Why You Get Irritated with a Loved One Again | Seeing Relationships More Broadly

OSOlga Stolyarova

You know how people sometimes allow themselves to behave with those closest to them in ways they would never allow with strangers? Usually they show strangers more respect, watch what they say, are more willing to help, and so on. At home, with family, there is irritation, rudeness, and the rest. It can even be the same situation, the same sort of request. A person gets irritated with someone close to them, while with strangers it seems to be understood that you should communicate more respectfully. I would like to understand why this happens and what to do about it.

For example, whether you see it from the outside or are involved yourself, how should you look at these situations? You always want to prove something, perhaps tell someone that behaving this way is wrong.

AVAlexander Volchek

The first thing to understand, something to keep in view in all these situations, is that everything is individual. There is no rule that a person is wonderful with strangers and terrible with those close to them. The very division into "strangers" and "loved ones" is relative. It depends on how a person perceives other people. For example, I keep saying, "I want to treat other women exactly as I treat my wife, my mother, or my sister."

"Equally, all of them equally. I want to treat all children, other people's children as well as my own, in the same way: as people. And I want to treat children as I treat adults, as people." Of course, there are particular circumstances. I am responsible for my own children, and I have certain opportunities in relation to them. That makes the situation different. There is one way of perceiving it. Someone else's perception is entirely different. They might say, "What do you mean? I want to regard my wife as a particular, unique person. And I will put my mother in another category." Some put their mother above their wife, some below, some alongside. Some arrange them in a kind of order or put them on parallel tracks.

They set up these parameters for themselves. Others define them through religion, membership in certain groups, nationality, and so on. People create different divisions into those who are close and those who are strangers. They also experience different states. One person sees a tree and has positive emotions. Another sees it and has negative emotions, a negative state. Olya, you need to understand that anger can sometimes arise not because your own view is negative, but because another person's view may be negative. You meet someone carrying endless clumps of negative energy. You cannot cope with them, and you begin to feel angry toward that person.

Your anger is actually secondary, not primary. You can live with this person and seem to be the angry one, but it arises from being together. It is like putting five people here who drink beer every day, with me spending time alongside them. At some point I might start drinking beer too. If they were doing pull-ups, I would certainly start doing pull-ups. People also do what is going on around them, or get used to things in their surroundings and stop noticing them. Take India. It is unbelievably dirty, incredibly dirty. It is horrifying in a great many places and regions, perhaps even most of them. I have been to different parts of India: the north, the center, the south, the west, and the east. It is very particular, extraordinarily so.

I experience negative aspects of perception there, but some people live there and do not perceive any of that. A place, like other people, can evoke negative emotions in one person and none in another. You might see ten poor people sitting on the street taking drugs. They evoke negative emotions in you, but not in one another, certainly not negative ones. You might evoke a negative emotion in them, or perhaps nobody does. Different states arise, whatever you do. So the first thing is to look at what states arise in you when you interact with other people.

With whom do you feel incredibly harmonious, and with whom do you feel very bad? Then comes the thought, "If I feel so bad, I will not meet with them." Look at what is really happening. Perhaps you are conveying certain energies to those people, and they simply cannot behave any differently. They do not have the strength to act differently with you. They are not so bad; they just lack the strength. Could that happen? Of course. It is important to recognize that possibility. It is a natural state within human development. We have a joke in our family—really it is the truth. Take my wife's mother. Whatever my wife does in a discussion, if her mother has to choose a side, she will always choose my wife.

Whatever my wife does. If she does something truly awful, perhaps her mother will stay neutral, but the likelihood of her taking the other side is extremely small, as is the chance of her siding with someone outside the family. My own mother, in exactly the same situation, will always choose the other person, not me. The further someone is from the family, the more likely she is to choose them. It is an automatic reaction in matters of interests, who is right, and so on. I tell a story, and she says, "Oh, you know, my friend's son does this and that." Automatically. If her friend is telling her a story, she will automatically say nothing about me. Or if someone else is speaking, she will say nothing. That is how the system works.

If she is discussing my sister and me with me, she takes my sister's side. If my sister discusses me with her, she takes my side. That is the automatic pattern. It is a very clear, simple issue. We have discussed both cases, both mothers, for ten or fifteen years, I do not know, many years. My wife always comes out the winner, it seems. We joke about it, but there is truth in the joke. We discuss it all the time. Has the situation changed? Not at all. This shows that people remain within their own energies of perceiving their surroundings. Their minds have only relative control over these energies. You also need to understand that none of this is entirely clear-cut.

Someone says, "I feel bad here and good there." But there is no ultimate boundary of how bad or how good you can feel, no maximum or minimum. We have been taught to divide the world in a one-sided way: good and bad, dark and light. Yet darkness has no limit, and neither does light. You can go on forever. I recently watched a video where someone said, "I have made the quietest room in the world." But it is something of an illusion that this is the quietest possible silence, that it cannot get any quieter. He said, "Clap your hands in here." They clapped, and there was no echo, but you could still hear the clap. Can you make a room where I cannot hear the clap? How would you do that scientifically? Well, you can.

If we are talking about the quietest room, then at the very least I should not hear the clap. There are many other things I might hear within myself, but at least I would not hear that. So it cannot be the quietest. For someone seeking to understand the world, someone who wants to bring goodness to others, the work always begins with how you feel toward other people, all the time. Not what they bring to you or who has done what to you, but what you are doing at that moment. If someone is angry, what do you do?

