The A-holes I Know
It seems to strike a chord because no matter where you work or live or play — it’s impossible to avoid jerks and assholes.
We try all kinds of strategies for dealing with them too. We shout back. We bend over backwards trying to make them happy. We avoid them whenever possible and sometimes we leave them behind forever.
The only problem is that there is nowhere that you can go where you won’t bump into another jerk. At some point, you have to know how to deal with difficult people.
The first step is to understand where they are coming from and trying to cultivate some compassion for the challenging people in your life. At the very least, it’s easy to see how they are suffering on some level. Happy people don’t feel the need to attack and bully others to get their way. A good way to develop some compassion is to check out Byron Katie’s Judge Your Neighbour worksheet and the videos on her website thework.com.
The next step is to practice (and it does take practice) setting limits. Often people will feel anxiety because they want to find a way to talk to their bully that will ensure a positive outcome. There are certainly techniques to increase the chances of a conversation not going off of the rails (see Nonviolent Communication by Marshall Rosenberg). However, most of the time you’ll have to accept that the other person won’t be all that thrilled with your newly discovered backbone.
In fact, sometimes the bullying can escalate when you stop playing their game (this is called a response burst by us behavioural psychologists) as they increase their efforts to get their way. The confidence you need to stand up for yourself in the face of this aggressive energy can take some time to develop. The most important thing to remember is that fighting aggression with aggression never works.
Instead, you need to respond confidently and peacefully. I often suggest watching the movie Gandhi to see how the concept of nonviolent resistance that Gandhi used to gain independence from the British could also be used on an individual level. Gandhi cared as much for the British as he did for India and he did not want to employ techniques that would end up harming everyone.
By staying calm but not cooperating, it’s like you are holding a mirror up to the other person’s behaviour. If you get hooked in and start screaming back, it allows the other person to justify their own aggressive actions.
It’s also important to have compassion. Otherwise you if you are calm, but smug, you could end up infuriating the other person even more.
Like I said, it takes practice. However, it’s the only way I know that we can begin to have peaceful interpersonal relationships and eventually a more harmonious world.