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What do we do with all the difficult people?
For all of my adult life, I have had relationships with people who just make things difficult. I don’t have lot of people like this in my life – just one at a time. And it’s not even the same person, over time. The personality remains the same, but it manifests itself in different people and capacities – at work, in romance, with volunteer activities.
I used to believe that if I had a difficult person in my life, it meant that I had attracted them, and the way to release them again would to be to love them.
So I learned to do that.
Being loving toward them has usually meant these things:
Accepting their accusations and surrendering to their authority. You simply can’t win an argument with a person whose self-worth is directly and completely connected to being right and to the illusion that they have control over you. If you take that away from them it is like a death to them. They will fight tooth and nail to keep from being proven wrong. And if you prove you’re right, you’ll probably sacrifice the relationship. Sometimes, that’s exactly what you’ll need to do, but sometimes that’s not an option. The only way to live peacefully with such a person is to be blameless – give them no reason to make an enemy of you, and participate in the charade that they are in charge. Over time, you may win their trust, but in the short-term, they will think they “own” you, so you can at least get your work done.
Serving them with complete impersonality. If I have to deliver something for someone who I can’t stand, I can’t do a good job. If I don’t do a good job, it reflects poorly on me. I refuse to let the insecurities of others become my liability. This means that no matter how much I disdain a person, I try to find a way to give them service as if I loved them.
Relating to them with genuine personality. While I may need to serve difficult people with complete impersonality, if I remain impersonal to them, I make it easier for them to disregard that I am a feeling, thinking person who deserves their respect – regardless of the boxes on the org chart or of who is paying and who is getting paid. So during the course of relating to them, I look for opportunities to share something of myself in a way that makes me less of a cog and so makes them less of the engine of a machine. It humanizes both of us, and so opens up the chance for a real relationship.
Lately, though, I’ve found myself asking why it is even necessary to be loving to such people. If they are rude, condescending, inflexible, hurtful, haughty, untrustworthy and incompetent, why should I invest so heavily in them with my love?
Well, in my old way of thinking, loving them was the way to get rid of them. If I attracted them, it meant that I was somehow being rude, condescending, and inflexible, and the only way to release them from my life was for me to stop exhibiting that sort of behavior and simply be unconditionally loving. Then unconditionally loving people would soon surround me.
Yet even though I have become more and more adept at this loving thing, the difficult person always returns.
Something is fishy.
If difficult people are in my life because I am difficult, and yet I am not difficult, they should not be there. And if loving them is the way to repel them, and I love them yet they do not go away, have I not proved the inefficacy of love? I have released so many illusions, but I still do believe in love. So what gives?
I have come to the conclusion that difficult people are sometimes in my life because I share the world with them. No matter where I go or what I do, they will be there. They are a fact of life – just like many other unpleasant facts of life. Thinking that I brought them to myself or that I have the power to make them disappear is just another illusion of control. They will be just as
