A first-person reflective talk about the many forms of aggressive emotion (impatience, irritability, anger, envy, rage) arguing they share a common root: frustration at not getting what one wants (a narcissistic/self-centered want). The speaker recommends experiencing aggression exactly as it is, investigating the underlying needs, and responding with self-compassion so one can better understand and compassionately respond to others' anger.
I experience so many different kinds of emotion in my life that I would put in the category of aggression. But they're different. They're different in so many ways. There can be frustration, there can be anger, there could be envy, there can be all kinds of things. Are they basically one root or is there more than one root? Is it the same process to get to the root or is it different with different emotions? I mean, the way I semantically describe that whole range of aggression is I just include, like you said, impatience, irritability, agitation, fury, rage. You added envy. And the key thing is to experience it exactly the way it is. And it's like a rainbow. And it might be all the way from one color to another, but it's all the aggressive emotions. And they all have a very similar root in that there's a fire and there are different kinds of fire. One might be more like smoke with a little bit of flame, and one might be just a raw flame. But the key thing is to appreciate exactly the way it is and just to go into it and to allow it to expose what it is that really is wanted underneath. And I would say the root is really the same root, which is, I'm pissed that I'm not getting what I want. It's a narcissistic frustration or a self centered frustration. And all of us, in the ways I'm using narcissistic are narcissistic. So we all have ways in which we have these range of aggressive feelings. And the more we recognize that, the more compassionate we can be. Because when we think, oh, it's the other person that has this range of aggressive feelings, then we become dangerous because we're projecting in other people. When we can see that we have this whole range, then we have a chance of being able to experience where we are in that rainbow and then be able to inquire what it is that we most need and want. And that will paradoxically allow us to be able to see other people's anger and aggression and have a friendlier attitude towards them too. It's the exact opposite of being narcissistic, which is we're kind towards our aggression, which means we can see the underbelly of innocence in it. And once we start to be able to do that inside ourselves when somebody's angry at us, we can immediately start to say, oh, they must really want something. And we can start to look at it and say, well, I'm guessing they probably want to be heard. Like I want to be heard or they want to be understood. Like I want to be understood.
