7 Ways to Deal With Difficult People

Difficult people are like the termites of the human spirit. They can be eating away at the tender parts of you for months on end before you notice, and then, suddenly, at a work meeting or a family dinner, you lose it. You might scream something unkind or have a temper tantrum much like the two-year-old on Nanny 911, or even do something drastic like start binge drinking again after a few years of sobriety. Unfortunately, living on earth as a homo sapien requires dealing with other homo sapiens — unless you want to isolate yourself and watch Dr. Phil all day long. So having some techniques in mind, especially during the holidays and other times of vulnerability, can help you arrest their damage before your structure crumbles.

1. Identify Your Landing Pads for Difficult People

 

Termites don’t eat healthy wood. Depending on the kind of termite, they either like moist, soft fibers or dry, parched wood. If you think about it, difficult people like to go for the damaged spots as well — not intentionally, of course (most of the time). We all have weak areas: tender patches that haven’t been fully healed from traumatic events or hurtful conversations, or remnants of childhood baggage. Those holes provide the landing pads for difficult people. But if we are aware of our own vulnerabilities, then we can relax around our coworker who degrades us at company meetings, or our brother-in-law who makes fun of our diet — because we know it’s not really about them. It’s about our own insecurities.

The other day, when I was I was fighting through a terrible case of stuck thoughts triggered by a difficult person, it occurred to me that it wasn’t about her at all. A comment she made simply fell into the chasm opened up by my biggest childhood wound that is still rather exposed — that if I don’t “fix” a person, or make her feel good about herself, something terrible is going to happen to me. That was the message I got back when my brain was forming synapses as a kid, so whenever I feel as though I’ve disappointed someone or caused him or her pain, I experience a peculiar kind of anxiety and OCD — remnants of childhood baggage still left in the front hall.

2. Stretch and Breathe Through Your Weak Spots

 

At yoga last week, the instructor told the class that the more difficult the pose, the more we need to do it because the discomfort signals that healing needs to happen. So if you’re experiencing repetitive pain from dealing with a certain person, you could consider your encounters with the annoying sucker as an opportunity to get out a journal and write out WHAT specifically is causing you the pain. Is it the way he says something, the inflection in his voice, how often he says it, or the expression on his face as he’s delivering the grenade? Visit it over and over again in your head, and break it apart. Where, exactly, does your body become uncomfortablee? Do your shoulders lift in tension, and does your neck get stiff? Then, when you identify the hurt — the spot of penetration — breathe through it. Breathe in to a count of five, hold it for two counts, breath out to a count of five, and hold it for two more. Repeat that a few times. You might even try stretching your body in a certain way as you revisit what ticked you off so badly, always continuing to breathe.

3. Visualize Them as Children or Running Water

One technique that helped me a lot when I was in the midst of a two-year suicidal depression and was surrounded by an army of folks who were anti-medication and anti-Western medicine was to visualize them as children. Whenever someone was in the middle of telling me that antidepressants were a cop-out, and depression can only be cured through mind control, I would take a deep breath and visualize my son’s head on that person. I couldn’t expect my two year old to understand the complexities of mood disorders and to say anything intelligent about mental health, right? So visualizing whoever was giving me expert opinions on the Law of Attraction or Scientology as a cute two year old helped mitigate the hurt.

At other times, whenever someone would try to give me opinions about what I was doing wrong in my recovery, I would visualize myself as a water wall, like the famous one in Houston: Whatever babble emerging from the person’s mouth in front of me was water, rushing down my wall. It didn’t change my wall, because my wall was firm. So I could let whatever she had to say run down without altering my essence or getting me too upset.