When you are full of fear and upset, you lose your effectiveness.

Notice what happens when you get upset. You close down inside. You get tunnel vision and lose your ability to see clearly. All you can do is to fight, resist, hang on, or withdraw.

Almost any action you take in this state destroys love, fuels conflict and makes your situation worse. If you could somehow be free of the fear and upset, the tunnel vision would disappear.

You would see your situation clearly. You would be creative, resourceful and able to discover solutions you could never have seen before. You would become very effective.

However, being free of an upset is much easier said than done. This is because we think our upsets are caused by what happens. Fortunately, this is an illusion. Upsets are not caused by what happens.

Upsets are caused by fighting and resisting what happens. To see this in your life, select a recent upset. Now notice what would happen to the upset if, somehow, you were at peace with what happened. There would be no upset. There would be no upset, because the upset wasn't caused by what happened.

The upset was caused by fighting and resisting what happened. The moment you take away the fighting and resisting, the upset disappears. You restore both your peace of mind and your effectiveness.

Now notice what would happen if someone spilled a glass of water on you. You would be wet, and you would be wet whether you liked it or not. Your being wet is like any other circumstance. It's something that happens outside of you. Your feelings about it are totally irrelevant.

Upsets, on the other hand, are located on the inside. Since an upset is something that happens on the inside, there has to be something on the inside that creates it. We create our upsets by fighting and resisting what happens.

Let's go back to the water. If you were at peace with being wet, there would be no upset. If you fought being wet, you would be upset, and the more you fought it, the more upset you would be. The same is true with any circumstance in your life. Nothing has the power to create an upset in you. Only you can do that.

So why do we fight and resist what happens? We fight what happens, because our circumstances trigger a suppressed hurt from the past. To say this another way, our circumstances strike a nerve.

This is why different people get upset at different things. Different people have different sets of nerves that get triggered. This is also why the same type of upsets and the same self-sabotaging behavior keep showing up in your life. The same nerve keeps getting struck.

It's the automatic, subconscious avoidance of this hurt that fuels the conflict and sabotages both your relationships and your life.

You can learn more about healng this hurt by reading the book Get Your Power Back, or listening to How To Divorce As Friends.