So, you write a Step Four, you discover you're upset not because of how people behave but because they're not behaving in accordance with your script. Fine. Drop the demands, and you're home, right?
Wrong. Yes, you have to drop the demands, but you can't retreat into a hole. You can't let people steal your phone off the restaurant table, punch you in the face, not pay you what they owe you, or get away with all sorts of other things. So, how do you retain a sense of right and wrong, of what it is legitimate to seek and what it is legitimate to avoid, without blowing a gasket or popping a rivet like Victor Meldrew every five minutes?
The answer has two parts.
Firstly, clean out the ego demands and leave yourself only with the legitimate blueprints.
Ego demands: I want to be richer than everyone! I want everything to be under my complete control! I want everyone to like me the whole time!
Drop 'em.
Then you're left with legitimate blueprints.
For instance:
It's OK to want to work with clients who pay me and are reasonably effective, efficient, and harmonious in their collaboration with me.
It's OK to want a pleasant physical environment at home.
It's OK to want relationship with people who are interesting, emotionally mature, boundaried, and placid.
It's OK to want contractors to do a good job.
It's OK to want your broadband to work.
So how do you want those things (and work for their attainment) without getting upset every time something goes wrong?
By pretending you're a credit controller.
I've run finance departments before.
The credit controller reviews the company's debtors, the people who owe the company money, and tracks payments. There is an objective: Customers should pay on time! The situation is monitored, and if they don't, then a process is activated to remind and then pressurise customers to pay. Eventually you sue them, and if necessary enforce the debts. It's not personal. It's not your money. You're just here to do a job. You go home satisfied at the end of the day because you've performed your role well and kept the processes ticking along nicely. Maybe there are no difficult customers. Maybe most are difficult. Maybe it varies. But you're always fine, because you have no skin in the game.
The job is to treat your life like this. You go to God and ask for God's blueprints. What does God want me to do?
For example I run the home for the family. I monitor all sorts of different parameters. I engage suppliers and contractors. I look out for things that go wrong and seek to fix them. But I'm doing it on God's account not mine. I've got a vision of perfection for how things could be, and seek to work towards that, but I'm content simply with discharging my duties well. If projects go well, great. If they don't, great. It's fine. I have no skin in the game. Because ultimately the only thing that matters is my spirit and my relationship with God: am I being a hollow channel for God to work through me?
So I still get to have a blueprints, except they're God's blueprints, and I still get to monitor reality, matching it against those blueprints (albeit not obsessively any more), except I'm detached because my identity, purpose, and security are not tied up in them. So whatever happens is fine by me.