تفسیر درس

VIP Commentary - Anger

Hello and welcome to this month’s commentary about ‘Anger’ and really about negative, undesirable emotions. Now, I don’t like that word “negative” emotions, because I don’t think these emotions are negative. I don’t think certain emotions are bad and others are good. I think that psychologically speaking, you know looking at it from a psychological point of view, that our emotions are just messages, in a way.

Now, what is the message that anger sends us. When we get angry, why do we get angry? Usually it’s the idea, as I discussed in the video, that our feeling of fairness has been violated, right? Basically, something has happened that we feel is not right, that it’s wrong; unjust, right? It’s kind of a feeling of injustice, maybe towards us, maybe towards someone else, but that’s a message that we should pay attention to and not just try to ignore it.

Now, how we handle the anger that comes up that’s the challenge. It’s quite difficult, right? Because, obviously, just yelling and screaming all the time and walking around being stressed out and angry that’s not so good and it’s also not good to just press the anger down and try to ignore it and pretend it’s not there.

Actually, this is a very challenging thing to find a kind of middle ground where you recognize the anger, you feel it and then you look at it a little more deeply and you try to recognize okay, why am I feeling angry? What do I feel is wrong in this situation? What’s happening that’s giving me this feeling of injustice or unfairness or that things aren’t right. Someone is doing something that’s not right or something’s happening that’s not right.

That’s the message of anger and that’s what we really kind of need to focus on. I know when I deal with anger in a healthy way that’s what I’ll do. I’ll get more to the root of what’s happening and then I’ll try to figure out what can I do about that. And that’s really our challenge.

Now, one of the big challenges we have in this world now because of Internet and TV and all of this is that we’re constantly bombarded with messages of injustice and unfairness. I mean the news is designed to make us feel powerless and angry at the same time, right? If you watch the news it’s almost impossible not to constantly feel angry. It’s nothing but wars and cheating and corrupt politicians, you know, on and on and on and on and on.

Then, of course, even in our personal lives things happen which make us feel anger.

We see this injustice. This has been a challenge in my own life. I have a sensitivity to justice and unfairness and suffering. You know, I used to be a social worker and worked with people who were suffering and it made me angry to see people with more power doing bad things to other people.

Sometimes that meant a man hurting a woman – domestic violence – and it made me angry. It also makes me angry to see whole countries, such as my own country, bombing and killing and invading people. You know there’s so much of it out there in the world and if we just focus on all of that all of the time then it’s very easy to become angry all of the time.

This is, like I said, something I’ve struggled with in my own life sometimes. Part of the reason I’m not a social worker anymore is because it kind of almost started making me angry all the time. I’m a little more of a fighter. I kind of have a fighting sort of spirit inside of me so when I see things that are bad I want to fight them. For me it’s not enough just to kind of heal people and it’s going to be okay. You know kind of that really gentle soothing thing that some people are very good at.

Some people are natural healers. They don’t get angry. They just feel a deep compassion and they’re very kind to people who are hurting and that’s wonderful. But other people, such as myself, we feel that but then we also feel a sense of we need to fight the good fight – that was last month’s topic – and so we get a little bit of this kind of anger like hey, this is wrong. People are being hurt. We need to fight this! Something needs to be done about this!

That would happen to me and so I usually ended up kind of fighting with my bosses and, you know, fighting against the system that was hurting these people. I did some good things and I helped some people and I got some good changes to happen, but I also made myself quite burned out and stressed a lot and that’s the danger of being angry too much.

So, I think the challenge this month when we really think about these emotions…and maybe for you it’s not anger. Maybe for you it’s sadness or depression or maybe for you it’s jealousy, but whatever it is, that difficult emotion, we gotta go deep into it. One thing we do know is just trying to avoid it, pretending it’s not there, that’s not going to help. In psychology it’s called repression and it doesn’t work. It usually makes the problem worse.

So if you’re feeling jealous, let’s say you’re a jealous person, you’re always jealous, usually it’s guys who are jealous, not always, but let’s say it’s a guy and you’re dating a girl and you’re always jealous of your girlfriend, jealous of your girlfriend all the time.

Well, just pretending you’re not jealous and trying to say that you’re not when really you are all the time, that’s not going to work. It will just make the jealousy even stronger.

On the other hand, being jealous constantly and constantly following your girlfriend around and not trusting her and getting all stressed out, making her feel terrible, that will ruin your life. So what’s the solution? The solution is you gotta get into that jealousy and you gotta really start feeling it deeply and looking at its source. Why am I feeling so jealous? What is happening here?

Usually jealousy comes from, of course, insecurity. You feel like you’re not good enough at some level and therefore your girlfriend is gonna leave and find someone better and you gotta get into that feeling, which is not a good feeling. And, yet, the only way to cure the jealousy is to really get deep into that feeling and see it and feel it, write about it, talk about it, recognize it, accept it. And it takes some time, but through some time you can actually heal that.

