by Lori Deschene
“Judge nothing, you will be happy. Forgive everything, you will be happier. Love everything, you will be happiest.” ~Sri Chinmoy
I love her to death, but it’s draining to talk to her.
Every time I call this friend of mine, I know what I’m in for: a
half-hour rant about everything that’s difficult, miserable or unfair.
Sometimes she focuses on the people she feels have wronged her and
other times she explores the general hopelessness of life. She never
calls to see how I’m doing, and she rarely listens to what’s going on in
my life for more than a minute before shifting the focus back to
herself.
I tell myself I call because I care, but sometimes I wonder if I have ulterior motives–to pump up my ego offering
good advice, or even to feel better about my own reality.
I’m no saint, and if there’s one thing I know well, we only do things
repeatedly if we believe there’s something in it for us. Even if that
something is just to feel needed.
I thought about this the other day when a reader wrote to me with an
interesting question: “How do you offer compassion to someone who
doesn’t seem to deserve it?”
While I believe everyone deserves compassion, I understand what we
meant after reading more. She went on to describe her offensive, sexist,
racist boss who emotionally exhausts everyone around him. He sounds a
lot more hateful than my friend, who is, sadly, just terribly depressed.
But these people have one thing in common: boundless negative energy that ends up affecting everyone around them.
So today I started thinking about how we interact with negative or
difficult people. People who seem chronically critical, belligerent,
indignant, angry, or just plain rude.
When someone repeatedly drains everyone around them, how do you
maintain a sense of compassion without getting sucked into their doom?
And how do you act in a way that doesn’t reinforce their negativity–and
maybe even helps them?
Here’s what I’ve come up with:
1. Resist the urge to judge or assume.
It’s hard to offer someone
compassion
when you assume you have them pegged. He’s a jerk. She’s a malcontent.
He’s an–insert other choice noun. Even if it seems unlikely someone will
wake up one day and act differently we have to remember it
is possible.
When you think negative thoughts, it comes out in your body language.
Someone prone to negativity may feel all too tempted to mirror that.
Try coming at them with the positive mindset you wish they had. Expect
the best in them. You never know when you might be pleasantly surprised.
2. Dig deeper, but stay out of the hole.
It’s always easier to offer someone compassion if you try to
understand where they’re coming from. But that can’t completely justify
bad behavior. If you show negative people you support their choice to
behave badly, you give them no real incentive to make a change (which
they may actually want deep down).
It may help to repeat this in your head when you deal with them: “I
understand your pain. But I’m most helpful if I don’t feed into it.”
This might help you approach them with both kindness and firmness so
they don’t bring you down with them.
3. Maintain a positive boundary.
Some people might tell you to visualize a bright white light around
you to maintain a positive space when other people enter it with
negativity. This doesn’t actually work for me because I respond better
to ideas in words than visualizations. So I tell myself this, “I can
only control the positive space I create around myself.”
Then when I interact with this person, I try to do two things, in this order of importance:
- Protect the positive space around me. When their negativity is too strong to protect it, I need to walk away.
- Help them feel more positive, not act more positive–which is more likely to create the desired result.
4. Disarm their negativity, even if just for now.
This goes back to the ideas I mentioned above. I know my depressed
friend will rant about life’s injustices as long as I let her. Part of
me feels tempted to play amateur psychiatrist–get her talking, and then
try to help her reframe situations into a more positive light.
Then I remind myself I can’t change her whole way of being in one
phone call. She has to want that. I also can’t listen for hours on end,
as I’ve done in the past. But I
can listen compassionately for a
short while and then help her focus on something positive right now, in
this moment. I can ask about her upcoming birthday. I can remind her
it’s a beautiful day for a walk. Don’t try to solve or fix them. Just
aim to help them now.
5. Temper your emotional response.
Negative people often gravitate toward
others who react strongly–people who easily offer compassionate or get
outraged, or offended. I suspect this gives them a little light in the
darkness of their inner world–a sense that they’re not floating alone in
their own anger or sadness.
People remember and learn from what you do more than what you say.
If you feed into the situation with emotions, you’ll teach them they
can depend on you for a reaction. It’s tough not to react because we’re
human, but it’s worth practicing.
Once you’ve offered a compassionate ear for as long as you can,
respond as calmly as possible with a simple line of fact. If you’re
dealing with a rude or angry person, you may want to change the subject
to something unrelated: “
Dancing with the Stars is on tonight. Planning to watch it?”
6. Question what you’re getting out of it.
Like I mentioned above, we often get something out of relationships
with negative people. Get real honest with yourself: have you fallen
into a caretaker role because it makes you feel needed? Have you
maintained the relationship so you can gossip about this person in a
holier-than-thou way with others? Do you have some sort of stake in
keeping the things the way they are?
Questioning yourself helps you change the way you respond–which is
really all you can control. You can’t make someone think, feel, or act
differently. You can be as kind as possible or as combative as possible,
and still not change reality for someone else. All you
can control is what
you think and do–and then do your best to help them without hurting yourself.
7. Remember the numbers.
Research shows that people with negative attitudes have significantly
higher rates of stress and disease. Someone’s mental state plays a huge
role in their physical health. If someone’s making life difficult for
people around them, you can be sure they’re doing worse for themselves.
What a sad reality. That someone has so much pain inside them they
have to act out just to feel some sense of relief–even if that relief
comes from getting a rise out of people. When you remember how much a
difficult person is suffering, it’s easier to stay focused on minimizing
negativity, as opposed to defending yourself.
8. Don’t take it personally–but know sometimes it is personal.
Conventional wisdom suggests that you should never take things
personally when you deal with a negative person. I think it’s a little
more complicated than that. You can’t write off everything someone says
about you just because the person is insensitive or tactless. Even an
abrasive person may have a valid point. Try to weigh their comments with
a willingness to learn.
Accept that you don’t deserve the excessive emotions in someone’s
tone, but weigh their ideas with a willingness to learn. Some of the
most useful lessons I’ve learned came from people I wished weren’t
right.
9. Act instead of just reacting.
Oftentimes we wait until someone gets angry or depressed before we
try to buoy their spirits. If you know someone who seems to deal with
difficult thoughts or feelings often (as demonstrated in their behavior)
don’t wait for a situation to help them create positive feelings.
Give them a compliment for something they did well. Remind them of a
moment when they were happy–as in “Remember when you scored that
touchdown during the company picnic? That was awesome!” You’re more apt
to want to boost them up when they haven’t brought you down. This may
help mitigate that later, and also give them a little relief from their
pain.
10. Maintain the right relationship based on reality as it is.
With my friend, I’m always wishing she could be more positive. I
consistently put myself in situations where I feel bad because I want to
help, because I want her to be happy. I’ve recently realized the best I
can do is accept her as she is, let her know I believe in her ability
to be happy, and then give her space to make the choice.
That means gently bringing our conversation to a close after I’ve
made an effort to help. Or cutting short a night out if I’ve done all I
can and it’s draining me. Hopefully she’ll want to change some day.
Until then, all I can do is love her, while loving myself enough to take
care of my needs. Which often means putting them first.
–
I’ve learned you can’t always saved the world. But you can make the
world a better place by working on yourself–by becoming self-aware,
tapping into your compassion, and protecting your positive space. You
may even help negative people by fostering a sense of peace within
yourself that their negativity can’t pierce.