How do you express yourself? What states arise in you? Set aside arguments such as, "They attacked me, so I responded," and look at the pure state itself. We recently wanted to visit a place but did not make it. I had been there about seven years ago. It is in the mountains in France. There was a story about people in a castle who did not resist when others came to kill them. They said, "Kill us. We will not kill other people." Humanity endlessly asks itself this question: if someone hits you, hit back, and so on. Imagine carrying the state, "I will not cause harm." That is all. Does that mean you will not defend yourself if someone is trying to kill you?

No, because you do not know how even your physical body will react. You do not actually control every aspect of your mind and body, or every aspect of how your system functions. Anyone who says they do is laughable. You control some things. Jesus in the body of Christ controlled the whole range, but you control certain things, and so do I. Perhaps the foundation, the motive, the core values can be, "I will live with this intention." Whenever a disagreement arises, whatever happens or whatever someone does to you, if you become angry, you recognize that as a negative aspect. That is all.

There is not even a debate. You can discuss it socially and say, "In this social situation, that is what I had to do, because the social world exists." Fine. You can find other ways to discuss or explain it, but fundamentally, as an interaction with other people, that action is negative. You can probably discuss it psychologically, but that is a question for psychotherapists and psychologists, not me. They may draw conclusions about your behavior. Imagine, Olya, the endless layers of perception around who is right and who is wrong, with all the methods and details. You can choose a boundary for yourself and say, "Clearly, there should be no malice." Will I reach a point where there is none?

Probably not in this life, the life of this physical body from birth to death, this incarnation. In the broader sense, as a spiritual being, I probably will. Human spiritual beings move toward this in different ways, with falls and other difficulties. Some will not get there, because some systems fall out of the human cycle of development, out of various structures. But broadly, the movement is in that direction. The question is what comes first for you and where you direct your attention. Someone might say, "If I will not get there in this life, why should I bother? I will not reach it anyway."

That is always a hook. That is why incarnation exists. It is a hook.

OSOlga Stolyarova

I am always amazed when you give examples. It feels so much as though you are reading my life, particular situations. You describe them so precisely. It always amazes me.

AVAlexander Volchek

That is an interesting point. We will leave what you just said in the video. You attend many of the meetings and groups I lead, and you see people's comments. Notice how many people say, "You are talking about my life," and how different all your lives are. What I am saying is not a theory or the life of one particular person. More than that, I am expressing energies. You feel and see certain energies that may give you a state of expanded perception, in which you recognize that all this is happening and seems to be about you too.

It would be strange if you said it was not about you, because everything I talk about is connected to me as well. As you listen, how could you say it is not so? That does not mean you necessarily agree with everything. You live within all these concepts and details. What is wrong with this perspective, this angle, this area of perception? It would be very strange to say, "Of course this has nothing to do with me." Yet people ask these questions. This is genuine perception. Notice that there are, or have been, times when you said, "I am going to ask a question, but it is not about me."

This is the situation in which you truly realize, "It is about me." Valery Lomovtsev has a restorative text called Repentance. I have seen many people read it and feel a tremendous inner upheaval: "This is not about me." Then you read it and realize that everything, every word, is about you. You stop arguing with who you are, with the reality of what a human being is. You do not argue; you observe. He is not trying to humiliate you. He has no desire to. He is not speaking from an ego structure.

He describes natural, reasonable, real things. Imagine: I checked into a hotel today, and something in my room is making noise. There always seems to be something making noise in my hotel rooms. I think I will go and complain. Then I think they will come again and say, "There is no noise in your room. It is just noisy to you." Can a person always find things noisy? What do you think?

OSOlga Stolyarova

Probably, yes.

AVAlexander Volchek

Of course. Why argue with it? It is obvious. If someone calls and says, "It is noisy for me," that is normal. Anyone has the right to say it is noisy for them in any place. Anyone also has the right to say it is not noisy, even in a pub in Ireland. They can say, "It feels so harmonious for me to be here." Why argue with that? Yet we argue all the time, Olya. We think it is some sort of accusation, or we are afraid to express our point of view and say it is noisy, because everyone immediately starts saying, "You are being picky," or something else. If it is noisy for you, go ahead and do whatever you want next.

You can complain, move out, put in earplugs, or seal every gap with whatever you can. No problem. It is normal, and you have the right to find it noisy or not noisy. You have the right to feel good or bad in any place. Any state may arise in you. Whether it is good or bad is not the point. Why argue with it? There is a whole structure behind why it arises, how, in whom, at what moment, what energies come up, what systems, and so on. But fundamentally, why argue? Think of my example about quiet.

It is so simple, yet it has such an impact on people's lives. How many lives, perceptions, and souls have been ruined by an inability to relate to these things calmly? This is freedom. This is what freedom is. How hard it is to be in that freedom—how incredibly, unbearably hard. And how easy at the same time.

As I talk about it now, we both feel wonderful. You sit in freedom, perceive, and think, "How wonderful." You can simply sit like that. How easily meditative states arise. There is so much energy in these simple things, an incredible amount. What you said about it being about you was very good. It is an interesting observation: you listen and wonder, "Is this about me or not?" You go to a training program—there are so many nowadays—and someone is speaking while you sit there thinking, "Is this about me? I hope it is not."

You can spend an hour and a half in that endless state, fighting it, not listening, trying to see everything that is happening while remaining endlessly bound to it, dependent on that perception, saying, "I do not really need to be here."