Dealing with Angry People and Situations

Video Post by:  Andreas Moritz  (2012)

Hi, this is Andreas Moritz and this is a question from Melinda Struzynski: “Many people have one person in their life who always makes them feel angry, anxious and upset. It could be a mother-in-law, your boss, a friend, etc. These people push all your buttons and even when they are not pushing your buttons, just being in their presence causes a feeling of great uneasiness. How do you best deal with being around with these kinds of people and what can we tell ourselves when we are in their presence? Why are they in our lives?”

And this is not an easy question to answer because there are complexities that only relate to a person’s past, their upbringing, childhood experiences and karmic relationships that are not typically available to these individuals.

I have seen many cases where someone like a boss who is very, very dominating and controlling because of a past life relationship where the exact opposite had occurred and so that person who is being controlled has certain guilty feelings from a previous relationship where he was the suppressor or the person was controlling the other person and in order to balance that experience and he has to be on the receiving end.

Now not because he deserves to be punished by (that person who is) now boss, but because there is a certain amount of guilt and shame from having done something bad to that same person when he was the victim. And so the only way for these two individuals to bring an old conflict into balance is to come back together, to find each other and to reverse the roles so that the one person who is the victimizer becomes the victim and vice versa and both of these individuals benefit from that interaction.

Now when a person has their button pushed, it’s only because there are buttons that can be pushed. If there were no buttons that could be pushed, then nobody could push them.

So in other words, the victim is always responsible for what happens to them. The victim is asking for it, unconsciously though. If it were conscious, he would not allow this. So the most important thing to understand in this, in our relationships with other people who push our buttons, is that we somehow give it out. There is a feeling inside of ourselves that we are not worthy so therefore we may make mistakes and then the boss comes around and is pointing it out or criticizing us over making bad mistakes and then we may feel angry because he is criticizing us.

So it gives us an opportunity to get in touch with suppressed feelings of anger towards our self because we can never ever get angry about someone else. It’s an old myth that you get angry with someone or a situation, this cannot be true because if there is no anger towards yourself inside you, then it doesn’t matter what anyone does to you, you cannot have anger towards that person. It can only, there can only be fire coming out of you if there is fire already inside of you. If there is no fire inside of you it cannot flare up doesn’t matter what anyone else does to you.

The idea that other people make us angry is an illusion.

If there is someone that comes to me and criticizes me and I get angry, it is only because there is something inside of me that is reminded by that particular instant or attack or criticism that I have not made terms with yet. Something inside of me I don’t like about myself… and when there is something I don’t appreciate and love or accept in myself e.g. having made mistakes and I still blame myself for that, then someone else has to come along in the immediate environment, it could be a mother-in-law, could be a boss, could be a friend or an enemy, any of these individuals then will point out to me that what exactly I am doing to myself.

So if I don’t like myself, someone will not like me. If I really like myself, then someone else will come and like me too. So we all have all kinds of parts to ourselves, the likeable, the beautiful parts that other people bring to the surface so that we can say, “Oh, yes, there is something beautiful about me,” and likewise there will be people in our lives that will bring out the worst in us, so to say. The things that we have suppressed, we didn’t want other people to see, our vulnerabilities, the mistakes that we make, the ugliness, the things that we hate in ourselves, all the guilt and shame that we have brought into this lifetime from other lifetimes, or the guilt and shame that we have acquired during our childhood years.

So these people are doing us a great favor. They are like the postman who delivers letters to us. Sometimes we see beautiful letters and postcards or greeting cards where people wish us well or we receive nasty letters, people that don’t like us, and they complain to us about what we have done to them. But if we went out and blamed the postman for delivering these letters, then this is misdirected.

The blame shouldn’t be there in the first place because there is nobody to be blamed when something supposedly bad is happening to us.

When someone puts us down and criticizes us, it’s a blessing in disguise and should not be counter reacted against. We need to become more aware of our responses to something that happens to us. So if right now someone comes to me and says “You are such a bad person, and you did this and this and this”, I have two choices, I can counter react and start attacking that other person for being so unkind to me and be very angry with them or I can breathe for a moment and take a couple of deep breaths… “Well, this happened to me so why did this happen to me? What is the benefit from that criticism? What does it tell me? Is there something in me that I still am not appreciating enough… something that I am not accepting enough… something I don’t like about myself… things that are done to other people I feel ashamed for or guilty about?” And so these are eye openers for us.

Our negative experiences like that help us to come to terms with more of ourselves, to learn to appreciate and love and accept all the weaknesses that we may have, the mistakes that we may have made, the things that we have done to other people and we have cursed ourselves over that. So these are opportunities, therefore a mother-in-law who is hostile towards us, or a boss that keeps commandeering us around and constantly putting us down, these are not coincidental happenings, these are opportunities to learn more about what we are doing to ourselves. And once we learn to simply accept these incidences as useful, it doesn’t matter if we understand them or not, simply by accepting them and saying, “Well, there is a blessing in disguise in this, I may not know why this is happening to me but the fact that this is happening to me it must be for good reason.”

And so you will find that by staying with the emotion, the feeling, the welling up of anger, of fear, or whatever is allowing you to get deeper in touch with who you are at that time… and that allows these emotions to transform into something more useful.

Every time we are afraid of something we typically shut our door to our heart and this doesn’t make us feel good, this makes us angry. And so by accepting what comes to us as a blessing in disguise, it allows these emotions to sort of become diminished until they disappear and then we realize, “Oh my God! I feel so much better about myself.”

If someone is angry with you, you can easily make the choice and reach out to that person and say, “Gosh, is there anything I can do for you? Obviously you are not very happy right now. Maybe I can make your day a little happier? Let me know please if there is anything I can do to make that happen?” and giving them your hand and reaching out… instead of reacting against them you can reach out and give them something, surprise them, tell them that you really, really appreciate your boss especially at that moment when he is attacking you. Say, “Please let me know if there is anything I can do to make it better for you.”

And so, there is a saying by Jesus Christ “Love your enemies” and loving your enemies means love your adversities, love the things that are hurled at you, the hostility, the anger, the criticism… these are all the supposed enemies, and so by accepting them, by loving your enemies, accepting them, bring them in your home. Home means heart. And by bringing them into your heart, by letting them be there for a while… simply by letting them be there rather than rejecting or trying to avoid these fears or anger or emotions, allow them to be there and then they will transform into your friends. Your enemies will become your friends. And by revealing your own weaknesses to other people, other people will appreciate you more, will accept you more, and the hostility will simply end.

So, these are simple advices that have worked for so many people and I wholeheartedly recommend that you practice that. It’s not a difficult practice and it starts by accepting yourself the way you are. Don’t try to change yourself, don’t try to make yourself better, because that will imply there is something bad about what you are. Something that is negative. You don’t need to do that. All that is required is to accept everything about you: positive and negative. Not try to change yourself but to accept yourself… and that is a form of loving yourself and once that is accomplished there is no way people will start attacking you, because there is nothing that can be attacked. If anyone still attacks you, it will go right through you, it will not create an impact, there are no buttons to be pushed anymore, and therefore there is no conflict. So anyone who is still trying to relieve their anger and just spread it in their environment, it will only hit doors that will offer resistance to it. And so if there is no more resistance in you, and it will go right through you, or it will just dissipate and so you are not affected by it.

This is the best possible advice I can give to your question.

Thank you.