Dealing With Difficult People

Part Two...

There are so many ridiculous people in the world. People of all walks of life can be difficult, and everyone can have a bad day. When you have someone having a bad day, all it really takes is kindness, but how to be kind to an individual can depend on their circumstances. The best method is one I learned from my Significant Other, and Jess, and that is to be, or at least appear to be, genuinely interested. This can backfire for me, however, because people already want to talk to me, and acting interested in what is going on in their lives, might take up a few hours of mine. It can be a real risk of my time.

Let’s discuss someone in customer service that you can just hear is having a rough day. You can hear the vocal strain, they might be very blunt in their responses, they may even sigh without realizing that they are doing so. When they tell you it’s going to be a moment, letting them know that you aren’t in a hurry, and that it isn’t a problem, will often lessen that annoyance with the world. As the conversation progresses, being able to make them smile, laugh, or just take that deep breath that they have needed for their entire shift, it really can make all the difference in the world. You will be the customer that they think of as a joy to deal with, and they will do what they can to make your experience a good one. Turning their day around can make your day far better than where it began.

What about people that are difficult, because they want you to engage with them, in a very specific way. There was a guy that I knew that was a sympathy farmer. He wanted people to give him, “Oh my god, how terrible. I am so sorry you had to go through that,” responses, regardless of who you were. The payoff was what mattered to him. We’ll call this dude, Dave. Dave had a whole system of rollout for his sob story. He never hit you with it all at once. That would cut down on the number of, “I’m so sorry that happened to you. Poor baby(s),” that he got. No, no, no, no, that wouldn’t do at all.

He would first hit you with the dead brother that he had.

Then, the abuse that they both went through.

Then, how the brother died.

Then how he had to go to court with his own family to rescue his brother’s vehicle from being sold by his unscrupulous father.

Now, don’t get me wrong. His story sucks. It sounds like a rough life, and he does have people that will back up that he is telling the truth. However, it wasn’t that he was delivering the information because it was simply factual, and nothing more. Nope, he was delivering it for effect coupled with his unwavering stare that asked, or begged, for your responses. I understand that acknowledging his difficulties is the neurotypical standard thing to do, so I will be kind about it once, but that is the extent of it. After that, if I hear the same story again and again, then I start to have less of an interest in entertaining that emotional need.

Also, it bears mentioning that my friend, who works with people that have been through horrifying abuse, has a policy with all of his staff. You do not indulge the history lesson. All the people have terrible stories, of course, but there are those that have learned that they will get positive emotional payoffs by telling their story to anyone who will listen, but especially people that aren’t used to hearing such things.

It, of course, gains them sympathy, and that is why they do it. It keeps them in a loop, where they use the trauma to feel like someone cares. People care, but it isn’t a healthy way to deal with their emotions. They have to learn to interact with people in a more normal way, so everyone is instructed to not encourage that sort of interaction.

So, back to Dave. After hearing about his deceased brother, I would counter with the story about my sister, who is also dead. Whatever the situation, I had a story that was similar. I never did it as a one up kind of situation. Instead, I would simply mention it in conversation. He noticed that he didn’t get the emotional response that he got from others, but that in no way stopped him from trying. Over time, I ceased giving him any response other than, Umm-hmm, or, I know, you mentioned, all while having absence of affect. In other words, a totally neutral expression and no facial response, and flat tone. Had he continued, he didn’t, he would have gotten the annoyance starting to thread in.

This sort of person leads into another type, and that is the one that wants your attention more than anything, and they will do whatever they must in order to gain it. I find these sorts quite annoying, especially because they often come locked and loaded with compliments. Compliments mean very little to me, so when they are used to gain my favor, it will have the opposite effect on me. I will become wary of that person. I don’t have the ability to feel trust anyway, but this will make it obvious to me that this person wants something from me, and whatever it is, I am disinclined to give it to them.

