Areas › Anger
Anger
Almost nobody wants to be the person who says the thing they cannot take back. The window between the surge and the words is short and it can be widened. That is most of what this area is about, along with the fear or hurt that anger is usually protecting.
Narrowed down
9 practicesTheme · What you are actually defending
How long you have
Approach · Core
When · Any ordinary day
Respect comes from the Latin for looking, with the prefix meaning again. It is literally the second look, the head that turns as somebody important walks past.
Knowing that does something useful. A word that felt close to sacred turns into a plain social behaviour you can examine: who gets looked at twice,…
If you can see yourself, you need other people to do it far less. That is really the whole aim, and it is what takes the sting out of being misjudged.
Being seen properly by others is lovely, and it is also occasional, partial and outside your control. What you can do daily is notice what you did…
Try saying the word until it goes silly. Respect, respect, respect: a socially agreed comment on how tall you are supposed to be.
The point of the joke is not to demolish respect, which is fine and worth having. It is to shrink the fear of not getting it, because that is the…
Here is an uncomfortable way to look at it. To value someone is often to find them useful, and paying respect is a bit like looking after your tools: being nice to you is nice for me.
It is not the whole truth about people and it is not meant unkindly. It is useful because it makes generic respect a strange thing to organise a life…
A lizard's temperature is whatever the rock is. A mammal shivers, sweats and pants, and stays roughly the same whether it is a good day or not.
Self-esteem works like the lizard. It rises when things go well and drops when they do not, and other people supply the weather. Self-acceptance is…
Esteem shares a root with estimate, and estimating needs a measure. Look at what you are measuring yourself with and you will usually find it was handed to you: money, height, thinness, numbers on a screen.
Those measures move. They differ between one country and the next, and between your grandfather's time and your own. Anything you score yourself on…
Feeling good about yourself is not the safe end of this. The high and the low come from the same borrowed source, which means the high can be taken back at any point.
You feel valuable while you are fitting in and worthless when you are not, and neither reading was ever yours. It is why an insult can go off like a…
A small child works out how to feel about itself by looking at its parents' faces. If that face was missing, or busy, the looking does not stop, it just moves on to teachers, coaches, friends and strangers.
It is part of why being disrespected can feel so much larger than the moment deserves. Some of that old search is still running. The work is slow and…
Understanding an idea is not the same as being changed by it. The explaining is soil preparation, and the crop comes later.
Somebody can follow the whole argument about respect and self-acceptance, agree warmly with all of it, and lose their temper the same way that…