From the Introduction to Roy Masters' book How to Conquer Negative Emotions

       Cruel people have power; they get their energy from you through the way you respond to them. Hypocrites have the same wickedness operating through a deceptive shield of phony innocence. It, too, gets inside you by the way you react to it.

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       Your life is in danger from people, some of whom could even be members of your own family, who chip away, harp, nag and aggravate the life out of you until you feel like killing them or yourself. YOU CANNOT FIGHT THEM WITH RESENTMENT, because they use your resentment to drive you crazy, to make you conform, to bring out the worst in you and terrify you into not facing them and their kind.

       Take heart. There is not one single problem in the world that you cannot solve if you will learn to stop being resentful toward people.

       You are indeed the sum total of your experiences, but another way of saying this is that you are burdened by your past. Unless you learn how to respond properly in the present, you will continue to let the ugly world get inside you and build on that past. And without self-control, that is the only kind of future you have.

       Respond wrongly to pressure just one time—and what aggravates you has got you. Your mind and body must go on responding slavishly until you find the Truth that makes you free.

       You are not alone in your dilemma. The wrong emotional response to all sorts of pressure is currently making everyone sick and depressed and driving all of us into conflict with ourselves. To solve the pressure-caused conflicts, people turn to drink, tobacco and drugs, legal or illegal.

       Look at it this way: your reactions, being compulsive, have become a subtle form of obedience, and emotional obedience is really a form of slavery. Behind the cruel and relentless pressures that zealous people apply to you (sometimes in the name of good) is a selfish motive that compels you to be like it and to go along with it—to sin, in other words. Because it has upset you, you are out of control and not living your own life. No wonder you feel guilty and depressed.

       Because no one has cared enough to teach you how not to respond, and because you have not yet discovered this vital secret, life now seems meaningless, hopeless, and depressing. You have worried, but worrying has made matters worse.

       All your sexual, family, and business problems arise directly from your failing to respond in a right way to what is wrong and, it might be added, making everyone respond wrongly to you when you have been upset. Conflict with yourself becomes conflict with others as you take it out on them.

       Most of the things that are wrong with your life—your marriage, your health, your children—can be straightened out very easily by discovering how to conquer your negative emotions.

       Your emotional upsets have made you feel guilty. Even though you might have been technically correct in what you said or did, if you did it resentfully, your emotions confused you, and when you began to doubt yourself, you experienced conflict, depression and fear.

       Resentment destroyed your objectivity, and, failing to see clearly, you made terrible errors of judgment. These, in turn, led to a fear of making decisions, so that perhaps you began to lean too much on others for guidance, and you know how upsetting it can be if those others happen to be wrong or take advantage of you.

       You must learn how to be patient with cruel and thoughtless people.You must learn to be poised and calm; otherwise, what is wrong in them shows up in you and makes you look like the bad guy. Everyone then becomes so fascinated with what went wrong with you that they fail to see what they did wrong to you, and that experience is upsetting, frustrating and scary.

       Cruel, unthinking people feed off the way you respond to their needling; they walk away self-righteous and satisfied, leaving you frustrated, confused, revengeful and depressed. They get their power from your reaction, while your resentment often makes you feel like the guilty one. “Successful,” domineering, unprincipled people lord it over you, drain you and make your life wretched; BUT THEY ARE ALWAYS SURE OF GETTING TO YOU THROUGH YOUR REACTIONS.

       The dehumanizing pressure to achieve and to study is changing people into animals, animals out of control, in mortal conflict with other animals.

       Of course, we all respond to pressure, but that response is what is wrong with us.

       Upsetting you is the key to motivating you; it is the hidden reason behind all of your suffering.

       Manipulating and winning through intimidation is a common practice among all corrupters: tyrants, high pressure salesmen, successful businessmen, and the like. No doubt you have your own private dictator currently aggravating the life out of you.

       Only through the shock of emotional upset can a compelling or morbid suggestion be planted in your mind, and this is especially true when you are resentful. If it doesn't’t cause wild and senseless rebellion, you find yourself obliged to give in, to ease the pain that the pressure of wrong resistance causes.

       Giving in to tyrants and zealots who make the pain of your upsets unbearable is a common but unhealthy form of love, loyalty, and closeness between husband and wife, mother and child, and between churches and their believers. (It is also the way you lose your identity.) It is hard to say no to pushy, irritating people.You tend to favor people who apply pressure: your boss, your wife, and your kids. Then the breaking point is reached; there is rebellion against work and study; debilitating disease and nervous breakdown take their deadly toll.

       Being upset is your weakness—your Achilles heel. All heartless, cruel, power-hungry, unprincipled people inherit the know-how to make your slavish emotional responses work for them, and they have no qualms about casting you aside after you are spent and broken.

How to Conquer Negative Emotions
by Roy Masters

Resolve the effects of pain, fear and stress and discover how to conquer your negative emotions.

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       The world is dominated by tyrants, tempters, and psychopaths. Some of them get to you through cruelty, while other types manipulate you with a holier-than-thou, irritating “kindness.” They might use both methods to confuse you, upsetting you one moment and being “kind” to you the next. Their bold, unprincipled manner upsets you and makes you feel guilty; then, by suddenly changing roles and becoming “nice,” they intensify your guilt feelings and make you doubt yourself. In that manner you are made to believe that they were right all along and that you were wrong. And so you learn to go along with their wishes; you find yourself doing things you would never have done in your right mind, and that upsets you all over again. This vicious cycle, with a built-in upset, repeats itself endlessly, until you feel like killing them or yourself.

