“Why don’t you talk to the other driver and see if the passengers are okay. I’ll look up the number for the insurance company for you.”
Focus on what to do rather than what went wrong. Particularly in situations where the incident will have its own natural consequences, the lesson is powerful enough without the added burden of lectures and recriminations from you.
If the driver is your child, make sure you let him or her handle the phone calls — supervised if necessary — and pay for any increased car insurance premiums. Those are life lessons that a young adult should not be shielded from.
Anybody can become angry — that is easy, but to be angry with the right person and to the right degree and at the right time and for the right purpose, and in the right way — that is not within everybody’s power and is not easy.
~Aristotle
Anger is usually a reaction to fear — fear of being hurt, overlooked, or betrayed, for instance. Anger is a helpful emotion insofar as it makes us aware of possible unfairness or mistreatment. It can appropriately signify that an injustice has been done or is occurring. Thus, don’t eliminate or repress anger altogether, but take note of it and inquire into the real causes of the injustice without jumping to conclusions or jumping into a tirade.
Ongoing rage is often the disposition of people who are ineffective, unaccountable, and powerless. People who storm around, rave, and point fingers don’t take responsibility for themselves and are ineffective in improving their situation.
One of the keys to making anger our ally is to develop the habit of clarifying how much we ourselves as opposed to others may be contributing to the unfairness or offense. For instance, we may be contributing by continuing to overlook mistreatment as it gradually worsens, or by provoking someone with veiled insults or a condescending attitude.
As people become more accountable for their own participation in a problem, the bitterness felt tends to diminish. While angry and aware, you hear another voice inside saying, “you’re overreacting; you’ll have to be accountable for this,” or “you’re staying in this unworkable situation; you’ll have to get out of it.” Knowing that you will have to be accountable and take action tends to subdue the inner drama-queen.
When intimates know that you will eventually take responsibility for your part in a confrontation and take real action regarding mistreatment from others, whether that occurs in five minutes or three days, the exchange tends to be less rancorous. The fact that others know that you will be accountable and hold them accountable adds some seriousness to the exchange while lessening some of the harm caused by seething accusations.
Learning to see the situation from the other person’s perspective takes away the intensity of the anger and informs you how to communicate effectively with that person or take necessary action. When you learn to look at several perspectives at once, rather than being locked into your own perspective, your anger softens, and so will your self-righteousness. Moreover, you’ll be able to focus on taking effective action, which is where real power lies.
The holiday season should be a time of family get-togethers, love shared, and relatives and friends brought up to date. Holidays are supposed to be the reification of that contradiction in terms: mass or group intimacy.
Instead, for victims of family violence and abuse, the holidays are recurring nightmares, replete with danger and duplicity, a theater of the absurd with menacing overtones. This is especially true when the offender also has Narcissistic or Antisocial Personality Disorders. It is important to understand the mindset of such abusers.
I. Envy
Holiday blues are a common occurrence even among the mentally sound. In abusers with narcissistic or antisocial personalities, they provoke a particularly virulent strain of pathological envy. The psychopathic narcissist is jealous at others for having a family, or for being able to celebrate, or for possessing the right, festive mood.
Holidays remind the narcissist of his childhood, of the supportive and loving family he never had. The narcissistic and psychopathic abuser feels deprived and, coupled with his rampant paranoia, he feels cheated and persecuted. To him, holidays are a conspiracy of the emotional haves against the emotional haves not.
II. Passive-Aggressiveness
Holidays and birthdays are injurious impositions and reminders of vulnerability. Holidays create in the narcissist an abandon of negative, nihilistic emotions, the only type of feelings he is intimately acquainted with.
On holidays, on birthdays and even on his own birthday, the narcissist makes it a point to carry on routinely: he accepts no gifts, does not celebrate, or passive-aggressively works till the wee hours of the night. Such pointed withdrawal is a demonstrative refusal to participate, a rejection of social norms. The narcissist-abuser wants to be drawn out of his sulk and pouting — yet, he declines all offers and opportunities and evades all attempts to draw him out. He hurts those who try to make him smile and to forget.
