How Do I Deal With Difficult People?

It depends...

I get asked a lot how I deal with people that have their own idiosyncrasies in my life, and I have known many people that have them. Likely, I am one myself, but for me to know for sure, would require me to ask others, and I am probably not going to bother. Instead, it is easier to admit, we all have them. Most frequently, I am asked about people with NPD, and how I interacted with them, but it seemed to me to be a bit too focused in, as there are a lot of people out there that require care to be dealt with, and in some occasions, meanness. So that is what we are going to talk about today.

From the first in my life I had to deal with a difficult person, and that was my grandmother. She didn’t like me, and that suited me just fine. However, keep in mind, this is baby and little Athena. She was not exactly inclined to shift her behavior for anyone, and especially not for some grandmother that would be unhappy regardless. I did give my mother several headaches when it came to this situation, though. My grandmother always felt the need to complain to my mother about my faults and failures. My mom didn’t get along with my grandmother either. She felt the need to “test” my mother, while she and my father were about to get married, in order to see if she was good enough. She wasn’t exactly the most pleasant person.

I don’t have clear memories of dealing with her, but I do recall her complaining about me around the dinner table, about my hair, (it was too short, or too long, depending on the day and her mood), how dirty I got, how I didn’t pay her respect, I didn’t pay attention to her, I was too independent, I was precocious (because I could read at a very early age and somehow that mean… I have no idea what went on in that woman’s head, but for some reason that was bad). I could go on and on, but the dislike for me was pretty significant. Now, keep in mind, I am adopted. Both my sister and I were, and some of you might think, oh, it’s because you were an adopted child. Some people in older generations looked down on such things.

Nope. She loved my sister. She thought she was great, so it wasn’t the adoption thing. It was a me thing. I didn’t care one way or the other about her, but I wasn’t going to be meeting her demands any time soon. My mother could barely keep track of me, let alone change my behavior. Granny could go kick rocks for all I cared. I have no idea if my father ever spoke with her about her constant criticism, but my guess is, no, because it wouldn’t have changed things anyway. She was generally just a mean person. She also used to be in the medical field, so if any of you have ever had that really mean person that shouldn’t be in the business of caring for people, that was her.

Interestingly, I found out years later that my mom loved how much I got under her skin, so that was a nice thing to figure out. She also told me that my total indifference to her criticism helped her not care about when it was directed at her. She realized that Grandmother’s opinion of her was not one that she was all that invested in. She was kind enough to her, being her husband’s mother, but no longer did she take it personally.

Suggestion one to dealing with difficult people. Indifference. They have nothing to do with you, and their problems are theirs to shoulder. Not yours. If they want to be obstinate and difficult, let them. It’s not your mountain to climb. Even if they turn their nastiness toward you, just remember, you are seeing a piece of their misery. It is turned on you for but a moment, but it isn’t something that they can force you to carry. Doing so is a choice.

Next we can get to my ballet Mistress. She wasn’t mean, she was strict and harsh. Though, I imagine that many other dancers found her to be just horrid, her way of being was to push girls in the world of ballet that is very unforgiving if you have any interest in doing it past a hobby. If you are weak, you will fail. Side note, this is one of the many reasons that Black Swan is such a garbage movie. No dancer that unhinged and mentally unwell is going to ever climb the ranks in ballet. Maybe she could have scavenged her way through the corps, but a lead role? Never. She was unreliable, unhinged, and generally not someone that would do well in the ballet environment.

I have mentioned in the past what my Mistress was like. For those that are new here, ballet, back when I was doing it, again it may be different and rather benign now, was not about being friendly with other dancers. I recall in the first class I had, I think I was three, my Mistress sat the class of little girls down, no boys at the time in that class, and said to us:

“This is not a place where you come to make friends that will last your whole life. This is not Little League. You see those girls to your right and on your left? The girls sitting behind you? These are not your friends. You will not play together, you will not spend the night at each other’s houses. These girls are your competition, and don’t you ever forget it.”

This was a difficult speech for a lot of girls. Some cried because they thought they were being yelled at. I didn’t. It made sense to me, so let’s dance. She reduced many a dancer to a hysterical wreck, and then denounced them, saying they had no business in her classes.

A lot of girls washed out, and a lot had serious issues with her methods. I excelled under her. You want me to work harder? I will work harder than that. You want that landing more clean, those fouettés more controlled? Not a problem. It will be perfection by the end of the day. Whatever bar you set, I will exceed it. The harder it is, the better.

A lot of people likely saw her as very mean, but to me, this was not meanness. Perhaps I could see the reasoning behind it, I really don’t remember. I just know that I excel when things are hard and interesting. Hard for the sake of hard does nothing for me, looking at you Dark Souls series. I don’t want to deal with something that is just hard but boring. However, hard and interesting, awesome. Sometimes too awesome, and I push myself way too far because I can, and then deal with consequences.

