People seem to talk about wanting to control their emotions. It seems to be generally accepted that if you tend to get unduly angry in certain situations, the proper response is "anger management" where (I presume, or I presume most people assume) you learn to identify when you are angry and learn to either avoid anger triggers or learn to suppress anger or learn to not act on your anger, or some combination of these. I think that this is the wrong approach, that trying to "control" your emotions by learning to ignore them is like trying to "control" pain, especially that of serious injuries, by ignoring it or by learning to avoid triggering it. It is useful, and better than nothing, but the proper response to breaking your arm is not "ignore it until the pain goes away and don't use it in the mean time" but "realign the bones so that they can heal". Pain, in most cases, is an indication that something is wrong, and that something should be done to fix it. Similarly, I think that emotional reactions that seem inappropriate are indications that something is wrong with how you view the world. Most emotions are mediated by our perception of the world (unless physically painful, you do not get upset by the sounds someone is making, but by the meaning behind those sounds, and your emotional reaction to a person making physically painful sounds is different from your reaction to nature making physically painful sounds). In as much as an emotional reaction depends on your perception of the world, you can change your emotional reaction by changing your perception. It is my experience that whenever I think that my emotional reaction is inappropriate, I can eventually find some deficiency in my understanding of the situation, often one directly related to that emotional reaction and to why I think it's inappropriate.