Why You Get Irritated with a Loved One Again

In this conversation with Olga Stolyarova, I look at why different states arise in us around different people, and why the cause of a conflict does not always come down to the other person “behaving badly.” Why is the same request calmly accepted from a stranger, yet from someone close to us it triggers irritation again?

How can you understand your reaction? What do you yourself bring into a relationship? And what changes when, instead of looking for someone to blame, a person begins to observe their own state and see the interaction more broadly? This episode is about irritation with loved ones, recurring conflicts and the ability to stop arguing with what you actually feel.

Dividing people into “loved ones” and “strangers”

– You know, it happens that people for some reason allow themselves things with those closest to them that they would never allow themselves with strangers. With strangers, people show more respect, watch what they say, are more responsive when help is needed, and so on. And at home, with family, there is irritation and rudeness. And it can be one and the same situation, for example with some requests: you can get irritated with someone close, while with strangers it seems to be the accepted thing to communicate more respectfully. I want to understand why this happens and what to do about it. How should you look at such situations when you see them from the outside or are a participant yourself? Because you always want to prove something, to say that this is wrong.

– Look, a very important thing to start with, and to keep in view in all such situations, is that everything is very individual, and there are no rules that a person is, say, wonderful with strangers and very bad with those close to them. Because the very notion of dividing people into strangers and loved ones is very relative. It all depends on how a person perceives other people.

I, for example, have a perception in which I keep saying: “I want to treat other women exactly the same as my wife, or my mother, or my sister. Equally, everyone equally. I want to treat children — all of them, other people’s — the same as my own, and my own the same as others. As people. And children the same as adults — as people.”

And then, of course, there are some particulars: I have responsibility for my children, I have certain possibilities when it comes to my children — that is a completely different situation. That is a different zone of perception.

For someone else, this perception is certainly not the same. A person will say: “What do you mean? I want to perceive my wife as a specific, unique object. And I’ll put my mother into some other object as well.” Some put their mother above their wife, some below, some to the side, some build a kind of queue, parallel tracks and so on. They set certain parameters for themselves. Then some define it in terms of religion, some in terms of certain clubs, some in terms of nationality and so on. That is, different divisions of people into loved ones and strangers arise inside a person.

Where anger and irritation arise

What’s more, different states arise in a person. One person sees a tree and has positive emotions. Another sees a tree and has negative emotions, a negative state.

You have to understand, Olya, that sometimes anger may arise in you not because you look at something badly, but because the other person may look at something badly. You have met a person who carries endless clumps of negative energy, you cannot cope with them, and you begin to feel anger toward that person.

And in fact, your anger is secondary, not primary.

You may live with this person, and it will seem that you are the angry one, but you are simply together somehow. It’s the same as putting five people here who will drink beer every day, with me being there with them: at some point, maybe, I’ll start drinking beer too. And if they do pull-ups, I will definitely start doing pull-ups. Among other things, people do what surrounds them. Or they get used to certain things around them and stop noticing them.

Take India. An unbelievably dirty country, insanely dirty! It is simply horrifying — in an enormous number of places and regions, maybe even in most of them. I’ll tell you honestly, I have been to different parts of India: the north, the center, the south, the west and the east. A very peculiar country, unbelievably peculiar.

I feel the negative aspects of perception, but there are people who live there and have no such aspects of perception at all. This means that a place, just like other people, can evoke negative emotions in some and none at all in others. You walk along and see ten poor people sitting on the street using drugs. They evoke negative emotions in you, but they evoke no emotions in one another — at least certainly not negative ones. You may evoke a negative emotion in them, or something else, or maybe nobody evokes anything at all. Whatever you do, different states arise.

Where to begin when someone irritates you

And then there’s this story: “Since I feel so bad with them, I won’t meet with them.” Look at what is really happening. Perhaps you are transmitting certain energies to these people, and they simply cannot behave any other way. They don’t have the strength to behave differently with you. They are not that bad — they just don’t have the strength. Can that be the case? Of course it can, and this is very important. It is altogether a natural state of human development.