Suggestion two for dealing with difficult people. Try to see the motivation behind the difficult personality. Outside of ballet, my Mistress was as nice as can be. She just had no time for unserious students that wanted to wear frilly tutus and pretend that they’re a dancer. She was there to create dancers, and dancers don’t shirk, they don’t cry, and they don’t dare bleed on her sprung floor.

Have you ever had someone that desires attention so much that they will tell you other people’s life stories but tell them as though they are the one who experienced it? I am sure everyone has. Have you ever had one of them tell you your own story that you told them, but they are now ascribing it to someone else that they know, but really don’t, because the person doesn’t exist? I have. This was a person that I certainly knew felt the desperate need to embellish themselves and look a certain way in people’s minds. He shifted through personality traits, nationalities, jobs, cultures, all in the hopes of being interesting and the center of attention. For reference, this is a short list of some of the things that he claimed:

Native American

A ghost hunter

Japanese

Musician

Energy vampire

Conspiracy theorist

Regular vampire

A werecat

Artist

Let me be clear, he wasn’t difficult in the sense that he was mean. Not in any way was he. He was quite an affable guy, which is why he was a friend of mine. I didn’t care about his embellishments or fantasies. None of those things were why he and I got on.

He was funny, and interesting to be around. However, if he couldn’t ascribe a story to himself, he would in turn make someone up, and apply that story to them. It was their weird habit that he had. He would make up a person that he thought somehow made him more interesting because he knew that person, and then either make up stories for that person, or take events that happened to actual people (in this case, me) and relay that story with the made up person as the protagonist. It seems that he thought that knowing important people, or interesting people, made him interesting.

So, one day, I am sitting in my living room, and he begins regaling me with the story of his newfound friend, I have no idea what her name supposedly was, so we will call her Miranda, and as he’s talking, I know pretty well immediately that he is telling me my story. I let him talk, made sure to ask details that I knew already, obviously, which of course, he confirmed because those details were there in my story, and when he was done, I looked him steadily in the eyes and said, “Interesting. Maybe I should meet Miranda. It is so strange to meet someone that had the exact same thing happen to them. What are the odds?” And I smiled, holding his gaze and watching him panic internally.

“You guys should meet,” he stammered. “I think you two would get along really well.”

Funny, after that I never heard about Miranda again, and his tall tales became a minimal distraction. I would only hear about them tangentially from others from time to time, but somehow he neglected to tell me about his amazing adventures and incredible friends.

Suggestion three on dealing with difficult people. Know when to call them out. If you are going to entertain someone like this, there likely will be a time that you will have to be direct with them that their internal fantasy world doesn’t overwrite the real world, and they should remember:

If wisdom’s ways, you wisely seek,

Five things to observe with care,

To whom you speak,

Of whom you speak,

And how, and when, and where.

~Caroline Lake Ingalls

Next difficult person would be my ex-brother-in-law. For those of you that know him, you know he’s on the lower end of the human spectrum in terms of value. For those of you that don’t, he was, and only “was” because he is currently in prison so he isn’t capable any longer of being, an abuser who tortured a child to death over months. Simply, not a good person. He and I rarely interacted, but when we first did, he thought he could charm me. That fell very flat, and because it didn’t work, I was suddenly someone that couldn’t be trusted. Whatever, dude, I didn’t really talk to my sister anyway. It wasn’t like I was planning on interfering. My sister was older than me, she can make her own decisions. However, when I did have to be in the middle of their nonsense, because my sister called me hysterical because he had been hitting her, and she had run, I went to help her. It was the only time she asked for my help. Ask, and my family will likely receive, but she hadn’t up until this point.

She was hiding in a park, and I got there just after he had found her. He was thinking that he was going to take her back home, and I was like, that ain’t happening, dude. She’s coming with me. He tried to grab her arm, so I stepped between them and said, by all means, try, but he would be going through me first. He and I locked gazes, and he started screaming and cursing at me. I just stared at him. He threw up his arms and stalked off, still yelling. I turned back to my sister and told her to get in the car. She scurried to do so and we drove away.

Suggestion three of dealing with difficult people. When you have to be the baddie, be the baddie and don’t show weakness. It’s the same mentality as, when you are walking alone at night, walk as though you know exactly where you are going and are going there quickly. It is about how you appear to the other person.

Next will be someone that I knew that had a very unhealthy fixation on me. To the point that he had stolen some of my clothing to do good lord knows what with. This was easy for him, as he was a roommate, so he had access to my living space. He was also a person that had a habit of pretending to be much more impressive than he was. Granted, he was pretty intelligent, but he was sort of like a child prodigy that fizzled out before he hit sixteen. He was really smart, so he thought he could coast his whole life. It didn’t help that his mother was totally doting on him and did everything for him. His father was distant, and incredibly critical. He did not turn out with the most balanced of personalities.

