I am upset. At this moment, as I sit here typing this up, I am truly upset. Something happened a little while ago. I got into an argument and I am now reaping the results of that. It’s a true bounty of results, I can tell you. Let’s see…anger, frustration, shame, disgust…then more anger and guilt at the fact that I have allowed myself to get angry and frustrated. All of this is confusing. It’s a form of madness (no offence intended). I think what’s worse is that it is quite normal for most people.
So, as I sit here and stew, let us see if we can work this all out. Where does all this negative emotion come from? Well, obviously from the thing that was said to me. The person I had the “conversation” with spoke words. These words were taken by my mind, analysed, and a proper “reaction” was produced based on the result of the analysis. No matter how deep we go into human psychology and the workings of the mind; that really is the simple description of what happened. That’s all we need to concern ourselves with. We can keep it simple, and then try a simple approach to addressing the problem. The problem is whatever the person said. Words…Just words. How can words have such a powerful effect? The answer is that they don’t. What has the effect is the power we give those words…our rating of them…our belief in them. So if someone calls you an idiot, you might be offended. Why?
I mean you know you are not an idiot. Most likely the person knows it too. Why the negative response? Why can’t you ignore it? Well, because you are wired that way. You can’t stand to see that anyone would say you were an idiot. It is not enough that you know you’re not an idiot. You need this person to acknowledge that as well. And what’s wrong with that? I think it’s natural for us to want other people recognize the message we are trying to convey by our words or actions (whether or not the message is true or false). Sadly, no matter what we do, there are people who will always interpret things how they choose. Basically, no matter how much you show James how much of a genius you are, James (Sorry if your name is James) will still call you an idiot, and probably feel he is better than you.