Pod Insights All In The Mind Narcissist, or just a pain? How to deal with difficult people About this episode You know how certain people are just… difficult? Maybe they're prickly to be around, don't take feedback well, or act like a narcissist?
Today we're learning how to handle relationships with difficult people; from setting boundaries, to understanding the role of attachment and temperament on behaviour.
Plus, is it ever the right time to cut someone off completely? And what's a 'highly sensitive person' (HSP)?
Got a question about a difficult person in your life? Send us an email at [email protected] mailto:[email protected] with the subject line "mailbag episode: difficult people".
Guests:
Rachel SamsonClinical psychologist https://www.instagram.com/australianpsychologist/?hl=enCo-author, Beyond Difficult
Dr Jessie SternDevelopmental psychologist and researcherCo-author, Beyond Difficult
Credits:
Presenter/producer: Sana QadarSenior producer: James BullenProducer: Rose KerrSound engineer: Micky GrossmanYou can catch up on more episodes of the All in the Mind podcast with journalist and presenter Sana Qadar, exploring the psychology of topics like stress, memory, communication and relationships on the ABC Listen app (Australia) or wherever you get your podcasts.
Extra information:
Beyond Difficult, An attachment-based guide to dealing with challenging people https://www.simonandschuster.com.au/books/Beyond-Difficult/Rachel-Samson/9781923046597
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0:38 Speaker 03 Have you ever dealt with someone so infuriating, so needy, so combative or arrogant that you wondered, who hurt you? Why the hell are you so damn difficult? Well, we're going to try and answer that question today because as much as you might want to write certain people off as narcissists, or insert preferred label here, often there are other, more subtle, more accurate factors at play.
1:08 Speaker 04 It is very common now to slap that narcissistic label on anyone who's got difficult behaviour. The prevalence rates are much lower than the frequency of people sort of applying that label to their friend or their boss or their ex-partner.
1:23 Speaker 03 And if you can learn to consider the more common factors that often drive difficult behaviour, we'll get into what those are exactly. You'll have a better time understanding difficult people and a better time dealing with them.
1:36 Speaker 05 She was emotionally very volatile. She could turn on a dime and be extremely critical. But I think the more compassionate way of understanding my grandmother is not the label. The more useful way of understanding her is to think about the little girl who was still living inside her, who had experienced this deep abandonment.
1:56 Speaker 03 Today, whether the difficult people in your life are in your family or your workplace, we are figuring out some of the reasons that might be driving their behaviour and asking how often personality disorders are at play. We are also going to figure out some tools for dealing with these prickly personalities and ask whether cutting someone off is ever the answer. I'm Sana Qadar from ABC Radio National. This is All in the Mind.
2:28 Speaker 05 We've all had a difficult person in our lives, a clingy partner, or an overbearing boss, or a coworker who we cannot seem to communicate with.
2:37 Speaker 03 Dr. Jesse Stern is a developmental psychologist and an assistant professor at Pomona College in California.
2:44 Speaker 05 At some point in our lives, we'll encounter a difficult relationship that can take a toll on us mentally and emotionally.
2:50 Speaker 03 We've probably also all been difficult people at some point, right? Even if we don't want to admit it?
2:55 Speaker 05 Absolutely. Actually, understanding our own assumptions or beliefs or patterns is really a starting point for making all of our relationships better. Because yeah, we are sometimes other people's difficult person.
3:09 Speaker 03 This episode is less about when we ourselves are the main problem, though, and more about how to deal with others. Because let's face it, other people are mostly the problem, right? I'm joking. I'm kidding. Anyways, Jesse is the co-author of a book called Beyond Difficult: An Attachment-Based Guide to Dealing with Challenging People. And her co-author is Rachel Samson. I'm based in South Australia. I'm a clinical psychologist. You might know Rachel from Instagram, where she goes by Australian Psychologist. She's got nearly 150,000 followers.