Automatic reactions to loved ones: a family example

There is a joke like this in my family. It’s not a joke, it’s the truth. There is my wife’s mother. Whatever my wife does in a conversation, if her mother has to choose, she will always choose my wife. Whatever my wife does — even if she has done something terribly bad, her mother may take a neutral position — the probability that she will choose the side that is not hers, not the side of family, is critically small.

And there is my mother. In exactly the same situation, she will always choose not me but the other person. And the further those people are from the family, the more likely she is to choose them. Such an automatic reaction happens — in terms of interests, who is right and so on. I tell some story, and she says: “Oh, you know, my friend’s son does this and that.” An automatic story. If a friend of hers is telling her something, she will automatically keep quiet about me. Or if someone else somewhere is telling something, she’ll keep quiet. That’s how the system works.

If she is discussing my sister and me with me, she will choose my sister. And if my sister is discussing me with her, she will choose me. That’s the automatic pattern at work.

The question here is very transparent and simple. We have been discussing it for ten, maybe fifteen years. Both the first case and the second, one mother and the other. It turns out my wife always wins. We discuss it with humor, but it is truthful humor. What do you think, has the situation changed? Not at all.

This picture shows that people continue to remain in their own energies of perceiving the world around them. And these energies are relatively controllable by these people mentally.

Why “I feel good / I feel bad” is not so clear-cut

What’s more, it is important for you to understand that not everything is so clear-cut. A person says: “Here I feel bad, and here I feel good.” But the notion of “bad” has no boundary — bad at its maximum and bad at its minimum — and there is no boundary of good at its maximum and good at its minimum. We have been taught to divide the world one-sidedly: good and bad, dark and light. But darkness has no limit, just as light has no limit — it doesn’t exist. You can talk about this endlessly.

I recently watched some video. A man says: “I have made the quietest room in the world.” But it’s his illusion that this is the quietest silence and it can’t get any quieter. And he says: “Clap your hands in here.” They clapped — there is no echo, but the clap can still be heard. Can you make a room where I won’t hear the clap? How would you do that scientifically? Maybe you can. But if we are talking about the quietest room, then at the very least I should not hear the clap. There are also an enormous number of things I can hear within myself, but at the very least I should not hear the clap. So it cannot be the quietest.

What to do with your anger and reactions

If there is an angry person nearby — what are you doing at that moment? How do you show up? What states arise in you? Without these debates — “But if I was attacked, I responded” — and with an understanding of the pure state.

We recently wanted to get to one place and didn’t make it. I was there about seven years ago, I think. The place is in France, in the mountains. And there is a story there about how people came to a castle to kill those inside, and they did not resist and said: “Kill us, we will not kill other people.” This is the question humanity endlessly asks one another: if someone hits you, hit back, and so on.

Imagine you carry within you a state in which you say: “I will not cause harm.” And that’s it. Does that mean that if someone is killing you, you won’t defend yourself? It doesn’t, because you don’t know how, among other things, your physical body will react. In fact, you do not control all aspects of your psychophysics and, in general, all aspects of how your system functions. And whoever says they are in control — that’s laughable. You control something. Jesus in the body of Christ controlled the whole range, but you certainly control something, and I control something.

But perhaps the foundation, the motive, the core values say that I will live with this intention. And when any debate arises, whatever happens, whatever bad thing is done to you, if you got angry somewhere — you know that this is a negative aspect, and that’s it. There is not even any debate.

You can discuss it socially and say: “In this social situation, that’s what had to be done, because there is the social world.” Fine, you can discuss it in some other way, come up with something, but fundamentally, in terms of interacting with other people, this action is negative. You could probably discuss it psychologically, but that’s more a question for psychotherapy, for psychologists, not for me. They will draw some conclusions about your behavior.

Can you imagine, Olya, how many endless layers of perception there are: who is right and who is to blame, methods, details and everything else. You can choose a certain boundary for yourself and say: obviously, there should be no malice at all. Will I come to the point where there is no malice at all? Probably not in this life — in this life of the physical body from birth to death, in this incarnation. But overall, I probably will — from the point of view of my spiritual being.

