A person who isn’t in control of their emotions—a person who is a bundle of reactivity—is incapable of relating well.

Reacting is very different from relating. When we are reactive, hurtful acts such as withholding warmth or lashing out with a harsh comment characterize daily life, instead of acts of warmth and caring.

When we are locked in emotional reactivity with another person, we are actually deflecting pain that’s within us onto an external target.

This is the reason people get into fights in their various relationships. It’s a way of projecting outside of ourselves the immense pain we carry within us so we don’t have to feel it.

A person who carries no pain within them never gets into emotional struggles with another person. They don’t become emotionally reactive, no matter what the provocation.

If we find ourselves argumentative, fighting, or distancing ourselves and sulking or pouting, it’s important to get in touch with the inner pain that’s driving these behaviors. Only in this way can we end our reactivity.

The first step is to become aware of the fact we are indeed in pain. We do this by simply observing ourselves.

Let me give you an example of how this might work. Suppose you are locked in emotional combat with someone, perhaps a spouse, a lover, a friend, or someone at work. In the course of your week, you spend quite a bit of time in the car together—time that’s often tense and frequently ends in arguments.

If you want to see what’s really behind this disruptive behavior, just start driving everywhere you go all week in separate cars.

Some days ago I mentioned Mark and Marie who were having difficulties in their marriage. It seemed that whenever they got into the car to go to a movie, out to dinner, or even to church, they got into a fight.

So Mark and Marie started going everywhere in separate cars. If they went to a movie, they went in separate cars. If they went to church, they took two cars. If they went to their parents and inlaws, they drove by themselves.

By driving separately like this, each began to feel very alone. Of course, there’s nothing wrong with feeling alone. It isn’t in itself a painful state and can in fact be joyous. But neither Mark nor Marie were feeling joyous as they made their own way to each activity they were attending together. On the contrary, the aloneness they felt was disturbing.

As they drove in their separate vehicles, they began to take a look at the nature of the discomfort they were experiencing. Paying attention to their various thoughts and emotions as they arose, they noticed a sadness settling over them. This sadness didn’t seem to be linked to anything in particular such as a specific event. It was just a pervasive feeling of disappointment.

This profound sadness many of us feel if we allow ourselves to is actually masochism. Rather than feel it most of the time, we project it out in sadistic, hurtful acts. We get into arguments and fights, or we give each other the cold shoulder.

In other words, we torture someone close to us in our life in order to mask our self-torture. This is the source of all reactivity. This is what torpedoes our natural ability to relate.

By letting ourselves feel our pain and simply observing it, it gradually begins to dissipate. We’ll look at how Mark and Marie did this in he days ahead. In the meantime, if you need help with this, I know no better tool that the Namaste book The Presence Process.

When I began connecting my anger in the present to patterns of behavior established in childhood, I realized that as I became adept at identifying the source of my reactions, I could close the gap between the time of venting the emotion and recognizing where it came from.

In due course, as we do this, we begin to recognize a reaction at the time it’s happening.

The idea of actually paying attention to emotions as they were happening, instead of being consumed by them, was novel to me when I first heard it. I had never thought of watching myself, observing my behavior. But this was to become the key to changing my life.

At first it took me a few days to acknowledge that a particular behavior had been inappropriate and to admit that I was acting out of lifelong childish patterns. But as I became more practiced at watching myself, the time between losing it and understanding what had happened became shorter.

Then one day, though I couldn’t stop the emotion, I was able for the first time to observe while it was actually happening just how a reaction arose and possessed me.

I had walked into the kitchen and observed a mess. I experienced the familiar feeling of how “wrong” people were to “do this to me.”

I felt a rush of anger gush up inside my chest, like a volcano erupting. I felt my throat, shoulders, and arms tighten. I experienced my stomach beginning to knot.

Though I couldn’t stop the reaction, I was aware for the first time that the feeling of “rightness” was in reality a reptilian reaction, reinforced by the home in which I grew up, where being “right” was a big issue as I talked about yesterday.

This was an important breakthrough because until now I had justified my anger as an appropriate and rational response. But on this occasion I knew, while I was actually losing it, that I was reacting.

Indeed, I was reincarnating my family’s behavior. I heard my father’s voice speak through me; I experienced my mother’s sense of panic; I felt my grandmother’s meanness grip me. I knew that I was expressing my own reptilian reaction, shaped by these most significant figures from my childhood.

The insight that comes to us from observing can be used to get a grip on ourselves. Making an instant connection with the reason we are reacting opens the way to interrupt the impulse to react.

From this point on, whenever I felt anger arising, instead of imagining that I was acting in a rational, fitting manner, I would try to remain calm long enough to ask myself, “Could it be that I’m not being rational, that I am in fact reacting?”

For a brief moment before I was engulfed by my immature emotions, I sensed that I didn’t have to react angrily. I suddenly realized I had a choice. I knew I could either let the emotion take me over, or calm myself and allow reason to prevail.

