By battling something we label as an enemy we are actually giving it lots of energy and perpetuating its negative existence. While this may work with a physical problem, it does not work with psychological, relational or spiritual problems. Fighting to make your way out of a vicious circle, you are focused constantly on the negatives in your situation. This will not make the negatives go away. In fact, it highlights the negatives in your awareness, puts you in an aggressive, negative frame of mind that is not health-promoting, and in the end is unlikely to be effective. In fact, it is likely to perpetuate and worsen your problems (Benor 2004; 2005.

EmotionalBodyProcess, Part II (Benor 2000; 2001) discusses ways in which negative beliefs, traumas and emotions can be dealt with through acceptance, love, healing and forgiveness.

Being angry is actually a choice. No one can make us angry if we're not in a mood or of a mind to respond with anger. However, we are conditioned to put the responsibility for our feelings on other people through the common usage of such terms as "He made me furious!" "This makes me sick!" or even "Seeing her smile makes my day!"

I work a lot with children and their families. From years of observing their behaviors (as well as observing my interactions with my own children) I am impressed that when parents are in a positive psychological space, children's natural misbehaviors are handled much more successfully than when parents are in a bad mood. Just last week, two year old Susie spilled a whole box of crayons on the floor in my office. Jennifer, her mother, responding from a place of anger, loudly reprimanded her: "Why do you always have to make such a mess?" Susie walked off to the play chest and refused to help her mother pick up the crayons. Jennifer continued to rant at Susie. Rather than cooperation, she elicited more rebellious and negative behaviors, stirring herself and Susie to escalating angry interactions.

In anger we tend to blame others for "making us angry." Jennifer had nothing but criticisms for Susie. She could not understand what her baby sitter's secret was for dealing with Susie, who rarely had angry outbursts while she was babysitting. I suggested to Jennifer that she might explore this question with her baby sitter. Yesterday, Jennifer sheepishly acknowledged she had begun to see how her own frustrations and anger were probably stirring Susie to be an even more rebellious terrible two. With further discussions, she was able to see that her frustrations and anger (over marital and financial problems) was feeding on itself, and that she was venting her anger on Susie. She was pleased to report that in the past two days Susie had been behaving much better, responding very quickly to her mother's more positive attitude towards her.

Divide and master
Our Western scientific method dichotomizes. We have the world of matter and separate realms of mind and spirit.