Without Hatred On The Inside There Are No Enemies On The Outside

Our unique personalities and ways of looking at life affect the way we interact with others. In some situations, we project our traits on the people around us by attributing to them behaviors or thoughts that are actually ours. With this mindset, enemies are more a matter of how we confront situations in our minds than the circumstances we are objectively in.

Sometimes the worst attack we can suffer can not come from the outside world, but within ourselves. In some situations, we may even feel grateful for external attacks. For inner states include anger, inability and social shame. These, which come from ourselves, make us feel weak and insecure, which becomes a breeding ground for seeing other people as enemies.

For our emotional stability, it is important to know how to redirect the anger that these situations produce in us. Knowing the situations and circumstances that result in great dissatisfaction in our lives is vital to identifying who or what we are confronting.

There is no doubt that the worst attack is not the one coming from the outside world; it is the one that is produced inside and causes a negative self-esteem.  This undermines us as human beings. This negative self-esteem makes us our worst enemies because our emotional balance is largely due to our self-esteem.

Robert J. Sternberg – a professor at Yale University and former leader of the American Association of Psychiatry – distinguishes between at least two types of enemies: external and internal.

Internal enemies are, as the name suggests, those that can be found within us, such as thoughts. Negative thoughts capture us in a circle and lead us to anger, rage and hatred. They make us look at others as enemies who “produce” various painful situations for us.

This inner enemy comes from the irrationality that all these negative thoughts evoke within us. Emotional well-being is mainly due to not letting ourselves be swept away by automatic thoughts as these tend to have very negative traits:

• They are irrational. In other words, they are not based on objective facts, on reality.
• They are automatic. They act as a reflex that is produced without our voluntary acceptance of them.
• They are exaggerated, dramatic and always negative. These thoughts create a lot of emotional discomfort, and we can not get anything positive from them.

Gandhi practiced a passive method of “fighting” against his enemies: constructive non-resistance.  This is an active way of interacting with the enemy through positive methods, a proactive way of dealing with adversity. In personal relationships, there are a wide range of situations that we must confront. To deal with situations involving conflict, it is important to remember the following:

• Do not quarrel just for the sake of quarreling.
• Do not quarrel just to inflate your ego.
• Do not quarrel to get more pride.
• Do not quarrel just to win over or punish your opponent.

• Quarrel just to fulfill a higher purpose.
• Quarrel to overcome your problems.

No matter how hard we try, situations full of conflict will not disappear from our lives. Therefore, it is important to learn to control the effects these have on us.