To interrupt emotional reactions required a lot of practice. Every time I felt the impulse to react, I tried to prevent it from becoming full-blown. As I became adept at watching myself, I discovered I was able to delay my reaction and even modulate it to some extent.

As the weeks went by, the constant mess in the kitchen didn’t anger me as much. Things didn’t set me bouncing off the walls so easily. Little by little I was learning not to react and stay in my peaceful center.

Though still feeling the rage that arose in me in response to thoughtless behavior, at least some of the time I wasn’t venting it. I was beginning to take charge of myself.

Watching—becoming aware of the reptile within and realizing it was neither my true self nor fitting behavior for any situation—was the key, as we will see in the days ahead.

One hot Sunday afternoon when I was about six years old, I heard the jingle of the ice cream van coming down our street in Harrogate in Yorkshire, northern England, and asked my father for money to buy some.

Although my father didn’t like me to buy anything on Sundays in those days, because it was a hot day he conceded.

I ran out to the street and lined up at the van. Since they didn’t have the kind of ice cream I wanted, the merchant talked me into buying a popsicle. But when I got back to the house with my red popsicle, my father erupted.

How dare I get anything other than an ice cream! What was I thinking of to bring a popsicle into the house? Didn’t I know that my brother had once eaten a popsicle, thrown up all over the white sheepskin rug in front of the fireplace, and it had been almost impossible to eradicate the red dye?

My father shouted at me angrily, emphasizing how wicked it was of me to buy anything other than what he had said I could.

Though I had acted in innocence, to my father it was a big deal. He wanted me to understand how wrong I had been. That’s the way he grew up.

In due course, I was to come to realize that the dynamics at play in this incident formed a fundamental imprinting that affected me well into adulthood.

I also remember Christmas mornings, particularly as I grew older. Opening our gifts in mom and dad’s bed that morning was exciting for my brother and me; I think we received more toys than anyone in the neighborhood. We were treated like kings, our wants thoroughly pandered to.

But before we had been playing with our new possessions very long, we were being jumped on for leaving a toy in the wrong place.

There were no minor infractions in our home back in those strict days. Dad could never just ask us nicely to move something. One minute courteous, a perfect gentleman, the next he was irritated and scolding us, a frown creasing his otherwise kindly face.

Every time I was corrected, it was in such a way that I felt like crawling out of sight.

The feeling of everything having to be “right” dominated my childhood home. If things weren’t “right,” there was hell to pay. Through incidents such as these, I learned well the politics of being right or wrong.

What are the molehills you turn into mountains, placing barriers between you and fulfillment? What from your past are you acting out in the present to the destruction of your happiness?

“Your family life didn’t equip you to be an adult,” someone once said to me. “Instead of teaching you what it means to grow up, which entails mastering your emotional reactions, your father behaved like a child pitching a fit when things bothered him. At such moments, he was out of control, run by his reactivity.”

“And I copied him, just like any good reptile,” I thought to myself.

I remember feeling mortified on those occasions my father corrected me. For many years the ice cream incident was the first memory that sprang to mind when I thought back to my childhood. What a way to remember one’s early years! But thankfully, no longer do such memories come to mind when I reflect on that period of my life. No longer do they haunt me.

No matter how we grew up, and to what degree our childhood behavior replays itself in our adult life, we don’t have to remain stuck in such debilitating patterns. We are only prisoners of our past until we bring our behavior to conscious awareness.

Awareness dissolves such dysfunctional behavior because this behavior isn’t a reflection of who we really are. It’s simply something we learned. In our true being, we are nothing like this.

If you are battling issues of emotional reactivity from your own pas—the anger, the pouting, the cold shoulder when you are upset—there’s a wonderful solution. It’s called The Presence Process, by Namaste author Michael Brown. It will enable you to separate your learned behavior from your real self, which is divine love.

We’ve been looking at how emotional reactivity takes us over, so that we end up being untrue to who we really are, behaving in ways we wouldn’t ever behave were we in our right mind.

When reactivity has control of us, we are literally beside ourselves. We aren’t being our authentic selves, which are grounded in divine consciousness and the love that characterizes the divine.

In our most primitive brain, we are all alligators in evening dress, ready to snap at the least provocation. It’s a highly defensive state in which to live.

After the reptilian brain evolved in humans, the early mammalian brain developed next. With the addition of this part of the brain, mammals became capable of feelings instead of just the primitive reactions of reptiles. This equipped them to cope with their environment with a versatility not found in reptiles.

While reptiles exhibit little parental care, mammals display affectionate behavior and maternal instincts that are powerful aids in the evolution of life. Bonding now becomes possible. Feelings of attachment and caring all flow from this aspect of the brain.

In higher mammals, the forebrain underwent what Kerr and Bowen in their classic work Family Evaluation describe as an explosive expansion, culminating in the development of the neocortex of the human brain.