3:41 Speaker 03 Okay, so factor one that can be the cause for what comes across as jerkish, mean, combative, difficult behavior? The tagline of their book kind of gives it away. It's attachment.
3:53 Speaker 05 So attachment is basically our pattern of showing up in close relationships. And it's thought to come from our relationship history, in particular, the way that we were treated by caregivers really early in life.
4:05 Speaker 03 You might already be familiar with attachment styles. We have definitely covered attachment in a lot of detail on All in the Mind before, but it bears repeating because Rachel and Jesse say understanding attachment is fundamental to understanding behavior. And usually, when we talk about attachment, it's in the context of personal relationships, especially romantic relationships. But it's not like you leave your attachment style at the door when you arrive at work. So before we get into how attachment styles can influence difficult behavior in the workplace, a very quick recap on what attachment is.
4:44 Speaker 03 Broadly speaking, there are three main attachment styles: secure attachment, anxious attachment, and avoidant attachment. If your caregivers were generally responsive and sensitive to your needs, congratulations, you won the parenting lottery. You might have a secure attachment style. If your parents were rejecting, and if they had a habit of telling you to get over it when you were upset, you might have an avoidant style.
5:09 Speaker 05 Oftentimes, avoidant people like to keep others at arm's length. They're not super comfortable with intimacy, and that can create some problems when it comes to working through conflict. Folks tend to stonewall and shut down, for example.
5:22 Speaker 03 Finally, if your caregivers were inconsistent, like sometimes they were there for you, sometimes they weren't, you might have an anxious attachment style.
5:31 Speaker 05 And in adults, this shows up as being a little bit clingy, over-dependent.
5:35 Speaker 04 This is such a common dynamic that comes up in the therapy room. This dance between someone who's pursuing and someone who's distancing.
5:46 Speaker 03 So, how do attachment styles manifest in the workplace?
5:52 Speaker 05 Part of what the research shows that I think is really fascinating is that avoidant people, who again are trying to keep others at arm's length, they have a hard time delegating, and they have a hard time working on a team. So often, you'll see avoidant folks who mostly want to just do things their way or do it themselves, and they often are less receptive to other people's input and feedback. What you might see for an anxiously attached person in the workplace is sort of the opposite, really craving a lot of reassurance, maybe needing a little bit more hand-holding, especially in the training phase. But one of the cool things, I think, is that leadership can really make a difference in these dynamics in a workplace.
6:35 Speaker 05 So if you have a secure leader, in other words, who is a secure base for their employees, people feel comfortable coming to them with a problem, and they're supportive of their employees' growth, their professional development, that can actually transform a workplace so that... Whether you're avoidant or anxious to begin with, you start to move toward more security over time, which I think is really hopeful.
6:59 Speaker 03 That makes me think about some of the worst dynamics I've seen at work where the manager is actually quite insecure.
7:04 Speaker 05 Yeah.
7:04 Speaker 03 And so is overcompensating in all sorts of really unhelpful ways because of that.
7:10 Speaker 05 Yeah, that is particularly challenging. I mean, hopefully you would have somebody in a position of leadership who's actually
7:16 Speaker 03 Hopefully.
7:16 Speaker 05 sending an example for what good relational skills look like, but often that's not what we have.
7:22 Speaker 03 The conversation around attachment is something you often have in a personal relationship. You're not really going to at work say, I think you have an insecure attachment style and that's why you're being a jerk. So if you're dealing with colleagues who are frustrating and you're maybe on your own, starting to think about, is it because of their attachment style? What should you do with that knowledge? Or is that too much assumption really to go forward with?
7:44 Speaker 05 I think it can be helpful just to have the language and the lens for yourself so that you can understand, oh, this is a pattern and I can think about it in this way. So even just having that internally can be very empowering and clarifying for what's actually going on. And I think the other thing too is, once you know, okay, I have this very anxious boss. One of the things that we do have control over is our own behavior, interacting with this person, obviously. It's not your job to make them magically secure and you're not going to do that, right, as their employee? But I think what you can do is to approach conversations from a perspective of, how can I make this feel safe?
