Seinfeld Star “Loses It”

“Shattered” is the way Seinfeld star Michael Richards describes how he feels about his outburst in reaction to being heckled by members of his stand-up audience. Screaming racial abuse on stage, captured on video and spread via the internet, has caused him deep embarrassment, for which he’s since been apologizing profusely to everyone from Jesse Jackson to Al Sharpton.
Richards joins a spate of people of fame who have been suffering from foot in mouth disease of late, ranging from Senator John Kerry to New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin and neighboring Jefferson parish Sheriff Harry Lee. But while these others “misspoke,” Richards truly lost it.
Why did this famous comedian act so inappropriately? Didn’t he know what the consequences would be?
“The way this came through me was like a freight train,” Richards said on Jesse Jackson’s radio show.
I can identify, can’t you? My guess is that most of us know the embarrassment of watching an ugly aspect of ourselves roar to life, causing us to feel like we want to crawl under a table. We wish we could take back our words but the damage has been done.
In The Presence Process, author Michael Brown highlights how we frequently react to life’s situations instead of responding. An emotional reaction is worlds apart from a creative, appropriate response.
In a reaction, you lose your head. When you respond, you use your head.
When someone triggers an emotional reaction in us, they are touching on some unresolved aspect of our childhood. The person is reflecting back to us a hidden part of us that’s unconsciously driving our behavior.
To some extent, everyone lives in reaction to people and events. “We all have our learned dramas that we automatically perform whenever certain emotional buttons are pushed,” says Michael Brown in The Presence Process. The trick is to trace our reactive patterns, until we source them in the learned behavior of childhood. When we make the patterns conscious, we can free ourselves from their grip.
You might wonder whether Michael Richards was revealing his true feelings about blacks, or whether he was screaming things he didn’t really mean because he was angry. Here, The Presence Process is enormously comforting. Michael Brown shows us that, in our deepest being, none of us is racist. On the contrary, we are each a part of one another, if we but knew it.
Beneath our emotional reactions, however practiced and ingrained they may be, at our center we feel a deep love for each other. At heart we are, without exception, each other’s champions.
No matter what you may have said or done in a moment of unconscious behavior, you are in essence a beautiful person who seeks only to love and be loved. When you behave in an ugly manner, it’s not coming from your center. You are quite different from the angry, hateful person you seem to be when you are caught up in an emotional reaction.
Michael Richards’ tirade doesn’t reflect who he truly is. Equally, when you lose it, you aren’t being who you really are. A freight train is roaring through you. Through The Presence Process, you can learn how to identify the triggers and prevent such behavior from happening.
Equally, those hurt by Richards’ words––or by our words or actions––are caught up in a reaction if they can’t forgive what was said or done. It doesn’t matter whether an apology is truly genuine, or just expedient. To remain in reaction to the hurt is to be guilty of the same emotional immaturity as the one who perpetrated the hurt.
Forgiveness comes easily when we recognize that we are all part of a Oneness that pervades creation. We understand that none of us is the reactive person we’ve learned to be. Each of us is a reflection of the divine—no matter how deeply emotionally reactive behavior has been layered over our true selves across the years.
Take responsibility for your words and actions—learn response-ability. It’s never been easier than it is now, with the wonderful insights Michael Brown shares in The Presence Process.