It’s this part of our brain that’s responsible for our imagination, creativity, and abstract thought. Reading, writing, and arithmetic originate in the neocortex. Designed for problem solving, it’s the part of the brain that allows us to observe our habits, monitor how we are doing, and make choices superior to blind reactions.

We can even choose to override emotional reactivity when it’s in our best interest to do so. It’s this part of the brain that transcends the reptilian survival impulse, utilizing the mammalian capacity for bonding to impart meaning to relationships and making events and people significant.

Becoming a person who isn’t adversely affected by another person’s moods and provocation is a process of learning to use our cerebral cortex to take charge of behaviors generated in the more primitive, reptilian part of our brain.

Instead of allowing reactive patterns to overwhelm us to the point we end up in arguments and fights, we can exercise restraint. We can come to grips with our own primitive impulses instead of fighting with the other person.

Self-mastery ought to be learned through the process of growing up. Unfortunately, few of us come from families where the adults knew how to master themselves, so there was no opportunity while growing up to learn self-mastery.

Our emotional outbursts were either reinforced because our parents gave into us for the sake of peace, or we were brutally crushed. Either reaction failed to help us gain control of ourselves.

It takes a well-defined parent to remain calm but firm with a child who’s throwing a temper tantrum. Yet it’s this that teaches the child that emotional outbursts aren’t threatening to the parent and won’t bring the result the child desires.

My parents were intimidated by my tantrums, imagining that my behavior was a reflection on them and that I was disgracing them.

If I pitched a fit, they either became highly reactive themselves, shouting at me angrily, threatening me with dire consequences, and at times even taking a belt to me, or they caved into my demands by giving me whatever I wanted. The opportunity to learn how to control myself was missed.

Now that we are grown, learning to master ourselves so we aren’t run by fused reactions is no easy task. But thankfully life doesn’t abandon us to the patterns learned in childhood.

I have found that our inner being walks us into situation after situation, often so very painful, as it attempts to awaken us to our true nature, which underlies our primitive behavior. This gives us the opportunity to allow our essence to come through our neocortex, so that we have the chance to begin taking control of our emotional reactivity.

In any kind of relationship, there will be characteristics of the other person that we don’t like. It’s impossible for two quite different individuals to like everything about each other, and this is perfectly normal.

But when aspects of the other person’s behavior irk us, or even provoke a fight, it’s more than the other’s behavior that’s at issue.

When there’s aggravation, irritation, and tension between two people, what isn’t commonly recognized is that this feeling of being at odds mirrors a conflict within ourselves.

The sensation of being driven up the wall by someone, and the compulsion to lock horns with them, isn’t about their behavior but about aspects of ourselves that we don’t want to own. Being close to another person brings this internal conflict, which long preceded the individual’s presence in our life, to our attention.

It also furnishes us with a framework in which to work on our reactivity.

Relationships have a unique way of vibrating chords struck long ago in childhood. Because of the nature of its commitment, marriage especially has the ability to reopen a chapter of our lives too painful to digest as children. More poignantly than any other relationship, it’s capable of bringing us in touch with pain long forgotten. That’s why people who have lived together might split up once they marry. Marriage does indeed change things!

In any serious relationship, we select a partner who resurrects the unresolved issues of our childhood. Our unconscious hand-picks a person—as a friend, a coworker, or a lover—who possesses a combination of the traits of immaturity that have stayed with us from infancy.

We choose this person because she or he embodies these undeveloped aspects of ourselves and is therefore able to mirror them back to us.

If we’re up for the challenge, this experience of sharing our life with another presents us with the possibility of resolving what was left unresolved in our upbringing. Becoming aware of those parts of ourselves that are still infantile, where our authentic being hasn’t yet matured, and beginning to deal with our infantile behavior instead of squabbling with the other person, enables us to finish the work of growing up into whole, integrated individuals.

One would think that, as rational beings, we would be happy to discover those undeveloped areas of our self that are being mirrored back to us. After all, we proclaim our desire to grow. We read magazine articles and books, listen to CDs, attend seminars, and go to counseling “because we want to grow.”

The reality is different from the intentions we profess.

When a relationship begins doing what it’s meant to do, we experience a massive resistance to what the other is showing us about ourselves. Reason is drowned out by highly charged emotions. We discover that we would rather fight with the other person than get ahold of our tendency to be reactive.

Instead of owning our reactivity, we blame the other person. “They did this to me—it’s their fault I feel like this or behave like this.”

It’s the internal conflict that results from seeing mirrored in someone a disowned, childish part of ourselves that’s the real cause of fights. The circumstances are merely the trigger that awakens our inability to accept our disowned traits, creating that stressed-out, irritated, aggravated, at-odds feeling that goads us to pick a fight.

We’ll go deeper into this in the days ahead.