When You Get Angry At Yourself, Who Exactly Are You Angry At?
If you ever gotten angry with yourself, for whatever reason, have you ever stopped to ask yourself who it is exactly you are angry at? I mean we all have only one self, or do we?
Who we are, who we want to be, and how we are perceived by others is not always a congruent picture. How can this be? Surely our personality and our traits win out whenever our behavior and our thinking and feelings are involved. Aren't they?
One of the most solid findings in social psychology is that a majority of our behavior is nudged by the situations we experience. Especially situations of a social nature. We tend to not only not know this but we are woefully unaware of the power the situation yields in this regard.
This is difficult for most minds to accept. Why? Because our emotional need for autonomy has holes punched in it if we accept this. We all need to believe we are in more control of things than we actually are. This is the illusion of control.
Bouncing around in the subconscious of us all are a litany of thoughts, feelings, and behaviors we are completely unaware exist. We all in fact have multiple selves floating around down there.
Our conditioning and subjective experiences in life tend to cause us to create predictive models of thoughts, feelings and behaviors to surface and manifest themselves. But this is only because we subconsciously create the situations that will pull these out of us.
This is a good thing if you are committed to growth and change in your life. It means you have to consciously create new situational experiences to create new behaviors in your life. This in fact is where our power to control is. It lies in our ability to consciously act on our environment to create situations and experiences to pull those behaviors and selves out of us.
When engineering your environment pay close attention to the people who are a part of that environment. The people we surround ourselves with largely determine the self that emerges from our subconscious
