I have a back ground in counseling and train in hypnosis. Much of how I organize my experience is around the notion of trances. Not in the traditional sense, but in the sense of music leads to a trance (or altered state) going to court, being before a judge leads to a trance state, etc. etc. one approach to working with people for managing mental states is to ignore anything that is the target closer to the target state and encouraging anything that leads towards the target state.

It is funny how we can learn to change our focus. I have worked a number of times with women having baby. Typically people call this pain management, but, I call it managing comfort (this is just a small change in focus, but it asked the person to seek comfort rather than asking them to focus on pain.

I have had had a number of women who's first issue when going in to the hospital to have their baby was that the hospital staff did not think they were ready to have their babies because they did not present the appropriate amount of distress.

My point of course, is that, we can demonstrate a surprising amount of control as to where we put our focus, and therefore, a surprising amount of control over how we are influenced by what happens outside.

To some extent it also matters as much "what we think people intend by what they do or say", as "what they intend by what they do or say."

Often people do and say unkind things, but the fact that we often feel bad as a result is extra.

PM