8:28 Speaker 05 So that I elicit the most healthy adult part of this person that I can? And how do I maybe not activate their insecurities and their anxieties? So I think once you maybe know that your boss is overcompensating or feels insecure about what they're doing, maybe it's worth sort of validating what's going well as a starting point before bringing up something more difficult to talk about.
8:55 Speaker 03 A shit sandwich.
8:58 Speaker 05 Actually, the compliment sandwich, it turns out, is not very effective.
9:01 Speaker 03 Oh, okay.
9:02 Speaker 05 Typically, the most effective feedback is actually to start with what's constructive and then follow up with some affirmation or validation.
9:10 Speaker 03 Wait, I just have to ask quickly, why is the shit sandwich not effective? Is it because that pattern is very detectable? We all know about the shit sandwich now?
9:17 Speaker 05 Yeah, so the compliment sandwich.
9:19 Speaker 03 I hope that you're giving the politer version.
9:23 Speaker 05 Yeah, it turns out that people have actually tested this. They've tested the different order in which you can give constructive criticism and positive feedback. And when the constructive part is sandwiched between two compliments, a couple of things happen. One, the compliments feel disingenuous and bad.
9:41 Speaker 03 Yes, right.
9:42 Speaker 05 Like, oh, you're just padding.
9:43 Speaker 03 Yes.
9:43 Speaker 05 You're just padding this to make me feel good. So it doesn't feel genuine. But secondly, we tend to forget the constructive stuff that's in the middle because it's in the middle. There is something in psychology called the primacy effect, so we tend to remember what's presented to us first. And the recency effect, so we also tend to remember what's presented to us last. And the stuff in the middle, it's like, nah, I don't really remember that. So apparently, starting with the constructive feedback first is typically the most effective thing. Don't bury the lead. I'm noticing this pattern. This would be something that would be great to strive for and do differently. And here's something I really appreciate that I'd love for us to continue doing.
10:25 Speaker 03 Compliment sandwiches aside, in addition to attachment styles, Rachel and Jessie say another factor that can drive difficult behavior is if a person has a sensitive temperament. Let me explain that in two parts, starting with temperament. Temperament is different to personality, but the two are related.
10:46 Speaker 04 So temperament is considered the biological basis of our personality. So we all come into the world with our own unique temperament.
10:54 Speaker 03 This is clinical psychologist Rachel Samson again.
10:58 Speaker 04 Our temperament is present from birth. And it's relatively stable across the lifespan. So we'll often hear nature and nurture. Nature is our temperament, our inborn biological um emotional machinery, if you like. And then nurture is our parenting experiences, our experiences in the world. And nature and nurture come together to shape the personality that we have.
11:23 Speaker 03 So temperament is the basis of which personality blooms and personality can change to a degree over a lifetime, whereas temperament stays the same.
11:30 Speaker 04 Absolutely, yeah.
11:31 Speaker 03 There are a bunch of components that make up temperament, things like mood, whether your general disposition is sunny, serious or grumpy. Also, things like adaptability, how adaptable you are to change. But the component that Rachel and Jessie focus on is sensitivity.
11:49 Speaker 04 Some of us have low levels of sensitivity, so about thirty percent of the population has lower levels of sensitivity. About forty percent are in the middle and then at the other end, about thirty percent of us have high levels of sensitivity.
12:04 Speaker 03 And sensitivity to what, like criticism or what do you mean?
12:06 Speaker 04 So it includes having a greater awareness of subtle aspects of your environment. A greater depth of processing, so a deep thinker. Because you are noticing so much and processing so much so deeply, you're also more prone to overstimulation. And you're also likely to be more emotionally reactive. And some people have higher empathy as well. So we're sort of all varying in levels of those features. But if you are someone who is highly sensitive and you are in a relationship or situation with someone who has low levels of sensitivity, then for the person with lower sensitivity, a highly sensitive person can feel like a lot.
