Mind over Mood

Lately there have been a series of teenagers committing suicides after relentless taunting on the Internet social networks. A son of Bernie Madoff committed suicide because he couldn’t handle the disgrace following the story of his father’s billion-dollar chicanery blanketing the old and new media outlets. Politicians and other public figures are often subjected to withering calumnies on the tabloid media that could burn lesser mortals to ashes. Personally, I have had my fair share of vicious and malicious attacks on one Internet social media site. The latest began with my posting some relatively contrarian out-of-the-box points of view. A man (probably with the support of “enemy” bevy of rodents burrowed in the underworld of gossip dens), in such high-octane apoplectic rants, inveighed against me about my supposedly undistinguished life history: my family relationship and my gallivanting philandering loser self.

First, admittedly, when one throws the kitchen sink at you, there is an instantaneous instinctive reaction. Thanks to the evolutionary properties we are all endowed with. Notice and observe the moods that course through your body. How you deal with them is a function of your trained or untrained mind. You don’t want to lose balance and a commitment to your mission.

Mindful of my reactive moods, I asked the questions: Who is this guy? What mind state is he operating on? What are his motivations? How do I handle the situation?

I take the view that often the attacker or attackers do not know your core self, and yet have the temerity to focus on your life. Often these people have serious problems of their own. They are bullies full of inadequacies. Their morbid exercise may not be a Freudian projection, a defense mechanism for protecting oneself against anxiety arising from undesirable feelings of some forms of emotional and mental perturbations. It is more a Functional projection of some inner turmoil on to others in ways that is perceived to promote one’s survival enterprise. (Kenrick, “11).

Life always has choices. We do the best we can with what we have at the time. Assuming you have a handle on the fight-flight automatic evolutionary gift, get on a game plan of what I call Mind-over-Mood:

-Size up the situation

-Experience and become friendly with your moods in the moment

-What are your automatic thoughts on the incident?

-Evaluate the thoughts: concrete versus phantoms

-What alternative thoughts, if any, are there?

-Decide on a course of action

Here are some options:

1-Keep quiet and refuse to engage. Depending on your temperament, this may be a course of action that can shut up the perpetrator because he cannot rant against a silent wall.

2-Go toe-to-toe with the red-eyed monster on his reframing of the issues. Chances you will be in a shouting match, talking pass one another until hell freezes over. This is because both of you are operating at different chunking levels of basic premises to allow for genuine discussion. (Linden, ’97).

3-Stand up to the bully, but not on his terms of framing the issues. This was my choice. The dude chunked to two lateral levels

a. Superman coming to expose the evil me

b. Superman coming to save me from myself

I, on the other hand, chunked up to: What the fuck is this creature, I have never met or know doing with my family and my life? Fuck off!

Ab initio, we were not discussing anymore but talking to ourselves. And so, began the odyssey: He, proud of himself for having all kinds of unflattering information about me. Some double-headed cobras were in a state of orgasmic delirium from the pungent gunk gushing from the man’s rear-end orifice. I threw some stinging jabs a la Ali. That got him madder and madder. There were hints that he believed he was actually doing me a favor—a tell-tale sign to his mental state. End of story.

4-Where profits in money or votes are involved, or if you are so inclined, you might mount a counter-intelligence offensive and dig out muck on the perpetrator. There is always information on anybody that can be manipulated and twisted without context. So, you might play what the dude called “matches” with matches.

In the end it boils down to having a core and unshakable believe in who you are. Once you have that then “a word is not experience” or “a map is not the territory.” In the process of protecting your mood you might consider some loving-kindness mental exercise to ease your disgust of your “enemy.” You don’t want to flood your system with dangerous cortisol that can be triggered when the body senses real or imagined dangers. You are now a Teflon—a mind warrior—protected even in death.