From New Year parties to new jobs, we can encounter difficult people almost anywhere. But what makes a person so difficult, and what is the best way to deal with them?
In this article, we’ll address these important questions, analysing the behaviour of difficult people to find strategies we can use to combat it.
What is a difficult person?
The word ‘difficult’ can be subjective. That friend that forever riles you may be a big hit with the others in your group; or that colleague that always pushes your buttons may have no such effect on the rest of the office.
On the other hand, there are some people that most of us would agree are difficult, be it argumentative, arrogant, bossy or some other behaviour that we would concur marks them as being far from easy-going.
Between these two extremes, we find people of varying shades of difficultness. Some of them we can tolerate; others leave us incandescent with rage.
As we all tend to see people differently, it’s probably easier to ask ‘What is difficult behaviour?’ In answer to that, most of us might come up with similar examples: that pompous supervisor that looks down on us; the gruff bus driver that barks at us when we ask him a question; the sullen waitress whose excessive moodiness makes us fear the very soup she’s serving us, lest she’s used it as a vehicle of expression for a lifetime’s worth of resentment.
So what is it that makes people difficult?
It can be helpful to see people as icebergs.
The face we present to the world (the tip of the iceberg) represents a tiny part of who we really are. If we were working as a barista, for example, we might struggle to pass an exam that tested us on our knowledge of the stranger we were serving in our café if all we had to go on was ‘A hot Americano, please’. Perhaps we’d get one point for describing them as polite. But even that may not be so accurate if it turned out they were rude to every other barista in town. Beneath their polite beverage request might lie a seething mass of emotions so complex and unnervingly troubling that, had we had an inkling of its existence, we might have felt thankful they’d only come in for a coffee.
Not everyone gets to see our whole iceberg. Revealing ourselves in our entirety may be something we reserve for close friends and partners. Perhaps we never reveal our true selves, always keeping certain aspects of our personality hidden.
So what’s going on with difficult people’s icebergs? What is it under the surface that could explain their difficult behaviour?
Monkey see, monkey do
If you’d been brought up with a pack of wolves, you might think nothing of journeying into town on all fours, though this might raise a few eyebrows among those whose formative years had been largely wolf-free. In short, you wouldn’t know any different. Similarly, that pompous supervisor might have been raised by a mother even more pompous than she is; that bus driver that likes to bark at his passengers might have had a father that barked at him; and that sullen waitress that looks capable of poisoning our soup might have a history of sullenness in her family, and possibly an inherited unsuitability to be around soup.
Life haters
Some people are difficult because they hate their life, which affects their dealings with others. Some of these life-haters may be unaware of the effect that their unhappiness is having on us, while others may have made a conscious decision to convey how unhappy they feel. By behaving badly towards us, they’re almost willing us to discover the cause of their bad behaviour. It’s as if they’re shouting from the rooftops, ‘This is how much I hate my life!’
Self-haters
Some people are difficult because they hate themselves, which can see them spiralling out of control: their self-hatred makes them difficult, which causes other people to dislike them, which then makes them hate themselves even more, thereby intensifying their difficult behaviour.
Now that we’ve looked at some reasons for difficult behaviour, let’s turn our attention to what we should do when faced with it.
The Pause and Compose strategy
When we encounter difficult behaviour, one option we have is to fight back, but this can be problematic. We might think that by giving as good as we got, we will shock the aggressor into ceasing their difficult behaviour, but that may not be the case. They may even be pleased that you’ve taken the bait, happy to reap the therapeutic rewards that a fight invariably gives them. Some people spend their whole lives honing their difficult behaviour, which might have turned them into expert fighters, so you have you accept that by going head to head with a difficult person, there’s a chance you could lose the fight.
An alternative response is to do the opposite: stay calm, breathe deeply and focus on remaining unaffected by whatever behaviour is being displayed. If it helps, you can try counting to ten as a way of calming down. By refusing to be drawn into a fight, you send out the powerful message that you are above all forms of provocation. Denied a reaction to fuel their hostility, the difficult person may then withdraw.
The Behaviour Analysis strategy
One reason we react defensively when we experience difficult behaviour is that we tend to question our own actions and worth: What did I do to make them behave like that? I must be at fault somehow. We question ourselves because we remember occasions as children when we were treated in a similar way: perhaps a parent scolded us or a teacher told us to be quiet. Regardless of whether we deserved the censure, we learned to associate it with behaviour we blamed on ourselves. As adults, we may instinctively jump to the same conclusion.
