"Michael, when you were a child, you were helpless over your parents brutality, and you were also helpless over yourself in many ways. You couldn’t just leave and go live with someone else. You couldn’t walk away without further punishment. However, today, while you are still helpless over others, you are not helpless over yourself. You can walk away from a situation that doesn’t feel good, or you can speak up for yourself. You can also explore difficulties with your family. You didn’t have any of these options as a child. But unless you accept your helplessness over others, you will try to control them, and anger is way you’ve learned to do it. Anger is your automatic controlling, addictive response to protect against feeling that old helplessness. You will continue to be angry until you accept your helplessness over others - over what they choose to do and who they choose to be."

Helplessness over others is a very hard feeling to accept. For many people, it feels like a life or death feeling, because as infants we were completely helpless and if no one came we would die. Some of us cried and cried and no one came and we felt helpless over living or dying. While today helplessness over others is not usually a life or death experience, feeling can trigger our infant terror. Most people will do anything to avoid feeling of helplessness, even though we are no longer helpless over ourselves. Yet until we accept our helplessness over others, we will try to control them, and anger is a major way many people have learned to attempt to control.

It took Michael time to learn how to take care of himself - how to embrace and accept his helpless feelings rather than ignore them or cover them up with anger. As he learned to take loving care of himself and his own feelings and needs, he became more accepting of other’s feelings and needs. As a result of accepting himself and others, and of learning to feel and manage his painful feelings, his need to control others gradually diminished.

In course of working with me, Michael learned to access a personal source of spiritual guidance to help him not feel so alone and to know how to take loving care of himself. Michael found that when he was connected with his spiritual guidance, he was much less likely to act out in anger. He found he could manage his difficult feelings of aloneness and helplessness far more easily when he felt love and support of Spirit.

Replacement therapy is not new. How many times have you heard of people attempting to replace their smoking habits by sucking mints? (I am just waiting for time when I come across someone who thinks they have cheated by system by sliding a cigarette through holes of a packet of "Polo's ("LifeSavers" for our American friends)! Although that is a very flippant remark, it does exaggeratingly make my point: replacement therapy, if it is to work, needs to be a truly pleasurable and/or rewarding experience if we are to keep returning to it.

STEP 3: Control acceptable.

If replacement therapy is allowed to run rampant, then it just becomes another out of control habit. It may be pleasurable, but in reality it is just another out of control experience.

You cannot control a habit, no matter how pleasurable it is. By it`s very nature, word "habit" indicates action out of control. What we do is introduce something I call: "resultant substitution".

When a football game isn`t going as well as manager would like or there is a need for a particular player to be replaced, a substitute player takes field. What is that state of that new player? They are fresh, alert, and ready to play their own game with an eye to helping team to win. It is likely that they will play using their own unique skills and abilities. Such players do not find themselves on pitch by accident (not theirs anyway!), but by purposeful positioning. Your substitute needs to appear through purposeful positioning if it is to have full effect. The manager (which would be you), should be in a position to make that decisive choice as to whether or not to leave them to play game through till end or changing substitution should it suit needs of game. All time control is in hands of manager - you, rather than in control of opposite team.

Step 4: Offer Reward

As human beings, we are pretty strange. When we catch ourselves doing something we believe to be wrong, then we start beating ourselves up about it. Normally this tends to be an argument that goes on inside our heads. We get really uptight with ourselves, boy do we go through it! Sometimes it can go on for days, maybe even longer. If judgement has been inflicted upon us, e.g. from others who we hold in regard, we can carry that torment with us for years!

So what are we to do? First of all, discover what forgiveness is. If you have a genuine need to be forgiven, even a perceived need, then this simple principle is so very important to master. Until you do, you will never be able to move forwards. Goodness knows there are enough people out there who are all to keen to be damning in judgement without you joining queue against yourself!

The second thing to do is to recognise when it works for you - when you actually get it right or resist that previously overpowering habit. I have some bad news for you... you are not perfect! Let that sink in.. You are not perfect! Sometimes you are going to fail in your efforts, but sometimes...maybe quite a distance apart at first, but sometimes you WILL succeed! When you do... reward yourself. Treat yourself in some acceptable way. Something that really builds on success you have had. This is all to do with association and mental image of experience that you form. This is so important as it consolidates your efforts to action.

Step 5: Set A Cut Off Point

I`m not really into football that much, but analogy works well. Every match, every game, has an end point. Sooner or later it finishes and everybody goes home.

When I was a boy, I owned one of those electric slot-car racing sets. Together with my brother or one of my sisters, we would place those cars side-by-side and hit throttle. The cars would spring into life and hurtle round track. Sometimes they would shoot off and crash into barriers. No matter. We would just pick them up and off they would go again. Round and round they would go, sparks flying as those little pieces of mesh scraped tracks. These little cars would continue to hurtle around that track again and again until either we got fed up with game or food was offered!

If we fail to set ourselves some marker - a date by which we will have achieved required action - then we leave ourselves open to position of racing around track of life with no end in sight. We become open to whims of personal taste rather than specification.

Goals can seem pretty final can`t they? They are firm points in life. Dates, actions, etc all specified in black and white. Here`s a question for you though: Who sets and/or agrees those goals? You do! So guess who is in control of them? That`s right...again, you are! If you find that for whatever reason, that your goals are not reached as and when you had originally planned, don`t go beating yourself around head about it. As you go along heading towards your goals, keep a good record of what you have done and how you are progressing, what your plans are, etc., and then reset those goals to a new date. The issue is about journey - progress - rather than simply about your arrival.

Step 6: Watch For Your Signals

What do you know about salesman`s tactics? The kind that gives you a sales pitch and at some point moves in for close of sale? How do they know just when to pull it all together and go for your signature on deal? Buying signals. A trained salesman will watch you like a hawk with an eye that includes your body language, your comments, change of tone, established rapport, etc., etc. We all do it every day our lives. We give out signals that show our acceptance or otherwise of deals that are on table. When it comes to overcoming your worst habits, there will come a point when you should go for close. Sew up that deal once and for all.

I used to work in Central London. At time, I lived out on edge of London and travelled into work on London Underground - "tube" train. Sometimes I would be pretty tired on that journey and heat and monotony of journey, I would fall asleep and continue on right past station that I needed! I failed to get off when I reached my destination. Don`t be like me - in your journey through life, watch for and get off at your destination. Watch out for your signals.