In fact, I personally went through that myself when I was young with my first girlfriend.

Way back in high school and maybe my early 20s I was really, really jealous of my first girlfriend, really jealous, and I eventually did exactly what I just described. I finally realized this is terrible. This is ruining my life and my relationships. I’ve gotta do something about this and I really got focused on it and when I felt it I would almost meditate on the feeling. You know meditate and focus on that feeling of jealousy and I would write about it. I read books about jealousy.

I just went into that jealousy and focused on it as much as I could and understood it as deeply as possible and I got down to the roots of it and I found that insecurity. Some of that insecurity came from being bullied a little bit when I was younger. I wasn’t very cool or popular when I was younger in school, like in high school, and all those feelings made me insecure. So I kept looking at that, writing about it, feeling it, understanding it and then, eventually, the jealousy faded away and then after that point I never felt jealous again and still don’t.

Well, that’s the process and it’s the same thing we have to do let’s say with anger, constantly feeling angry. You gotta get into this and you gotta really feel what is it? Why am I so angry? What is causing this anger? Is it a sense of injustice? Is it a feeling in unfairness? Do I feel like I don’t have enough of power in my own life? What is it? I mean this, you know, psychology. This is kind of deep psychology.

The reason most people don’t do this is because you’re going into feelings which don’t feel so good. See, most people want to avoid those feelings. Most people want to avoid that feeling of anger. They just wanna maybe yell and scream and get it out quickly so they don’t feel it very long or they push it down and kind of try to repress it and forget about it so, again, they don’t feel it for very long.

The most challenging way and yet the most healthy way is to actually just sit there and feel it and look at it, concentrate on it. See how it feels in your body when you feel angry, you know certain areas in your body might feel tense, and then notice what thoughts keep coming up. What are you focusing on and thinking about as you feel angry. What are those thoughts that keep coming up again and again and again? And then maybe get out a journal and just start writing about that anger. I feel angry because of this and this and this and this and just try to dig down and find the psychological roots of that anger.

This is something you have to do many times. Doing it just once isn’t gonna cause a big healing, but if you do frequently, like every day or every time it happens for a few months, you’ll find that you will begin to heal and you’ll find more positive ways to deal with the problem and you’ll feel less and less angry in general.

And the exact same process works with fear, as well, another one people experience a lot – fear. This is one, again, that I’ve gone into a lot and really worked on not being afraid, you know? I had to deal with this when I started this business. I’ve told this story many times, so I won’t tell the full story, but basically, to start my own business was a scary thing and I had to just go into the fear, like why am I afraid? What’s this fear caused by?

I really looked at that fear. How does it feel in my body? You know I feel a certain tension in certain places. What thoughts keep coming up? And I realized oh, I’m worried that I’m going to fail. Then I thought well why does that bother me? Why am I afraid of failing? I just kept thinking about it and asking these questions. Well, I’m afraid of failing.

I’m really afraid of what other people might think of me. Because I’m telling everybody about this, I’m taking a risk and other people might, you know, maybe laugh at me or something.

The more I got clear about it and I really understood it then I started to see that it was very irrational. I could see, well, you know, my family is not going to laugh at me and feel bad if I fail. They’ll be very supportive. They’ve always been very supportive of me.

And if other people laugh at me then they’re not really my friends, so who cares. I don’t care what they think. As I started getting deeper in to the fear and understanding it in more detail it lost it’s power and then I started my business and, you know, went forward and everything was great.

So that’s really what this month’s topic is about. I know it’s very psychological. It’s not really about, you know, getting some specific goal or something like that. It’s kind of a difficult topic this month because it doesn’t sound very inspiring, right? It doesn’t sound so inspiring like just think good thoughts all the time, yeah! That’s great, but in this month I’m telling you look at your most painful emotions. Look at them! Think about them! Feel them deeply! Write about them! Analyze them! Find their roots!

That is difficult work, it’s not for the weak, you know? Most people will avoid exactly what I’m telling you to do. Most people don’t want to do that and, yet, this is a key to freeing you. This is a key to your emotional freedom. That’s why I’m talking about this topic this month because so many people are held back by one or more deep emotional problem.

I mean I see it all the time. I see it on our general forums constantly. I read the posts and people will write about their doubts or they’ll write about their criticisms. You know, I can see people who are stuck and it’s very obvious to me, maybe because I used to be a counselor and a social worker, but it’s very obvious to me that they are stuck because of some emotional problem. It has nothing to do with Effortless English. It has nothing to do with English in general. There’s an emotional problem there.

I see on the forums, for example, a lot of fear. There are always certain people who are afraid. They won’t even try anything until they feel 100% certain that absolutely they will succeed. They have so much fear of failing. It’s interesting to me to see it. You know they’ll write these posts like how do I know I will succeed if I try Effortless English. They want everybody else to tell them that oh, definitely, you will succeed.

