This Creates Unnecessary Stress
I remember a time when I took something personally, and it caused me unnecessary anger (and therefore, unnecessary stress). A senior colleague was patronizing toward me; he spoke to me repeatedly in a condescending tone. Years later, when I acquired my Inner Guide, she pointed out to me that he treated everyone that way. He had been raised in a culture in which he was a member of the aristocracy, and that had influenced his attitudes toward people. Realizing this, I felt relief as my anger changed to amusement.
Perhaps you have had times when you erroneously took something personally. What makes us do this?
How Did This Response Develop?
During our early development, we react to stimuli reflexively and these reactions get locked in as habits. We react to stimuli that we perceive as threats with either fight, flight, or freeze responses, depending on the situation. Unless the threat is so intense that it evokes a flight or freeze response, it evokes the fight response: aggression, and the anger that is a component of aggression. Once this habit has been formed, it is locked in, and becomes an automatic response to things that we perceive as threats.
What are Threats?
Stimuli that we tend to perceive as threats are things that we don't want. In infancy, threats include hunger and other discomforts. During development, we are exposed to many other kinds of threats. Once when my son was three years old, and very engaged in an activity that he didn't want to stop, he interpreted my insistence that it was nap time as a threat, and he resisted (the fight response). As I carried him up the stairs to his bedroom, he shouted, "You are a dangerous person for taking me up to my nap."
Automatic Responses Interfere with Evaluating a Situation
As our locked-in, automatic response to a threat is anger, it doesn't allow us time to evaluate the perceived threat and decide whether it is, in fact, aggression against us. My automatic response to my senior colleague's patronizing comments was to perceive them as a threat and to immediately respond with (suppressed) anger. Even though I saw that he treated others the same way, the rapidity of my response precluded considering other possibilities for his behavior. It took my Inner Guide's intervention to enable me to see that he wasn't, in fact, attacking me.
The Inner Guide
The way an Inner Guide helps with an automatic response (such as a locked-in response of anger to a perceived threat) is to create a complex stimulus (which I'll explain in another post), which unlocks the habit and enables your mind to choose a new, better response to a perceived threat. While other factors can release you from an automatic response, an Inner Guide can do so efficiently and consistently.
This is but one of the many ways that an Inner Guide can relieve you of stress. You can acquire an Inner Guide with my course, Achieving Emotional Comfort®, which is available at: go.emotionalcomfort.com/getcourse
