Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.
Carl Jung
Lets face it. A whole lot of something about something always irritates us about something. I don’t think we go a single day without being bothered or irked by someone who mars our very existence. They prick us. They irritate us. They rub us the wrong way, and we want them out of our life. We want to change them. Expel them. We want them to vanish and stay away, but if they the do, they take with them some very deep lessons and much needed wisdom.
What rubs us the wrong way about someone else is something that reveals a great deal about who we are. Please don’t ask me how or why that is, because I don’t know but I have Carl Jung to defend me.
If you are jealous of someone, the jealousy live inside of you. It does not live inside of them. You are the one that wants something that they have. You are the one that feels upset that you haven’t worked enough or pursued something enough to make it your own, and the person who you are jealous of has just brought it up to the surface.
Many people hate and are bothered by many things and many people. They set out in their daily lives to change the world and make their life a better place. What they don’t understand and what we all don’t do enough of, is that everything on the outside is connected to the inside of our being. We never see anything without some context to ourselves.
So if something irritates you about someone, instead of getting so angry and petulant, try asking yourself what it is that is drawing this painful reaction? Examine your own life and what this could means. This is not an easy exercise, because if it was, very few people would have the power to irritate us and our world would be such a wonderful place to live, but it is. The world is a wonderful place to live, we just get irritated by the wrong things.
Understanding yourself will be hard but that doesn’t mean that it’s not worth it.
It’s worth it.
Getting irritated is worth it, because you life is worth the understanding.