Because fundamentally all human spiritual beings are moving toward this — in different ways, with falls and other things. Some will not get there, because there are systems that fall out of the cycle of human development, out of various structures. But overall the movement goes in that direction. The question is: what is primary for you, and what are you looking at?

And when a person says: “All right, but if I don’t come to this in this life, why should I bother with it? I won’t get there anyway,” — there is always a hook here. That is why incarnation exists — it is a hook.

Why it is important to acknowledge: “This is about me too”

– I am always amazed when you give examples: it’s as though you are reading my life, certain situations. You say it so precisely. It always amazes me.

– You know, this is an interesting aspect. You attend many of the meetings and groups I lead, and you see the people who write comments. Look closely at how many people say, “You are talking about my life,” — and how different all your lives are. Because what I say is not some theory and not the life of one particular person. What’s more, I speak in energies. And you feel and see certain energies that can give you a state of expanded perception, in which you understand: all this is happening, and it seems to be about me.

And it would be strange if you said it wasn’t about you, because everything I say is connected with me too. How, listening to it, can you say at all that it isn’t so? That doesn’t mean you have necessarily agreed with everything. You live within all the concepts, in the details. But what is wrong here? What is wrong with this point of view, this angle of perception, this zone of perception? It would be very strange if you said: “Of course, this has nothing to do with me.”

But in general people ask. And this is genuine perception. Notice that you have, or have had, moments when you said: “I’m going to ask a question now, but it has nothing to do with me.” That is exactly the situation in which you truly understand: but this is about me.

Valery Lomovtsev has a restorative text called “Repentance.” I have seen a great many people read it, and a huge space seethes in them: this isn’t about me. And then you read it and understand that everything, every single word, is about you.

You stop arguing with who you are, with the reality of what a human being is. You simply don’t argue with it — you observe it.

He is not trying to humiliate you, he has no desire to. He is not telling it through an ego construct — he is telling natural, sensible, real things.

Imagine: today I checked into a hotel. Something in my room is making noise — something is always making noise in my rooms. I think: I’ll go and complain that something is making noise. Then I think: they’ll come again and say that nothing is making noise in your room — it’s just noisy for you. Can a person always find it noisy? What do you think?

– Probably, yes.

– Of course, yes. Why argue with that? It’s obvious. If a person calls and says, “It’s noisy for me,” — that’s normal. Anyone in any space has the right to say that it’s noisy for them. Or anyone in any space has the right to say that it’s not noisy for them, even when they are in a pub in Ireland. They can say: “How harmonious it feels for me to be here.” Why argue with that?

How to stop arguing with your own state

Yet we argue all the time, Olya. We keep thinking that it is some kind of accusation. Or we are afraid to express our point of view and say that it’s noisy for us, because everyone immediately starts: “Oh, you’re nitpicking,” “oh, something else.” Go ahead: if it’s noisy for you, do whatever you want next. You can complain, you can move out, you can put in earplugs, you can seal up all the holes with whatever you can — no problem.

And it doesn’t matter whether it is good or bad. Why argue with it? There is a whole structure behind it: why and for what reason it arises, how it arises, in which person, when exactly, what energies come up, what systems and so on. But fundamentally — why argue with it?

Remember my example about quiet. It is so simple, yet so influential in a person’s life. How many destinies, perceptions, souls have been ruined by the inability to relate calmly to such things.

This is freedom. This is what freedom is. How hard it is for a person to be in such freedom! Insanely hard, ferociously hard, unbearably hard. And how easy at the same time.

As I talk about it now, you and I feel blissful. You sit in freedom, perceive, and think: how blissful! And you can just sit like that. How easily meditative states arise — that’s all it takes. How much energy there is in this, what volume — an incredible volume in such simple things.

And you put it very nicely about it being about you. It is a very interesting observation — when you listen and wonder: is this about me or not? You come to some training — there is an incredible number of different programs around now — someone is talking, and you sit there inside thinking: “So is this about me or not? I hope it’s not about me.” And you can sit in this endless state for an hour and a half, perceiving it that way: fighting it, not listening, trying to see everything that is happening — and being endlessly bound up with it. Being dependent on this perception. Saying: “I kind of don’t need to be here.”

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