12:51 Speaker 04 So it's a very different way of experiencing the world. And without having this framework of temperament to make sense of it, it can be really confusing why two people can experience the same situation really differently. And oftentimes, especially in westernized cultures where we're sort of a bit emotion phobic and like to kind of, you know, numb all of that out or shove it down a bit. You might get messages like, you're too sensitive. You're over the top. And so unfortunately, highly sensitive people often do receive a lot of criticism.
13:23 Speaker 03 And so highly sensitive people, I imagine, are both more extra sensitive to difficult people they encounter, but then also can potentially more easily be the difficult person.
13:33 Speaker 04 Absolutely, yeah.
13:37 Speaker 03 One thing to mention is that this term, highly sensitive person, or HSP, is increasingly being used as a distinct label. But there is a bit of back and forth in the research literature about how much this label is a distinct thing, or whether it's just neuroticism or neurodivergence by another name. But Rachel and Jessie think it is useful to understand as a distinct concept.
14:03 Speaker 05 In, in my view, pretty much all human traits are on a spectrum. And all of us fall somewhere on a spectrum from low to high sensitivity, low to high activity level, even low to high attachment security. Really, these things are dimensions. But as a shorthand, so that people can really understand and have a language for talking about these things. And because the human mind really likes to put things into categories, we use the term highly sensitive person as a shorthand.
14:34 Speaker 03 One thing I wondered when I think about difficult people is like, how often is it a personality disorder that's at play? You know, we love to talk about narcissism these days. The week before this episode will air, we'll have done an episode about borderline personality disorder and how people with that navigate work. How often is it a personality disorder that's fueling a difficult person's behaviour?
14:56 Speaker 05 I would first say that it's tempting to diagnose or label somebody with a personality disorder when in fact what we're seeing are a collection of traits that are hard to deal with or that are mismatched to our communication style. And even for folks who have something like borderline personality disorder, one of the things that we know developmentally is that BPD often grows out of an insecure attachment history, and in particular, sometimes more extreme cases of anxious attachment. So we actually, we start the book with a story that is actually the story of my maternal grandmother.
15:35 Speaker 05 She grew up during the depression era in the United States and was left in an orphanage by her mother, who was an alcoholic, even though the mother kept her sister. And this actually went on over the course of a number of years. Sometimes her mom would pull her out of the orphanage and then she'd be back. And then finally, she was adopted by some family members, but this really early history of abandonment and differential treatment, I think, stayed with her her entire life. And what I would say about her behavior as an adult is that it was consistent with traits of borderline personality disorder. She was the difficult person in our family. And just explain, how did she behave in the family?
16:20 Speaker 05 Yeah, she was emotionally very volatile. So she could be smiling at you, very warm and lovely one minute, and then if there was something that made her cross, she could turn on a dime and be extremely critical. She also took things very personally, so if there was any hint of a slight, she really took it to heart. And I think if she was not needed, especially by her children, she started to feel very empty. So that sense of emptiness is one of the core features of BPD. And an intolerance of aloneness. So in her older years, as she developed some dementia, she became very fearful of being left alone.
17:03 Speaker 05 So those are some of the features that that were noticeable, but particularly that emotional volatility, where all of a sudden she could bite your head off at a moment's notice. But I think the more compassionate way of understanding my grandmother is not the label. And the more useful way of understanding her is to think about the little girl who was still living inside her, who had experienced this deep abandonment. And really what she needed was a sense of safety and being valued. So I'm cautious about using those labels, although I do think that sometimes they're appropriate.
17:42 Speaker 03 What about the narcissism label? Like, this is a favorite of our culture right now. We love to slap that label on ex-partners, on bosses, on colleagues. How often are narcissistic traits involved in why a person might be difficult?
