we are likely to encounter a number of extremely  

well-crafted invitations  to lose our tempers badly.

Our partner will press a well-flagged  nuclear button related, let’s imagine,  

to their views on our mother or our career choice.  At work, a colleague may deliberately not answer  

a very simple question to which we urgently need  an answer. A shop attendant may give us a bored,  

insolent shrug. Someone in the supermarket may  falsely accuse us of standing in the wrong line.

What we are apt to miss at such moments of blatant  provocation, as we get swallowed up in fears of  

humiliation, illogicality and injustice, is just  how much many people enjoy having arguments,  

indeed crave them in order to refind their  equilibrium and appease their psychic  

discomforts. We are tricked into imagining that  there may be genuine issues that require our  

wholehearted engagement but thereby lose sight  of the true psychological motivations at play.  

A person is trying to get us into a fight not  because they have a sincere complaint against  

us but because they are feeling overwhelmed  by the intensity of their own aggression,  

which they hope to placate by spoiling a portion  of our lives. By goading us into a battle,  

they are looking for a way to evacuate their  fury into us, to use us as a receptacle for  

their emotional waste, to employ a skirmish  with us to distract themselves from their own  

intractable conflicts and muted sorrows,  to seduce us into joining them in their  

sadness and entanglements, so that they  might feel less alone and less bereft.

We should resist such enthusiastic and subtly  crafted invitations by recognising them for  

what they are: attempts by the other party to  rescue themselves from unbearable feelings.  

We might - if we are exceptionally  generous - pity them for their despair;  

we don’t in any way need to join  them in their gladiatorial quests.

What may at times provoke us to a particular  pitch of excitement is a puzzlement as to why  

others are behaving as they are: why on earth - we  wonder in a strangled way - have they once again  

mentioned something we implored them to leave  alone, why are they being almost deliberately  

slow or rude or surly, why is someone who should  be kind and thoughtful suddenly so off-hand and  

cruel. It’s our wide-eyed quest for sensible  answers that ends up fanning our upheaval. We  

should answer our bafflement with far greater  simplicity and therapeutic rigour. There aren’t  

any good reasons for the discord. It’s just  that our interlocutor is in a very bad way and  

has concluded - not incorrectly alas - that they  may well feel significantly better once we have  

started to raise our voice, redden and call them  horrible names we’ll later regret with intensity.

We should work out the clever game and  refuse to play any further rounds of it;  

whether the invitee is our spouse, a  stranger, our child or a colleague.  

We’re not being kind by leaving them to it,  we’re not being pacific or eerily grown up.  

It’s just there is so much else that needs our  attention: we have to hold on to our thoughts,  

repair our wounds, appease our turmoils and  discover our own routes to happiness. We must  

sidestep the many dragnets because we have so  many other, truly more important things to do.