It’s important, therefore, to stop those thoughts from taking shape in the face of difficult behaviour. An effective method is to immediately analyse the actions you’re witnessing. Ask yourself why the person would behave that way and what thoughts, emotions or situations might have led to this behaviour. In analysing their behaviour, we might eventually conclude that we’re not in fact at fault but are the victim of an unprovoked attack. This should quell any defensiveness within us.
The Internal Commentary strategy
Once you have analysed the difficult behaviour, follow it up with an internal commentary describing that behaviour in detail. Commenting on the behaviour to yourself will help to consolidate your findings and absolve you of all responsibility for the difficult person’s actions.
Let’s say, for example, that a stressed colleague snaps at you. The internal commentary for this might be ‘You’re taking your frustrations out on me.’ As another example, if your boss chuckles condescendingly at you for what he sees as your lack of knowledge, the commentary for this could be ‘You’re patronising me.’
When we analyse and internally comment on the difficult person’s behaviour, something rather magical happens. As well as removing us from the equation, an analysis and internal commentary serve as a useful focusing exercise, crowding out any negative thoughts we may have formed in response to the difficult behaviour and forcing us to look logically at the situation we’re in, rather than being swept away with our emotions. This can be very empowering, as the difficult person, if observing us, will notice that something’s going on behind our eyes that’s a direct threat to their plan to get the better of us. They will feel found out, as though a mask has been ripped from their face. Exposed in this way, they will likely decide to make a hasty retreat.
The Inner Child strategy
We often view people in a black-and-white way, because society paints the world in those colours. Society tells us that children stop being children when they reach the age of 18 and that, from that point on, they are adults. So when, as adults, we have encounters with other adults, we expect them to behave as we think adults would or should do. Whenever an adult’s behaviour falls short of the standard we’ve set for them, we can become frustrated, disappointed and angry.
A less stressful way of viewing things might be to avoid seeing childhood and adulthood as two distinct states. Rather, we could imagine that each of us has a child within us and that each inner child is at a different stage of development, according to their own circumstances. In the same way that we make allowances for children, we may be more tolerant of difficult adults if we put them in a child-like category. From feeling annoyed or disgusted at the difficult person, we might start to be more understanding and may even begin to pity them for having missed out on something that has put them at a behavioural disadvantage.
The Acceptance strategy
We can think of life as a giant race. There are all kinds of runners in the race, of all creeds, colours and religions, and all have their different personalities, based on their own traits, values and background. This great diversity means that everyone behaves very differently. Even people whose behaviour is of a similar standard might behave in different ways according to the situation they find themselves in.
In fact, we can think of that race as being split into lots of different little races, with each runner participating in more than one race at the same time. Each runner in each race is in a different place. Someone might be leading the way in the kindness race but lagging behind in the ego race; another might be a frontrunner in the friendliness race but a straggler in the sincerity race. It means that nobody is good at everything and that we all have our own stuff to work on. If we can look at the world in this way, we may have a greater degree of tolerance towards people we see as difficult.
The Role Model strategy
Generally speaking, people can teach us one of two things: how to be and act and how not to be and act. We must decide for ourselves which of the two lessons we can learn each time. There may even be times when it’s both, given that few people are wholly bad and few people are wholly good. To appreciate the extent to which we can learn from others, we might recall an occasion when someone’s behaviour stuck with us because it had an effect on us in some way. Perhaps we admired the way they handled a situation, and we took something away from the experience that helped us handle similar situations of our own.
In the same way, difficult people can learn from us. By showing difficult people a type of behaviour that they may not have considered before or may not even have been familiar with, we can act as their teacher in that moment. They may look back and remember how kindly and calmly we dealt with them during that time they were difficult with us and, at some point in the future, may be sufficiently inspired to change. In turn, we can feel good about having done something to aid their development and, ultimately, improve their life.
The Learning Game strategy
Encounters with difficult people can be tense and stressful, and it can sometimes be hard to prevent conflicts with them from escalating into something much uglier. Wherever possible, try to view the situation from a wider perspective. Ask yourself what the encounter is giving you: more patience and understanding perhaps, or a greater insight into how people think and behave. Try to see these encounters as mini lessons in life. It may be challenging to find the good in a situation that has left you reeling from the experience, but by distancing yourself from the event, you will be able to see it in a more positive light, making your own individual path through life not only so much easier but a lot more interesting and meaningful.
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