17:57 Speaker 04 I don't know the exact statistic. It would be under 5%, I think. Yeah, what I would say is that it is very common now to slap that narcissistic label on anyone who's got difficult behavior. The prevalence rates are much lower than, you know, the frequency of people sort of applying that label to their friend or their boss or their ex-partner.
18:18 Speaker 05 And I think you're right to call them narcissistic traits, because again, all of this is on a spectrum. And so somebody might have some of the traits of narcissism, but they are not a narcissist and they don't have a personality disorder. So I think it's important to tease those apart. And often when someone is expressing their superiority, maybe because they feel like they have to compensate for something or they don't take criticism well, it's like, yeah, those are perhaps narcissistic traits, but they're also just very human defenses. And so I think, yeah, avoiding pathologizing when in fact we might just be extremely frustrated, and for good reason.
18:56 Speaker 03 Now, in terms of tools and skills for dealing with difficult people, Rachel and Jessie split the approaches they recommend into two categories: intrapersonal skills, which are like the inner work you can do to regulate your own emotions, and interpersonal skills, which is like the outer work. Things like boundary setting, which we'll fact-check and myth-bust in a moment, because there's a lot of confusion around what a boundary really is. But let's start with intrapersonal skills. And Jessie has a couple of favorite strategies in this category, and one is called relational savoring.
19:32 Speaker 05 Yeah, I really think of emotion regulation as the foundation for everything else. Meaning, you can both accept your emotions, you can recognize them when they come up, and they will come up in difficult relationships, and that you can manage them. Oftentimes, that means calming down negative emotion, but it can also mean savoring positive emotion. And typically, our brains want to focus only on the negative features of an interaction. And so there are actually strategies that we can use to savor the good stuff in any kind of relationship. That's work by Jessica Borelli and colleagues on relational savoring.
20:12 Speaker 03 The Borelli technique for relational savoring goes like this. You choose a memory you'd like to savor, one where you felt safe, close, or comforted or connected to another person. And you find a calm place to reflect on that memory. And then you work through these five steps. First, focus on the sensory experience of the memory. Consider where you were when this memory happened, what you were doing. What could you see, hear, feel? How did your body feel? Then, focus on the emotions by considering what you were feeling. Where in the body did you feel those emotions? Can you feel them again? Then, think about the thoughts that might have been going through your mind at the
20:57 Speaker 03 time. What did you think of the other person? The second last step is to look ahead. Remember how close you felt to the person in that memory, and think about how this moment can shape your relationship in the future. Finish with open-ended reflection, where you chill out, you let your mind wander, and notice what you think about after having savored this moment. Across a number of studies, this method has been found to increase positive emotions, lower negative mood, and improve relationship satisfaction, and boost family bonds.
21:36 Speaker 05 In terms of favorite strategies, there was a beautiful meta-analysis recently about the effects of exercise on depression, which is to say, exercise can improve mood.
21:47 Speaker 03 Okay, if I'm being honest, this is where I started to think, how groundbreaking, exercise. But there is more to it.
21:55 Speaker 05 And one of the things that came out of this meta-analysis of all these different randomized control trials that looked at different types of exercise, compared it to medication, compared it to therapy, one of the most powerful interventions was dance. In fact, dance was perhaps even slightly more effective than therapy plus medication for treating depression.
22:17 Speaker 03 That's fascinating. And I'm so glad you said dance as opposed to running, because I was gonna be like, I'm never doing that. But dance, I will try.
22:25 Speaker 05 As someone who loves dancing and hates running, I was very impressed by this finding. So that's one of the ones that I really appreciate. The second one that I like is taking a break during tense interactions. So there's beautiful research by John and Julie Gottman, masters of relationships, in my view.
22:44 Speaker 05 Who have studied what happens physiologically when couples fight. And what they found is that taking just a twenty minute break in the midst of conflict can help reduce emotional flooding and can bring your physiology back to some kind of baseline. And you are much, much more likely to have a productive conversation with somebody, especially your partner, when your heart rate isn't completely overwhelming your ability to think straight.
