My client Francine's husband had started behaving oddly. "I'll do something ordinary, like offer to check his e-mail for him, and he'll react as if I've killed a child," she said. Another client, Selma, was a sunny optimist—except when her sister Eve called to complain about life; by the time they hung up, Selma was always exhausted and depressed. Meanwhile, my friend Pamela was getting blindsided at a public-speaking workshop. "I gave a speech that went really well," she told me, "and then this other woman got up and spent her whole speech mocking everything I'd done wrong."

Let's call it emotional mugging: You're going along minding your own business, and suddenly, when you least expect it, you're faced with a shocking attack on your mood or peace of mind. Being emotionally mugged can be crippling, but because the damage is so often invisible, few of us are ever taught self-defense. Time to change that. You're probably aware that the Asian martial arts, with their deft approach to handling attack, are popular practices for warding off physical muggers. Well, karate-do ("the way of the empty hand") and bushi-do ("the way of the warrior") have a psychological equivalent I call emo-do (pronounced "ee-moh-doh"): the way of the emotional master.

An Ounce of Prevention...
Like all opportunistic criminals, emotional muggers target people who wander around bad neighborhoods. The best way to become a victim is to turn your own mind into such a place—a place filled with self-hatred, unfair criticism, and gloomy predictions. This kind of setting not only attracts muggers but can leave you so emotionally tapped out that you turn to psychological crime yourself.

By contrast, those who follow emo-do create an inner space of clean, clear self-confidence. To cultivate such an environment, you must keep three brave commitments. First, vow never to deliberately create suffering for yourself or others. (If you can't do this, count on being mugged frequently. There's no honor among thieves.) Second, always own your mistakes and do your best to correct them. Third, forgive yourself when your best isn't good enough. Keeping these commitments creates deep strength that scares off most emotional muggers. And should some misguided thug ambush you anyway, emo-do will help you launch a powerful defense.

If You Are Attacked
My former karate teacher, Jay Cool (yes! really!), used to study muggers' patterns to help develop counterattack strategies for the Phoenix police. "There are only so many ways to assault someone," Jay says. "Every mugger uses some version of a few basic approaches." This is also true of emotional attackers, and knowing their strategy helps you thwart them. Here are six types of emotional mugger—and, for each, the commensurate emo-do response.

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