RULE TO BREAK

“Some people just get to you”

You must know certain people who have a habit of making you angry, or upset, or depressed. Even the people who mostly make you feel great can occasionally make you feel bad.

It’s a very common expression: ‘He makes me so cross’, or ‘She always makes me feel inadequate’, or ‘He makes me feel guilty’. So common that almost everyone believes it. But we’re not all so malleable that we’re just victims – pawns in someone else’s game. People can behave in ways that make a certain response seem easier, but you don’t have to get stuck in that initial reaction. As you’ll see, this is an extension of the previous Rule.

If you don’t want to feel a particular way, just don’t feel it. I know that’s far easier to say than to do, especially after years of forming a habitual response to certain things. Your brain has spent years beating a neural pathway to a certain response, and you’ll have to retrain it. But that can be done. Just refuse to listen to your mind telling you that you’re guilty or cross or inadequate, and tell it even more firmly that you’re at ease or calm or confident or whatever you would prefer to feel.

Suppose your partner ‘makes’ you angry by shouting at you. Try thinking of it this way: your partner shouted at you and you got angry.

Now take it further: your partner shouted. You got angry.

Now for the next step: your partner did what they did. You did anger.

Well, if you can do anger, you can do something else instead. What would you rather do – calm? OK, then do calm instead. Why should your partner doing whatever it is they did have control over your feelings? We’ve already established that you control your feelings. So just keep telling yourself, ‘I’m choosing to do calm’.

There’s some neuroscience behind this that I’m not going to bore you with,^* and it doesn’t matter anyway. The point is that you need to train your mind to ignore the old neural pathway by forging a new one. Keep telling yourself in this situation that you’re doing calm – if it helps, visualize feeling calm, or recall a time when you’ve felt very calm – and before long your brain will get into the habit of following the new pathway whenever your partner shouts at you.

Whatever is getting to you, just tell yourself that it is what it is, or that that person did what they did, or said what they said. Then choose which emotion you’re going to do, and do it.