And hello to you and welcome to the Richard Nichols podcast, the Personal Development

Podcast series that's here to help inspire, educate and motivate you to be the best you

can be.

I'm psychotherapist Richard Nichols and this is episode 217. It's titled, Forgive and Forget.

And if you're ready, we'll start the show.

Hi folks, hope you're well. How was your month? There's a lot of anger about at the minute, isn't there?

And some might say rightly so.

The cost of living is going through the roof, interest rates are up and tempers are frayed.

I use Twitter a fair bit and do try to dilute the negatives down with some positives, but it's going to

take more than one guy with an annoyingly cheerful voice to do that, because once your brain is primed

for anger, it's really easy to find other things to be angry about. Things that would normally

only be a three out of ten are pushing people

to their limits, aren't they? Because they're already upset. And I get it. People are hurt

and feel that they need to hit out. But just because someone throws a ball at you, it doesn't mean we have to catch it.

And if out of instinct we do, we can just put it down and walk away. There's a popular phrase,

you see, banded around on social media, that holding onto anger is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to

die. It's a phrase that came out of Alcoholics' anonymous meetings, although bizarrely, if you see

it on some Instagram post, more than likely it's been attributed to Buddha. I think whenever

phrases like this strike a chord with people,

we don't actually know the name of the person who started it off, people just stick butter

on the end of it to give it some weight. And of course, if you see something enough times,

it becomes true. It's not as succinct, but I prefer the analogy of picking up and throwing dog crap at someone

...