23:08 Speaker 03 Let's jump forward to interpersonal skills now. People love to talk about boundaries and I feel like some stuff might get lost in translation on social media when people are harping on about boundaries. How do boundaries work when you're dealing with a difficult person?
23:22 Speaker 04 So there is a lot of, I think, misconceptions about boundaries. It is this idea that it's an ultimatum or a threat. You know, this is my boundary. If you cross it, this is what's going to happen. And that's not a boundary, that's a threat. The definition of of boundary that I most like is it doesn't require the other person to do anything. So a boundary is what you are willing to do and what you are not willing to do. And so if if I use myself as an example, and I am willing to, say, help my aunt for an hour after work. And I might communicate that to her. I might say, yeah, I can be free until seven and after that I've got to head off for a dinner with friends.
24:05 Speaker 04 Now, let's just say at seven o'clock, my aunt says, oh, can you just help me to move one more thing? Now, on social media, it would have us believe that then she's crossing my boundary, right? But actually, the boundary is my responsibility. And so at seven o'clock, I say, oh, I'm not able to stay past seven because I've got dinner with my friends. So I'm going to, you know, have to go now. Now, if we have an example with difficult behaviour where we don't have control, say, over the other person's behaviour, and let's just say it's someone being critical or raising their voice. Then again, we have to decide, okay, so I'm not okay with this kind of behaviour. So what am I going to do?
24:48 Speaker 04 You might either get up and leave, or you might say, look, I said, I'm not okay with this kind of communication, so I'm going to go now. And that would be me maintaining my own boundary. It's important to acknowledge at this point that not everyone has control and power in a situation. So if we're talking about someone in an abusive relationship, then this doesn't apply. This only applies in situations where we do have some, you know, autonomy and some influence over our environment.
25:18 Speaker 03 In the workplace, here's an example of how you might maintain a boundary.
25:23 Speaker 05 With difficult people, I think particularly once we've tried a lot of these other strategies, like giving feedback, like engaging in dialogue with them about what's working and what's not working. If there's a sense that there are a couple of key behaviours that are not going to change, then setting a boundary makes a whole lot of sense. So we tell a story in the book about a woman with a very difficult boss and she gives this boss extensive feedback about how her behaviour is affecting her. And in the moment, the boss seems receptive, but ultimately there's no change in behaviour. So at some point, the very best thing that this person can do is start to set boundaries.
26:05 Speaker 05 And part of what that means is having less frequent meetings, but more structure to those meetings so that things can't veer off course and become toxic and personal. So I think those are some of the key features of a boundary is that they're, they're clear, they're both internal to you as, as a person and they're interpersonal in the sense that you can communicate when somebody is doing something that violates your boundaries.
26:31 Speaker 04 One of the most effective strategies is active listening. And when you say that, people are like, but that sounds so simple. But it's, it's not just hearing what the other person says, it's, it's much more active than that. And so when there is someone who is maybe being difficult and say that they are dysregulated, maybe they're angry, we could withdraw and say, oh, this is like too much for me. But otherwise, if you're able to stay present, then giving your undivided attention to that person and really listening to what they're saying and then paraphrasing back what they've said to you. So let me get this straight. You're feeling frustrated because I've been working, you know, late every night and we haven't had time together. Is, is that what's bothering you?
27:16 Speaker 04 And this really helps the other person to calm down because they're no longer needing to escalate in their efforts to be heard. And so this is one of the most effective strategies and it means that things don't tend to escalate, emotions don't tend to heighten.
27:33 Speaker 03 That sounds definitely very useful and effective, but it also occurs to me that that's probably only effective with people who are approaching you in good faith or that have some level of investment in that relationship too. But I can think of certain people I've encountered that are just so unreasonable or diabolical or just do not care, that none of that is really going to make a difference. And actually, the only thing to do is to leave that job or end that relationship. And so my question is, when can you assess when a person or a relationship is beyond kind of help and your only option potentially is to remove yourself from it?