It’s like they need everybody to tell them it will be okay. It’s okay. And even then it’s not enough. Sometimes they want a personal message from me telling them yes. I 100% guarantee if you listen to the lessons you will be a perfect English speaker in one month. Even if I did that these people would still be nervous and afraid and probably wouldn’t start.

You’ve probably seen these people on the forum sometimes. Well, they’re being ruled by fear and I guarantee that fear is not just about English. It’s a deeper fear that goes back into their life. It’s got very deep roots and those people are gonna have a lot of problems in life. Not just with English or Effortless English, but with their career, with relationships, with dating a woman or a man, with anything, because they are so controlled by fear.

They’re so fearful of making a mistake or appearing foolish or anything bad happening that they’re paralyzed. They’re paralyzed and super indecisive and they can’t really use a lot of the topics I talk about in VIP or Power English until they deal with that fear. They just can’t hear what I’m saying. They kind of hear it, but they don’t really understand it.

It’s because they’re so focused on the fear.

The fear is controlling them so much that they can’t really hear anything else and so those kinds of people they have to get into the fear. They gotta get in there and feel it and write about it and find the roots and just really work on that fear for a while and then once they do that it will start to dissolve. That fear will lose it’s power and suddenly these people will begin to experience success in all parts of their life very quickly. It’s like taking the chains off of them.

Now, other people are more angry and controlled by anger. I’ve seen this on our forums too. These are the people who are always kind of arguing, arguing, arguing. They’ll get on there and they’ll be like, you know, quite obviously this is not correct! And, you know, according to my grammar book in this situation you must always use the past tense!

They’re always arguing. If someone says the sky is blue, they say no it’s not, it’s red. If they say this is easy, they say no, it’s hard. If they say this is fun, they say no it’s not.

You know, there’s this sort of like anger. You can kind of feel that.

Now, we don’t allow people to be too angry on our forums because we want to keep a friendly environment. But, yet, I can still read certain forums and there are certain people that just have kind of an angry feeling in there sometimes and they’re always kind of argumentative and resisting all the time and, again, those people cannot hear anything else. They can’t really benefit from any other teachings or ideas because they’re so controlled by the anger and again, that anger really is not about English at all.

It’s about something else deeper in their life and if they really want to make big changes in their life and succeed in their jobs, their careers, with English, with relationships, with everything, the first thing they have to do is get in there and look at that angry and deal with it and find its roots and really learn how to feel it and see what thoughts are connected to it and go deep, deep, deep and write and write and write about it and find the message. What is the angry trying to tell them that they need to do or need to change?

And then, finally, there are people, again, who are stuck in sadness and disappointment.

You know these are the people who after two weeks of trying the lessons they’ll write something like oh, I’ve been listening for two weeks and nothing has happened. I’m not a perfect speaker now. Awe, something must be wrong with me. I guess I’m just not good at this.

Then they need everybody to reassure them. It’s okay. It’s okay. It’s okay. It’s okay. And yet, still, even if 20 people tell them, you know, don’t worry. Two weeks isn’t enough.

You’re gonna be fine. It will work. They still kind of ahh. There’s this sort of weakness and sadness and disappointment there.

And I’m not criticizing these people because, as I’ve said, in my own past I’ve dealt with jealousy. I’ve dealt with fear. I still now deal with anger. That’s probably the most difficult negative emotion I have now that I have to deal with sometimes. So we all have this. It’s not that it’s bad or good or something wrong with you if you have a problem with anger or a problem with fear or a problem with sadness and disappointment.

There’s nothing wrong with you it’s a basic human thing. It’s just that if we want to free ourselves, if we really want to live the kind of life we dream of, we gotta get into those negative emotions. We can’t avoid them and we can’t just express them quickly. You know, yell at somebody or cry and then try to forget about it. No. We gotta really look at them, kind of meditate on them.

Really look at the thoughts that come up. Really look at how it affects our body when we’re feeling those emotions. Write about them. Talk about them. Really go deep. Find the roots of the strong negative emotions. Just by doing that, it’s amazing, over a couple months time you will free yourself from the worst of it. Yes, you may feel it a little bit now and then, but you will become free. You won’t be ruled by that negative emotion any more.

Okay, so that’s a heavy, kind of serious topic for this month. Don’t get too stressed about it, just look at your own life and maybe identify what is that one difficult emotion that you have struggled with in your life and maybe this month really try to focus on it and try to decide, why do I struggle with that emotion so often? Where does that come from? What happens when I’m feeling that emotion in my body? What happens to my thoughts? What am I thinking about and focusing on when I’m feeling that deep emotion.

Write in your journal about it. Share your experiences on the forums. Just see what happens. I guarantee that the end result, the final result of doing all this will be very positive and will increase your feelings of happiness and relaxation and calm and success in your life, whatever success means to you.

All right, I will see you on our social site. Have a wonderful day. See you again soon, bye-bye.