What If My Problem Isn't Other People? How I Exhaust Myself
“It's me, hi, I'm the problem, it's me”
I’ve been reading a book on Buddhist psychology, and I got to a chapter that felt offensive in the way accurate things often do. It was about temperament. The book breaks people down into three basic patterns: grasping, aversive, and deluded. The grasping type looks for what is pleasing, enjoyable, beautiful, and improvable. The deluded type moves through life with confusion, hesitation, uncertainty, and a kind of drifting relationship to what is happening.
Then there is the aversive temperament. 🙋♀️
That is where I started feeling personally attacked by a Buddhist book.
The aversive temperament is built around judgment and rejection of experience. It sees faults quickly. Problems are apparent everywhere. It can become critical, rigid, controlling, angry, aggressive, and contemptuous. The book even describes this type as someone who walks quickly, wakes up as if annoyed, eats hurriedly, drives tensely, grips the wheel, gets irritated by other drivers, and enters a room immediately seeing what is wrong. The bad windows. The small kitchen. The stupid layout. The lack of an open view. The flaw shows up before the charm.
I did not need a personality test after reading that. I knew exactly where I landed. The uncomfortable part is that I’m also seeing something real. Sometimes when people talk about judgment, they make it sound like the whole thing is projection, as if the world is neutral and I’m walking around sprinkling contempt on it. Then I go outside, and people are doing dumb things directly in front of me.
So the real question is where accurate perception ends and where aversion starts feeding on itself.
The Beach Crowd
A few nights ago, we were walking back from fireworks on the beach. There had to be close to two thousand people funneling off the beach at the same time. It was a mass of slow walking, wandering, blocking, stopping, drifting bodies. People walking four-, maybe six-wide like they were in a parade. People stopping in the middle of the flow because someone needed one more picture, or had to adjust a sandal, or needed a family meeting exactly where everyone else was trying to pass.
I had nowhere important to be. I was not late for surgery. I was not trying to catch a flight. I was simply stuck moving at a pace that made my soul feel like it was being dragged across concrete. Eventually, I walked down the street near traffic because at least there was movement there. I was not being reckless. I just needed to get out of the human sludge.
The distress had another layer underneath the inconvenience. It was the feeling that some part of my finite life was being wasted at the speed of somebody else’s obliviousness. That sounds dramatic until you notice how often public life creates that exact feeling.
Airports. Cruises. Walmart around Christmas. Public pools. Beach events. Sometimes even AA meetings. Any setting where enough people gather and the average level of spatial awareness drops like a rock.
The person blasting music through a giant speaker on the beach as if every family, child, older couple, and tired person within a hundred yards came there to Bad Bunny rap about all the girls he’s been with . The guy smoking a cigar while playing catch with his kid, with the ball repeatedly landing near other people. The “influencer” turning a public sunset into a private photo shoot. The person standing in the center of a walkway with no concept that other people need to pass. The airport security amateur who acts shocked that shoes, laptop, belt, pockets, liquids, and ID are part of the process.
I’m going to be honest in a way that too many LinkedIn therapists and influencers won’t say out loud. I look at this and I feel disgust.
Then I feel disgusted by my own disgust because I can see where that road goes. I can see how contempt becomes a personality. I can see how “people are inconsiderate” turns into “people are disgusting,” and once that switch happens, public life stops feeling like shared space. It starts feeling like contamination.
Working With What Is Actually There
The Buddhist text gave me a better way to hold this because it does not ask me to erase temperament. It says temperament is to be understood, worked with, and transformed. Human beings come in with distinct styles, whether we call that karma, genetics, conditioning, family systems, trauma, or nervous system wiring. The work is to distinguish the “gold” of natural temperament from the unhealthy states covering it.
That matters because I have no interest in becoming a fake version of peaceful. My temperament is not going to become slow-walking vacation guy. It is not going to become cruise buffet serenity guy. It is not going to become the person who floats through Walmart at Christmas glowing with love toward every chaotic stranger in line.
So what do I do with what I actually have?
The book gives examples of teachers who transform people by using their existing temperament. A boastful builder comes to a monastery, full of himself, talking about his houses and business success. The teacher gives him a major building project. If the guy succeeds, he learns to work with others and contribute something beautiful. If he fails, that becomes a lesson too.
A boxer and tough guy becomes a monk after his mother dies, and the teacher gives him the role of bodyguard, even though the teacher does not need one. The role gives the man a way to transform aggression into dignity. A charming alcoholic monk keeps sneaking out to drink, and instead of relying on vows alone, the teacher gathers the man’s friends and places him in their care.
That is clinically sharp. You do not take the builder’s pride and pretend it does not exist. You give it a task. You do not take the boxer’s aggression and give him a lecture about kindness. You give the aggression a dignified role. You do not treat the alcoholic monk’s charm and community as irrelevant. You recruit the community as part of the intervention.