III. Control Freakery
Psychopathic and narcissistic abusers hate it when other people are happy if they are not the cause of such jubilation and joy. They have to be the prime movers and shakers, the center of attention, and the cause of everybody’s moods. In contrast, the narcissist believes that he should be the sole source and cause of his emotions. He, therefore, perceives holidays as prescriptions coming from high above as to how he should behave and feel on given days. Narcissists abhor authority and resent it (they are counter-dependent.)
The psychopathic narcissist projects his own desolate inner landscape onto others: he is convinced that people are faking and feigning their happiness — that it is false and forced. He feels that they are hypocrites, dissimulating joy where there is none. Envious as he is, the narcissist is humiliated by his envy, and enraged by his humiliation. He feels that other people are the recipients of gifts that he has been deprived of: the ability to enjoy life and to feel joy.
Besieged by gnawing inadequacy, the narcissistic abuser does his best to destroy everybody else’s celebratory mood: he provokes a fight, makes disparaging or snide remarks, projects a dire future, and sows uncertainty in relationships. When he has rendered his family and social circles sour and sad, his mood improves dramatically and he tries to cheer everyone up (in other words: to control how they feel). Now any joy would be real, his own doing, and controlled by him.
What can you do about it?
Act against your better instincts: do not try to involve an abuser in festivities, family events, birthdays, special occasions, and gatherings. Such attempts will only infuriate him further. Instead, leave him be. Go out, join friends and family at their abodes, and celebrate to your heart’s content. Chances are that by the time you have returned the abuser will have forgotten all about it and things will revert to “normal.”
Admittedly, some abusive intimate partners will be spoiling for a fight no matter what. There is nothing you can do about it except set boundaries and punish misbehavior and maltreatment. Whether you choose to involve an abuser in holiday activities or not is immaterial: he will torment and haunt you all the same.
"Allegretto" by Mimi Stuart Live the Life you Desire
Popular media tells us that our loneliness and anxiety are caused by not having enough things or the right kind of stuff. The right stuff will bring us pleasure, friends, love, happiness, and meaning.
While there’s nothing inherently bad about desiring material objects, preoccupation with the acquisition of consumer goods does not satisfy the needs they are intended to satisfy.
Consumerism is just the other side of the coin of miserliness. Both are caught by the attempt to take the whole world into their home and to possess it…. And yet, possessing the whole world is equivalent to having nothing at all. The miser and the consumer are fraught with insecurity.
~from “Money & the Soul of the World” by Sardello and Severson
Consumerism temporarily satiates insatiable yearnings and repeatedly numbs unwanted anxieties. The problem is that quick satiation eliminates the possibility of using one’s imagination, which is how we give meaning to material things.
Imagine that over a period of a year a child walks by a store window with a red bicycle in it. The child finally receives that bicycle as a gift, or saves up to purchase it. That bicycle becomes imbued with much more meaning than if it had been purchased when the child first laid eyes on it.
When we have little time between first desiring an object and acquiring it, we don’t have time to imagine having it. So it will not gain as much personal value to us. We start down the path of consumerism when we buy things right away without taking the time to consider acquiring them and imagine the delights they might bring us.
Nowadays, many children receive a lot of stuff from their Christmas lists. Yet, they often discard the gifts almost as quickly as they unwrap them. When impulse turns into possession too quickly, there’s no imagination invested and no time for real desire to develop. As a result, they are unlikely to cherish and take care of the material things they do acquire. Desire needs to deepen through time and one’s imagination in order to give soul to material things and their relationship to the world.
"Light of the Silvery" by Mimi Stuart Live the Life you Desire
A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity; an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty.
~Winston Churchill
Realistic optimism — that is, hopefulness and confidence about the future with an understanding of reality — enhances quality of life and longevity. Optimism requires intentional seeking of opportunity, beauty, and possibility, even in circumstances that don’t seem to hold out much hope, as in the following story:
The pessimist was sitting in a room full of toys and he did nothing but whine and cry. In contrast, the optimist was placed in a room full of horse manure and given a shovel. The optimist was happily shoveling away the manure. When asked why he was so happy, he said: “There’s got to be a pony in here somewhere!”