If someone is complimentary to you, that’s one thing, but if they gush over you, they want something. It might be emotional, it might be physical, it might be financial, but whatever they are after, it isn’t something that they can get out of you without their little song and dance. If you see a stupid little birdy making a fool out of themselves in order to convince you of your amazing qualities, remove them from your presence immediately. They are doing to you what works on them. They want to be thought of as the most important, beautiful, intelligent, awesomest person in the world, so they will tell you all of that about you, because that is their currency. Unless you want to meet the other side of that, stay away from people like that, no matter how amazing they make you feel. It’s all fluff, and none of it has substance.

Then you have the people that are nice, until they aren’t. This is the other side of the person above. You fell for the lie, and now they expect you to pay them back by acknowledging them as the master of the universe. When you don’t perform to expectations, they will then turn on you. People often describe this as “devaluing” and associate it with NPD, but really this is a habit that a lot of people have when their ego is hurt. They will turn against you and try to emotionally hurt you. I can understand why this might be devastating for someone, especially when that person might be your significant other, or someone close. It is something that you have to step away from the behavior in order to see through it and respond in a way that doesn’t give them what they want.

For a psychopath, this behavior simply triggers the, all right, no need to be nice in any way, any longer. That is the beginning of the end for these types. They rely on their insults and behavior to have an impact, and that impact should be emotional devastation. When it isn’t, they lose their higher ground position, and don’t know how to deal with emotionless fallout. They want an emotional engagement, but what they get is brutal honesty about exactly what I think about them. I tend to keep things to myself. We all have flaws, and pointing them out tends to be socially untoward. Also, I am supposed to have my feelings hurt. I am supposed to apologize. I am supposed to be the broken one. That is not how this is going to go. I am going to turn them inside out, and they are not going to like it.

When the times call for it, I am brutal. This is not my way of saying, fear me, you mortals. Instead, it is acknowledging, when the time comes for that interaction, I will go into it with the intention of breaking that person, and I do. It isn’t something that I seek out to be able to do, but when it is appropriate, it will happen. I have no time for someone throwing their emotional insecurities onto me. I also have no interest in their ego needs, either. This is true regardless of whether they are healthy or unhealthy. I will make a modicum of effort for those I am invested in, but where I am not, I have zero tolerance for tantrums, which is exactly how I see that behavior.

I think that the reason that this works so well for me is that I don’t care what they think. Whatever insult, whine, or complaint that they have, it falls on the ears that have no interest in their opinion. It isn’t as though there is any constructive criticism in their insults, and even if, by some random chance they did, they haven’t exactly presented themselves as reliable deliverers of information.

When dealing with a person like this, ask yourself this. Why have you given them power over your opinion of yourself? They surely haven’t earned it, and clearly aren’t a good steward of your soul, so what is the point of granting them any power to sway your self-esteem? Don’t allow them to damage you with what they should never have had in the first place.

What about dealing with a difficult person that doesn’t mean to be difficult. Someone with dementia would be an excellent example of this. When someone has dementia, it can change who they are dramatically. People that were mean their whole lives can become kind out of nowhere, and people who were kind can become bitter and angry. However, what I am referring to is simply the loss of memory and how you interact with that person. It can be hard to not get frustrated and lose patience with that person when they repeat the same story over and over, or they forget what you said literally a moment ago. It can be even harder when this is a person that is close to you and this is new to how they operate in the world.

My advice is to meet them where they are. So what if they don’t recall what you said. Say it again. It takes little effort. So what if they tell you the same thing over and over. That’s something that they remember, and likely that is a source of comfort in a brain that is betraying them on a constant basis. You may be tired, but there isn’t an off-ramp for dementia, and the end result is the person disappearing first, and then dying. It is a hard process. It is one that can drag you down with it.

Having a here and now attitude is exceptionally helpful. Allowing that person to repeat the memories that haven’t fled them, or reminding them what needs to be done, or what was said, is a moment in time of a journey that may leave you wishing you had listened to that story the thousandth time it was told. The intention of that person was never to create frustration. It is the only way they can interact with the world after there is a great deal stolen from them.

If there is a specific type of situation that you want to know how I might handle it, ask me in the comments and I will do my best to describe the hypothetical response that I would have.