The raw material stays recognizable. The expression changes.
The Walmart Line
One of the clearest examples I have is Walmart around Christmas or New Year’s. I cannot remember which holiday because both have the same public-energy signature: too many people, too much noise, too much stress, too many carts, and everyone acting like society is one inconvenience away from collapse.
The checkout line was insane. No clear structure. No barriers. No official lanes. Just a chaotic human snake bending through the front of the store. I was already irritated because disorder bothers me. Lines exist for a reason. Boundaries exist for a reason. A line is a social contract. It says, “We are all annoyed, we all want to leave, and we are going to suffer in order.”
The people in front of me left a six- or seven-foot gap between themselves and the people ahead of them. In a normal line, fine. In a chaotic holiday Walmart line with no barriers, that gap becomes an invitation. People started cutting in. I became enraged because I was watching a preventable breakdown of order happen in real time. I was stuck behind people who were either oblivious or passive, and other people were exploiting the space.
My mind was screaming: “close the gap. Move forward. This is basic civilization”.
The person in front of me had no shoes on, which did not help my compassion. By the time this person got to the register, I had turned them into a symbol of everything wrong with public life. Then they learned Walmart did not take Apple Pay. They had a photo frame and some candy sitting there. They had no way to pay.
And I paid for it. I paid for my tormentor’s photo frame and candy. I said Merry Christmas. Inside, I wanted to snap him in half.
That is the whole human problem in one checkout line. The violent contempt was present. The generous behavior was also present. The emotional impulse was ugly. The action was decent. That is DBT Opposite Action with teeth. That is practice with no incense. That is the moment where the first internal reaction is real, and it is also trainable.
When AA Language Gets Too Small
This is where AA language starts to feel too small for me. In some AA circles, someone would hear that story and say, “That’s your alcoholism.” I understand the point. Irritability, contempt, impatience, control, resentment, entitlement, self-centered fear — all of that can travel with addiction. Early in sobriety, that language can keep a person honest. It can stop the addict from making every ugly pattern sound special, complex, and exempt from accountability.
At seven years sober, that explanation does not do enough for me. Plenty of people who have never had a drinking problem walk around with the same aversion, the same disgust, the same intolerance for public stupidity. I have clients who hate AA partly for this reason. They hear every difficult emotion turned into “alcoholism”, every personality pattern turned into a “character defect”, every irritation turned into “dry drunk” or “resentment will kill you” language, and eventually the explanation stops opening anything. It starts closing things down.
Alcohol was one treatment strategy. It was one old way of managing the machinery. The machinery underneath is older and broader than drinking. The real issue here is temperament, conditioning, aversion, control, and the feeling that reality is being badly managed right in front of me.
For me, the pattern is not that I want a drink. The pattern is that I want reality to stop being so poorly managed. Alcohol used to offer a chemical exit from that pressure. Sobriety removes the chemical exit. It does not automatically transform the pressure.
That is why I like the Buddhist frame better here. It gives me language that is bigger than addiction and more precise than “character defect.” Untransformed aversion names the pattern without reducing my whole personality to alcohol. It also keeps the door open for clients who have the same temperament and no addiction history at all. You can be seven years sober, twenty years sober, never sober because you never had to be, and still be ruled by aversion.
The Pet Is Barking
The book has this image of personality as a stubborn and demanding pet. You can train it to have better manners, yet for the rest of its life it will need affection, water, and kibble. I love that because it removes the fantasy of a total personality transplant.
My pet walks fast. My pet scans for flaws. My pet hates blocked pathways, bad systems, passive line management, public noise, and people who act like nobody else exists.
My job is training the pet. My job is getting aversion to serve clarity rather than contempt.
There is also a story in the book about a Zen teacher who describes herself as an aversion type. When she travels, she complains about the airport, the food, the climate, the body discomfort, the stupidity of the gate process.
Then she catches herself and basically says, “I’m having an attack. I hate that airport. I’ll never travel again. Of course that isn’t true. I’ll be traveling again next month and complain just as much.” Then she laughs.
That is not fake positivity. That is disidentification. She still sees the airport as stupid. She also sees her own mind doing its aversion routine. That small bit of humor creates space.
Without space, the thought becomes a religion.
That is where I get into trouble. I do not merely notice inconsiderate behavior. I have a tendency to prosecute it. I gather exhibits. Beach speaker guy. Cigar guy. Slow walkers. Walmart barefoot Apple Pay guy. Airport security amateurs. Public pool parents. Cruise people. Influencer sunset people. The case keeps building. Every new example confirms the worldview. Eventually the courtroom never adjourns.
