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  • One of the most important ways to calm down is the power to hold on.

  • Even in challenging situations to a distinction between what someone does and what they meant to do.

  • In law, the difference is enshrined in the contrasting concepts of murder and manslaughter.

  • The result may be the same: the body is inert in a pool of blood.

  • But we collectively feel it makes a huge difference what the perpetrators intentions were.

  • Motives are crucial.

  • But unfortunately, we're seldom very good at perceiving what motives happened to be involved in the incidents that frustrate us.

  • We're easily and wildly mistaken.

  • We see intention where there was none and escalate and confront when no strenuous or agitated responses are in fact warranted.

  • Part of the reason why we jump so readily to dark conclusions

  • and see plots to insult and harm us is a rather poignant psychological phenomenon:

  • Self-hatred.

  • The less we like ourselves,

  • the more we appear in our own eyes as really rather plausible targets for mockery and harm.

  • Why would a drill have started up outside just as we were settling down to work?

  • Why are the email not arrive even though we'll have to be in a meeting very soon?

  • Why would the phone operator be taking so long to find our details?

  • Because there is, logically enough, a plot against us.

  • Because we are appropriate targets for these kinds of things.

  • Because we're the sort of people against whom disruptive drilling is legitimately likely to be directed.

  • It's what we deserve. When we carry a background excess of self-disgust around with us,

  • operating just below the radar of conscious awareness,

  • we'll constantly seek confirmation from the wider world that we really are the worthless people we take ourselves to be.

  • The expectation is almost always set in childhood

  • where someone close to us is likely to have left us feeling dirty and culpable.

  • And as a result we now travel through society assuming the worst.

  • Not because it's necessarily true or pleasant to do so, but because it feels familiar.

  • and because we're the prisoners of past patterns we haven't yet understood.

  • We would be so much calmer around adults,

  • if we could resort to some of the unflustered poised we naturally use around children.

  • Small children sometimes behave in really maddening ways.

  • They scream at the person who's looking after them, angry push away a bowl of animal pasta,

  • throw away something you've just fetched for them.

  • But we rarely feel personally agitated or wounded by their behavior.

  • And the reason is that we don't assign a negative motive or mean intention to a small person.

  • We reach around for the most benevolent interpretations.

  • We probably think that they're just a bit tired, or their gums are sore, or they're upset by the arrival of a younger sibling.

  • We've got a large repertoire of alternative explanations ready in our heads.

  • And none of these lead us to panic or get terribly agitated.

  • This is the reverse of what tends to happen around adults.

  • Here we imagine that people have deliberately got us in their sights.

  • If someone edges in front of us in the airport queue it's natural to suppose

  • that they've sized this up and of reason that they can safely take advantage of us.

  • They probably relish the thought of causing us a little distress.

  • But if we employ the infant model of interpretation, our first assumptions would be very different.

  • We think that maybe they didn't sleep well that night, have a sore knee, or have been upset by their lover.

  • The French philosopher Inmilo Gustachtie, known as Alain,

  • was set to be the finest teacher in France in the first half of the 20th century.

  • And he developed a formula for calming himself and his pupils down in the face of irritating people.

  • "Never say that people are evil." He wrote.

  • You just need to look for the pin.

  • What he meant was: look for the source of the agony that drives a person to behave in appalling ways.

  • The calming thought is to imagine that they're suffering off stage in some area we can't see.

  • To be mature is to learn to imagine this zone of pain in spite of the lack of much available evidence.

  • They may not look as if they were mad and by an inner psychological element,

  • they may seem chirpy and full of themselves, but the pin simply must be there or they would not be causing us harm.

  • When others madden us,

  • we need to imagine the turmoil, disappointment, worry, and sadness beneath an aggressive surface.

  • We need to aim compassion in an unexpected place at those who annoy us most.

  • We must do that very strange thing: move from anger to pity.

One of the most important ways to calm down is the power to hold on.

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