves toward you is reflection of his own feelings of self-worth and has nothing to do with your intrinsic worth—unless you (the ego) decide to make it about you.

  Likewise, when you’re in a good mood—brimming with transitory feelings of confidence and control—does it mean that others are suddenly worthier of your respect and kindness? No one has changed but you. As our mood sours, we become emotionally stingy and give respect to those we need. We are not really giving anything, though, but rather taking masquerading as giving.

  IT’S NOT ME, IT’S YOU

  In the previous chapter, we explained that when we know a person’s limitations, animosity is diffused because once we see their vulnerability and fragility, we don’t make his problem our problem. And while the more arrogant a person appears to be on the outside, the more weak and helpless he feels on the inside, it is we who determine whether we will see beyond the façade. Once our is ego deployed, we become fearful—the knee jerk conclusion is, How dare he!—and the fuse is lit. If, however, we are primed to observe the basis for his behavior—his feelings of inadequacy and insecurity—then we remain anger free. If not filled with empathy, than at least with pity. As long as we are alert to the pain of the other person, the entire interaction is automatically reframed and we will not feel pained because we will not be in pain. But the moment we become self-focused we will draw the inevitable conclusion that this treatment is because we are less—rather than he feels less—and that’s scary. That’s painful.

  It’s not the situation that determines how you feel but the meaning that we attach to it, and that meaning is always based on one thing: how we feel about ourselves. There is an event and an emotional response, but in between those is an intellectual process where we assign a meaning to what is happening. The instant you choose to take it personally—yes, it’s a choice—you’ll be fighting against your nature. Imagine that you’re at a party and someone starts screaming at you for being a lying, no-good thief and hurls a string of accusations at you. The music stops and the crowd stares. You’re feeling mortified until … he calls you by the wrong name. Realizing that this is a case of mistaken identity and everyone now knows it, you move from humiliation to relief as your focus shifts from yourself to this poor guy and how embarrassed he’s going to be the moment he learns the truth. In all interactions, if your ego is out of the way, then you know that, “He’s got the wrong person.” It’s not you. Unless you make it about you. While it’s true that he may see you as less, that doesn’t make you less—but if you feel less, then it does make you angry.