Contempt feels good in the short term. That is the dangerous part. It feels clean. It feels intelligent. It feels morally clarifying. It feels like I am awake in a world of people sleepwalking through shared space. Then the cost shows up. Contempt makes the nervous system live in a hostile environment even when nobody is directly harming me. It turns ordinary inconvenience into evidence of civilizational collapse. It turns people into categories before they get to be people.
The text says aversive types can discount real virtues because they are so focused on faults. That lands. The guy with the cigar might be an inconsiderate beach neighbor and a loving father playing catch with his son. The person taking duck-lip sunset photos might be ridiculous and also having one of the best nights of her vacation. The barefoot Walmart guy might be disorganized and also broke, embarrassed, tired, limited, distracted, or simply operating with a level of executive functioning that makes me want to chew glass.
That does not make the behavior enjoyable. It keeps my mind from turning them into trash.
No After-Party
Healthy aversion sees the problem and names it cleanly. It takes action where action is useful. It leaves when leaving is wise. It says the hard thing when the hard thing is needed. It protects time, attention, energy, and integrity. It refuses to normalize mediocrity. It allows me to say, “That is selfish behavior,” and then move my chair.
Unhealthy aversion keeps chewing. It follows me home. It becomes a monologue. It becomes disgust at humanity. It becomes the emotional equivalent of smoking the cigar myself and blowing it into my own lungs.
So the practice might be brutally simple: accurate perception, wise action, no after-party.
I see the speaker. I move.
I see the slow walkers. I choose another route.
I see the line chaos. I close the gap or accept the delay.
I see the airport mess. I put in earbuds and conserve energy.
I see contempt arising. I name it as an aversion attack.
Then I stop making the entire species stand trial.
That last part is hard because part of me believes that if I stop being angry, I am giving people a pass. I confuse internal outrage with moral accountability. I act like my disgust is somehow holding the line for civilization. Meanwhile, the guy with the speaker does not know I exist. The influencer got her sunset picture. The slow walkers made it to their car. The Walmart guy got his frame and candy. I am the one carrying the residue.
This is where Buddhism becomes annoyingly practical. The question is whether I want to become one more person unconsciously spreading suffering. My style looks more intelligent than the beach speaker guy’s style. His unconsciousness is loud music. Mine is contempt. Different packaging. Same lack of freedom.
Keeping Clarity Without Feeding Disgust
The aversive energy does not have to disappear. It can become clarity. It can become humor. It can become firm boundaries. It can become better planning. It can become paying extra for quiet. It can become leaving before the mob. It can become choosing the edge of the crowd instead of the center. It can become social commentary, therapy, writing, podcasting, and standards. It can even become compassion when I remember that most people are simply identified with their own little world.
Maybe that is the core of public fuckery: everyone is living from inside their own movie. The speaker guy is starring in Beach Party: Main Character Edition. The influencer is starring in Sunset Goddess. The airport guy is starring in Why Is This Happening To Me? The slow walkers are starring in Vacation Stroll. I am starring in The Last Competent Man Alive.
It is funny until it becomes a prison.
I think I am an aversive temperament with some grasping for competence and control. I want things to be orderly, efficient, thoughtful, skillful, fair, and aware. Those are decent values. The sickness enters when I demand that public life conform to them before I allow myself peace.
Buddhism is asking something brutal of me here. It is asking me to stop making my peace conditional on the end of chaos. I can still have preferences, standards, boundaries, and judgments. I can still leave the beach early, avoid holiday Walmart, skip cruises, use noise-canceling earbuds, pay for convenience, sit near exits, and build a life with less exposure to mass-human stupidity. That is wisdom. And when I inevitably encounter unconscious behavior, I practice seeing it without fusing with it.
The Walmart story gives me some hope because it shows I am not only my contempt. I was furious, judgmental, disgusted, and aggressive inside. Then I behaved generously. That does not make me saintly. It means there was enough space between impulse and action to practice.
Maybe that is the realistic version of spiritual growth for someone like me. I may never become the guy who floats through Walmart radiating loving-kindness toward every barefoot Apple Pay disaster in front of me. I can become the guy who notices the rage, keeps his conduct clean, maybe even does something decent, and then laughs later at how insane his own mind got.
The text says our temperament is to be understood, not eliminated. I can work with that.
I do not need to become a different species. I need to stop treating my aversion as revelation. Sometimes it is useful information. Sometimes it is an attack. Sometimes it is old conditioning. Sometimes it is accurate. Sometimes it is dramatic. Often it is all of that at once.
The question I am left with is simple and uncomfortable: can I keep the clarity without feeding the disgust? Because if I lose clarity, I become passive and dishonest. If I feed disgust, I become hard and alone. The middle path for an aversive person is probably this: see clearly, act wisely, release quickly. That is the practice.
