For example, John becomes very upset because Mary is often five or ten minutes late when they have plans. For John this is not some minor irritant. He yells at Mary every time this happens and he has a very difficult time letting go of his anger for several hours and sometimes even several days. Mary, for her part, can see why John gets upset and even goes so far as to agree that it is a fault of hers and, while its not her intent, she can even see where her behavior might be viewed as rude. What she can’t understand is why John gets so bent out of shape over it; to Mary his reactions just seem to be way over the top.

The reason John gets so bent out of shape is that what he calls Mary’s rudeness is only the tip of the iceberg. Every time John finds himself waiting for Mary he basically has the same conversation with himself about how this happens over and over again and if she really loved him and had any respect for him she would not do this.

Wait a minute -- love and respect? All he yells about is how rude she is, but what he is really feeling is unloved and disrespected? Digging a little further, we find out that John’s mother was always the last to pick him up from school and that he never knew when she was going to come. Sometimes she would pick him up at 4 other times it wasn’t until 5:30. There were days when he wondered if she was going to pick him up at all. In the meantime, he watched as all the other kids parents picked them up on time. The take home message for John was that he wasn’t important to his mother and he even wondered if she loved him as much as the moms who picked their kids up on time loved their kids. All of a sudden, John’s trigger doesn’t seem so irrational.

If that is the case, why is it that he isn’t able to calmly explain this to Mary or remind himself that, while Mary may in fact be rude, the real fire for his reaction has more to do with a ghost from his past than the present? The reason goes back to the emotional brain and flooding. Remember how we talked about how the emotional brain will release neurochemicals which in effect cut the thinking brain off from the rest of the brain? That is exactly what happens here – by the time Mary arrives John’s thinking brain has been so cut off that any nuance is gone from his thinking abilities. He has been reduced to saying simple, broad phrases like “rude” and “mean” and maybe unleash a good old fashioned bout of creative cursing.