       Irritating people are really victims themselves; they tempt you in order to retrieve something they have lost to those who aggravated the life out of them. By needling you, they drain you of your vital energy, and with this power they torment you again and again. As you become a parent, you find their identity welling up inside you, yelling and screaming at your own kids, unwittingly destroying them with the same projection techniques of aggravation that your parents and other pushy people once used against you.

       We may be legally free, but emotionally and morally we are still in the Dark Ages. We all live under an emotional feudal system of slaves and tyrants. It is a devilish, military chain of command, where everyone who responds and becomes a slave also lords it over a slave.

       Cruelty rules the roost. A subtle, god-eat-dog emotional pecking order of pressure is everywhere: at home, school, and at work. Everyone feels the meaninglessness, the futility of it all. THIS IS THE MAIN REASON FOR ALCOHOLISM, DRUG ADDICTION, CRIME, DEPRESSION, NERVOUS BREAKDOWN AND A MULTITUDE OF DISEASES.

       One of two things always happens to you under pressure: You become upset and blow up—but rarely at the person who upsets you, because you don’t have the guts— or you give in.You might even “fall in love” with someone you resent, or champion the cause of your corrupter, especially if the pressure is religious or political. All manipulators know that your capitulation is simply a means of relieving pressure as well as a way of making up for guilt you feel for being upset with them. But from your point of view, it might seem as though your changed behavior has somehow affected that cruel person’s attitude for the good, compelling him to reward you with approval and appreciation and love. For a while it could seem as though you have a marvelous power to control and redeem evil people. If that is your delusion, you find yourself addicted to selling yourself down the river to keep peace and control various situations.All manipulators carefully cultivate this behavior. This is how wicked people use you and get ahead, because in reality all they are doing is rewarding you for being unreasonable and for serving their bizarre purposes.

       Once you have been conditioned to give in to pressure, you could begin seeing that way of life as evidence of your divine goodness. And if you don’t become a tempter yourself, you develop a knack for spoiling people, compelling them to make the kind of demands that become the pressure you need to give in, to be reminded of, and to be rewarded for what you have come to think of as goodness, and for your imagined power to make naughty people right and happy. So when you don’t have a motivator, you create one— your child perhaps?

       Creating your own tyrants in the form of spoiling your children is the cause of juvenile delinquency and crime. It is why you parents become frightened of and submissive to your violent brats. The worse they get the better you look compared with them, and the more you are compelled to be good to them, believing that your only error is not being good enough to them. That is why bad children come from what appear to be good homes. It is also why we often see nice, gentle, kindly people living under the tyranny of a dictator. Their natural goodness is merely weakness, born out of a need to be submissive to realize their goodness.

       As soon as everyone’s demands grow so great that you become drained of energy, and when you discover that you have nothing left to give, to be “loved” for, you start blaming and being secretly resentful, and that leads to nervous breakdown and mental illness.

       Man was never designed to be externally motivated, as animals, but because of a little understood weakness, we are. This is the main reason why we all have paralyzing conflicts, anxieties, and fears; that is the basis of all our problems, right there. UNTIL YOU DISCOVER THE SECRET OF TURNING YOURSELF ON FROM WHAT YOU REALIZE IS RIGHT DEEP DOWN IN YOUR HEART, YOU WILL ALWAYS BE AN EXTERNALIZED ZOMBIE, COMPELLED TO ACT AGAINST YOUR OWN BETTER JUDGMENT, HURTING PEOPLE YOU LOVE AND DOING THINGS YOU ARE SORRY FOR.

       Being upset is a conditioned reflex; it is an inferior way of reacting to pressure. That is why you feel inferior, helpless, angry, and it is also why you are so compulsive in the way you are forced to relieve the pain of tension built up by those pressures; it is another reason why you hurt the ones you love.

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       But what if you could learn to look injustice straight in the eye without flinching, without being upset, calmly and with endless patience? Surely you would not have the problems that arise from repressing or expressing resentment. This then, is the aim of the book HOW TO CONQUER NEGATIVE EMOTIONS, to show you the secret principle of patience and self-control.

       I know what you want. You want relief from your nervous tension and guilt feelings. You want solutions to your sex problems and family problems. You want to stop smoking, drinking and overeating; you want happiness. But you will never find what you are seeking until you discover the hidden cause, AND THAT CAUSE IS ALLOWING PEOPLE TO UPSET YOU TOO EASILY.

       Emotional self-control is the key you are seeking. Without it, you will always be in conflict with yourself. If you are ever to be free of guilt and fear, you must learn the secret of responding in a right way to what is wrong with people and the world.

       Your main line of defense (and attack) is to stay calm and patient. So, seeing you unmoved, the motivator himself becomes upset and panics. Learn how to put up an impenetrable, invisible force shield of patience that lets the good come through and prevents the ugly world from getting in and growing up inside you.

       Roy Masters writes about one simple principle that will KEEP YOU SAFE UNDER ALL CONDITIONS OF STRESS AND PERSECUTIONS. You will marvel at how easy it is to say “no,” to over-power and to disarm pushy individuals. Surely, Roy Masters has nothing less to offer you than the secret to life itself.

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