28:09 Speaker 04 I think that your first step would be to try to connect. And you want to look for whether they are also open to hearing your perspective. If there is no interest in your perspective, or there is no shift in the dynamic, then that's a pretty good indicator that either the other person is unwilling or unable to come to the party. And no one can say, you know, when the moment is that you need to take a step back or otherwise radically accept the difficulty in that situation. But if there's no reciprocity, there's really nowhere that you can go, other than to look after yourself, decide what you're going to do and work out when you're going to call it.
28:55 Speaker 03 And there has been this burgeoning conversation online in the culture about, you know, if people don't serve you, cutting them off is a valid choice. And then sort of the backlash to that, that we're all getting too quick to cut off people. Where do you think we are as a culture right now? Do you think people are a bit too quick to let others go? Or yeah, how do you feel about that conversation?
29:15 Speaker 04 I think, again, it depends on the individual situation, but I have seen a lot of this kind of cut off culture, if you like, where there is, I think, a sense of entitlement there. Like, if you don't meet my needs, if you don't validate my feelings, you know, there's a whole lot of therapy speak in there as well, which can be helpful. Sometimes it's not so helpful. But I think it lacks a depth of understanding. I think, coming back to that reciprocity piece. If you're trying with another person and there's no reciprocity, then you can make a decision about whether you accept the situation as it is. Like, this person isn't going to respond to my needs or necessarily care about my feelings.
29:59 Speaker 04 I accept that there's still benefits to this situation for me, so I'm gonna stay in it. Or there is no benefit and so I'm gonna do what I can to exit this situation. But I think the entitlement comes in when we think other people must respond to my needs. Other people must see my perspective. No, other people don't have to. And then it's up to you to decide if that's a situation for you or not.
30:26 Speaker 03 If there's one thing people take away from this conversation on how to deal with the difficult people in their lives, what do you hope that is?
30:34 Speaker 04 I actually hope that people take other people's behaviour less personally.
30:39 Speaker 03 Oh, yeah.
30:39 Speaker 04 It's so easy to think it's about me. This person's in a bad mood and maybe I've done something. And I really hope that by learning, you know, about all of the things that shape who someone is, you can see that another person's behaviour is often not anything to do with you. So even if you are part of the trigger on that day, there's a whole history for that person that they're bringing into that situation. And for a lot of people, just knowing that takes the sting out of some of that situation. And we can drop some of the rumination about what did I do, what did I say, why are they like this to me? So I think, yeah, not taking everything so personally
31:24 Speaker 04 and realising that we're all very complex human beings that come with our own histories and personalities. And it's messy and that's just how human relationships are.
31:33 Speaker 03 I wish it was easier, but it's not.
31:35 Speaker 04 Exactly that.
31:39 Speaker 03 That is Rachel Samson, a South Australia-based clinical psychologist and co-author of Beyond Difficult: An Attachment-Based Guide to Dealing with Challenging People. You also heard from Dr. Jessi Stern, Assistant Professor of Psychology at Pomona College in California. She's the other co-author of Beyond Difficult. Now, this is a topic that everyone has an opinion on. Everyone's dealt with difficult people, so I'm thinking this could be a good candidate for a follow-up Mailbag episode. If you have more questions about how to deal with difficult people, maybe there's someone specific in your life that you'd like to get some advice on, or if you've realised
32:20 Speaker 03 you are a difficult person and would like to change, send us an email on [email protected] . Put in the subject line "Mailbag episode: Difficult People", and if we get enough responses, we will bring clinical psychologist Rachel Samson back on the show to answer your questions. In the meantime, that is it for All in the Mind from ABC Radio National this week. Thanks to producer Rose Kerr, senior producer James Bullen, and sound engineer Mickey Grossman. I'm Sana Qadar. Thanks for listening. I'll catch you next time.
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