I want you to go hunting for trouble. Some people manage to get into most serious trouble in looking for trouble; so much so, in fact, that after the trouble is over they have only the haziest idea of what the trouble has been about.

That's the sort of trouble to keep away from.

Still, there are certain troubles worth looking into; and the closer the better.

Like other ordinary persons, it is very probable that you have run across people whom you may describe as giving you a pain. They seem to rub you the wrong way, and generate in you a feeling of hostility. How would it be if you took a little walk and hunted up one of these pain-giving individuals, and deliberately got him to hand you out a full-sized dose of that "pain feeling"?

Of course, it would be just as well to utilize some discretion in this trouble-hunting expedition. I would not advise you, for example, to pick out an abnormally developed specimen of the belligerent tribe when he happens to be in his most pain-inflicting mood and tell him what you think of him.

In this trouble-hunting I want you to look for troubles not in other people, but in yourself: in your own personal sensations.

You see, many times you have run up against the person who "gives you a pain"; and then you have run away in a hurry so that you can nurse it all by yourself. The result is that you become so interested in experiencing the pain that has been inflicted on you that you forget to keep in touch with the realities of things.

Now, if you go about it in the right way you can get a great deal of interesting enlightenment from your pain experience

Having found the necessary victim, open up con­nections with him. If he happens to be a seller of something, pose as a possible purchaser; if he is a lawyer, pretend to be a possible client.

If this gentleman has given you a goodly sized pain on former occasions, the chances are that the present experience is not going to be any exception. If this pain is handled rightly, we may be able to get some­thing out of it.

Now, a pain, whether mental or physical, is a pain. That is, it is the direct opposite to a pleasure. So although it is possible that we might find it somewhat hard at times to define precisely just what a pleasure is, nearly every one of us finds it fairly easy to describe what a pain is. If we can't find any more explicit definition, we can at least say that a pain is a feeling of being hurt.

When this victim of yours has said or done enough to stir up within you a sufficient dose of that hurt feeling, take your specimen of pain off to your private laboratory for analysis while it is quite fresh. There is nothing like a good dose of freshly inflicted pain if the best results from an analysis are desired.

Examine Pain

Now go to work on that pain. Go over each such little area carefully, looking at all particulars of the sensation which you have undergone in that con­nection.

Something that your pain dispenser said or did pro­duced some form of reaction in you which was not pleasant. In itself this is not altogether unusual; for that matter, we see and hear very many things every day that are not enjoyable, yet we have not gone to pieces over them.

It may be that you are candid enough to acknowl­edge that the fault for this experience is your own. In fact, you may even be generous enough to admit that you have given the other chap as big a dose of pain as he handed out to you.

Still, that is not going far enough. What we want to find out is why an emotional storm became generated in your unconscious over this experience. To say that the blame is our own will not help matters; we are out on a technical exploration and not on any philosophic jaunt.

In the experience in question, three features are involved. First there is the something or other that has been said or done, or left unsaid or left undone, by the trouble dispenser; then there is the effect of that some­thing or other on yourself; finally there is the line of connection between these two.

After we have pulled about that particular pain specimen, have shredded it into bits, and have browsed around every little patch of interest matter contained in it, we are going to find that there is not a thing in it that justified any exaggerated reaction. So if there has been any pronounced emotional commotion, with no justifiable conscious reason for it, then there must exist some definite unconscious causes for such sensations.

Even if we do not get any further than this for a while, what we have thus far accomplished will aid considerably in broadening our concepts and realiza­tions as to how the conscious behavior reflects the character and tendencies of submerged mental pro­cesses. And if we begin to realize that we are carry­ing around within us a sort of touchy second self that we don't seem to know very much about, yet which is pronouncedly influencing our conscious mental atti­tude in some unknown manner, we ought to take a little interest in such phenomena.

All Pains the Same

After you have taken home a few specimens of pain to be analyzed you are going to make an interesting discovery. You are going to discover, in fact, that it does not make much difference what the particular pain specimen you have taken for analysis may hap­pen to be—the outcome of such analysis will always be pretty much the same. And when such analytic determinations have become narrowed down to funda­mentals, it will be found that you have not been upset by anything that has been either said or done. You will find that you have been upset solely because you have not had your own way, or because you have considered that you have been subjected to some slight, or have not been made enough of, or have had some other infantile susceptibility rubbed the wrong way.

Such emotional storms are simply the "wailings" of mental infantilism. By such outbreaks we betray the fact that we are carrying around within us mental qualities that have never grown up; vestiges of psychi­cal attributes have been fixed at a primitive level and have never developed to adult maturity.

There is only one means of cure for such a form of stunted mental growth as this, and that is for it to grow up. And the first step in this necessary growing-up process is to realize the imperative necessity for its doing so.

You should make a point of taking every experi­ence of the daily life in which there has been an ex­aggerated reaction and of analyzing it exhaustively, no matter whether the experience has to do with anger, depression, anxieties, or actual oppressive physical happenings. Under such treatment the imag­inary factors become nullified, and the real oppres­sions are helped.

Exaggerated reactions (outbreaks, moods, tenden­cies, etc.) should not be valued at their face aspects; their motivating causes must be traced. When this is done it will be found that these exaggerated reactions have not resulted from any experience of the here and the now, but because some old unconscious sore spot has been irritated.

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