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Message: <blockquote data-quote="barsoomcore" data-source="post: 672825" data-attributes="member: 812">Yeah, yeah. You and Socrates, dude. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f600.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":D" title="Big grin    :D"  data-smilie="8"data-shortname=":D" />A jerk to one is not a jerk to all. The qualities you keep listing off don't sound jerkish at all to me.But hey, I'm not here to convince you of anything. We can agree to disagree on that, I'm sure.Have you ever read The Uses Of Enchantment by Bruno Bettleheim (I might have the name wrong)? It's a psychology book about why fairy tales exist and why they are traditionally read or told to children.Bruno's theory is that children experience all sorts of emotions, often terrible emotions. Emotions they know are wrong but don't have enough experience to control or direct appropriately. Fairy tales allow them to vicariously live out these horrible desires without hurting anyone.Children want to murder their parents. They just do. There comes a time in any child's life where they want to cut their parent's heads off. They know it's wrong but they feel it anyway. They don't know what to do.So they read Hansel and Gretel and join in excited delight as the children push the witch (their figurative mother) into the oven. Hurrah! We burned Mommy alive! Yay! The kids get to act out their horrid desires and Mommy's still there to tuck them into bed. Bruno reckons that having such avenues for living out these desires is part of a normal childhood.The point is that it's perfectly natural to want to kill your kin and to feel frustration at your inability to do so. I have no trouble believing that you are angry because you are unable to kill your grandmother. That's exactly what I'm talking about.But you will have to let them. You will have to go along with them enough to be made angry.You wouldn't have gotten angry, I suggest, unless she was successful in finding issues you feel badly about. Poking you where it hurts. Finding your weaknesses and attacking them. Some people are very good at this sort of thing.I don't mean any offense but I am compelled to suggest that most of us feel bad about something or other about ourselves. Most of us have problems with ourselves, issues that we haven't dealt with or anxieties that we've suppressed. I do, anyway. And I usually find when someone has made me angry that they're poked me right in one of those spots.I'm not trying to say she isn't a cow. All I'm saying is that the fact that she was able to make you angry says that there is within you something that she can turn to her purposes. If you can find it, figure out what it is and deal with it, she won't be able to hurt you anymore.Hey, I didn't say this happens sometimes. I said it was ALWAYS TRUE. I mean that. This isn't just good advice. This is a law of human behaviour. I haven't found many so I get excited about the ones I do find. So bring on the extreme examples. If my law doesn't apply to EVERYTHING it's not a law.Well, obviously it's because you're such a jerk. You said so yourself. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f61b.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":p" title="Stick out tongue    :p"  data-smilie="7"data-shortname=":p" />Meaning absolutely no offense whatsoever. Just having fun with your determination to be badly thought of. Which I respect, by the way.It's not a question of fault. Fault doesn't enter into it. It's a question of "How can I stop this? How can I keep this from affecting me?"Sure it's hard. And easy, of course, which is the really annoying bit.</blockquote>

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