We all know that politicians and the media lie to us. They do this so frequently and so unabashedly that everyone can see it (if they want to).
But do you know that other people regularly lie to you as well?
And do you know that experts and other professionals have been lying to you about anger for decades?
Well they have. Not intentionally, like politicians and the media, but rather because they themselves have been misinformed about anger.
And this week, I’m going to expose three of the biggest and most widespread whoppers.
“Your Anger Is Caused By…”
The first big lie you’ve been told about anger is that it’s caused by people doing stupid things that bother you.
You know, people doing things that are clearly bad or wrong. People doing things to hurt or harm other people. People being inconsiderate, uncaring, thoughtless, overbearing, abusive, etc.
Well guess what? Whomever told you that this is what’s causing your anger to occur doesn’t know Jack about anger.
The external events in your life, no matter how bad or wrong they appear, ARE NEVER THE DIRECT CAUSE OF YOUR ANGER.
Anger is always caused by internal thoughts, behaviors, perceptions, and assumptions TOTALLY WITHIN YOU…which get triggered by the external events you are clearly able to see.
The internal thoughts and behavior tendencies, which have been programmed into your body, are not obvious to you, but without them YOU CANNOT FEEL ANGRY!
Almost everyone in the world today misunderstands this basic mechanism of anger causation (and other emotions as well)
Here’s the process:
- Something happens, usually outside of you (but could be inside you as well—producing anger at yourself);
- Your brain-body automatically views/perceives/understands what just happened through various filters/judgments/interpretations that have become programmed into you and your body (including your brain) throughout your entire lifetime;
- If those filters/judgments/interpretations line up in just the right way, you get the emotion of anger (immediately and without conscious choice);
- If they line up in other specific ways, you get guilt, fear, sadness, worry, or other specific emotions;
- Thus, it is the filters/judgments/interpretations already programmed into your body that actually cause your anger, not the external (or internal) events themselves—which are merely triggers;
- Most people have never been taught what the specific filters/judgment/interpretations are that create the emotion of anger (or any other emotion for that matter);
- Once you learn what the specific internal causes of anger are within you and all other human beings (they are universally the same) you can become a magician with regard to anger;
- You can literally learn how to make anger quickly disappear, whenever you want;
- And you can change yourself, over time, from a person who frequently gets angry and appears to be unable to do anything about it…into a person who only rarely gets angry and can make anger go away quickly and easily, whenever they want.
These are the truths about anger that you rarely hear about.
Instead, you get a constant drumbeat of how people doing stupid, bad, or wrong things is the real source of your anger…when it is not.