When he moved in, I expected him to do his share of the work around the house. Keep in mind, this dude was in his twenties, but as I mentioned he had mommy do everything for him. First, he tried to get out of doing the work. His job was the kitchen. That didn’t fly with me, and I would go in and tell him to get to work. When he begrudgingly did so, he did not move things in order to clean under them. He said that he thought that it was already clean. You know, things were sitting there, so it was clean. I would take him in and show him that crumbs don’t care about minor obstacles, and even though I could wipe up the dust and crumbs, he still didn’t see it.

Willful ignorance or having the eyesight of a child who, “just doesn’t see dirt” doesn’t fly in my house, and he was indeed living in my house. There was no getting away with anything with me, and he was informed of that with prejudice. He didn’t like that much, but as it turned out, on top of having an unhealthy fixation of me, he was also terrified of me. I have an air about me that says, you will do this as I have directed, or, consequences. No one seems to want to know what consequences are, and there are few people that are immune from them.

When it came to this person, and remember that this is a very truncated version of these events as this post is already long enough to get my spell check to complain, and it is now sitting in the corner refusing to work because it’s “too long”, it came down to a few things. He was an obstinate child who believed himself to be special, had very weak self-esteem that he then made the poor decisions to balance that self-esteem on my opinion of him, who didn’t want to be responsible for anything. This is not a mentality that is going to go well with me.

A quick story. I made a pasta dish, and when I cook, I do so for the house, not just me and my Significant Other. This was a lemon, artichoke, sundried tomato, cream pasta, with chicken. It was a tasty dish, but wouldn’t you know it, he didn’t like sundried tomatoes. “Next time”, he suggested, “maybe put less of them in.” This was not a question, this was a statement that he seemed to think would alter my behavior. I am guessing that this is exactly what it did with his mother.

That… does not work with me. Some months later, I made the same dish, and this time he said, “I thought I told you not to put so many sun dried tomatoes in this.”

Not a wise choice. I said coldly, without a hint of kindness, “I don’t cook for you. I cook for me. I make it how I like it, not how you like it. If you don’t like sun dried tomatoes, you can pick them out. Or, and here’s a suggestion for you. Don’t eat it. Do not presume to tell me how I will make something. Ever.”

“I was just trying to be helpful,” he whined.

“You want to be helpful? Go clean up the kitchen, and stop complaining when you don’t get your way. You’re not six, and I am not your mommy.”

He shrunk away and went to do the remaining dishes that I hadn’t gotten to.

Suggestion four of dealing with difficult people. Don’t bend to their bullsh*t. No one can dictate your life to you, nor should you adjust yourself to meet what they want. They either like what they get, or they can lump off somewhere else.

Now I will go into more generalizations instead of direct examples. People that are really, really nice to me? When I was younger, I knew this meant that they wanted my attention and if they wanted my attention, that meant that they would do for me. Whatever I wanted often. I got all kinds of stuff from people that just wanted me to look their way. Be them people who wanted to be friends, or people that wanted more from me. I could make them jump through hoops, and when I was no longer interested in dealing with them, I would simply be cold to them. Their feelings never made an appearance in my mind, nor did I think that there was a reason to not take whatever they were willing to offer.

Now that I am older, I have found that bothering with these types is just an inconvenience. I don’t have the desire to deal with the fallout. People can be very clingy, and that isn’t really all that fun on my end. It’s more eye rolling. To answer some of your questions, yes I knew I was taking advantage of them, and no, I did not, nor do I now, care about that. I simply have little interest in the emotional noise of it all, and aren’t interested in dealing with people that think that it was going to be reciprocal.

I still have them come about. I have had people tell me that they would love to just have me live with them, and they would do all the work, pay all the bills, all I would have to stay home and write. I am not a gilded cage kind of girl, so no. I have been offered jobs, offers to move to different places so I would be closer to the person offering, I have had people ask me for my eggs, or to bear the children of my Significant Other and I because we simply have to have children. Not doiing so would be a tragedy for humanity… (long and totally bizarre story, and yes, they really did say that). I have had a lot of clingy people that would very much like some sort of connection or relationship with me. My response to those people?

At first, cooly professional. I don’t engage any of their fantasies, and tell them I am not interested. If they don’t get the hint, and they never do, then it’s time to be direct. This is often taken as meanness, and that’s fine with me.

Suggestion five for dealing with difficult people. Their expectations have nothing to do with you. They can want whatever it is that they want, all they want, that doesn’t mean you have to entertain it. There is no reason for you to prop up their delusions, nor any reason to be kind to a person having them. Perhaps that isn’t true in the psychological sense. Maybe it does lasting damage to their ego, but frankly I don’t give a dinkus damn, and you shouldn’t either. What someone else expects of you shouldn’t dictate what you decide for yourself. How nice for them for wanting, how nice for you to say, not happening.

This is the first round of difficult people. There will be more next week.