5 ways to get along with the people who bother you
Susan Krauss Whitbourne is a professor of Psychology and Brain Sciences at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She writes the Fulfilment at Any Age blog for Psychology Today.
You’ve got a colleague who is constantly getting on your nerves, due to his bossiness and insensitivity. In meetings, he is always trying to upstage you, and he seems to lack some basic human relationship ingredients like respect and courtesy. You can’t escape him, so how can you possibly manage your feelings so that his actions don’t make you miserable? Consider, also, the case in which you see someone regularly who you also can’t avoid, because it’s a person you need a service or product from. It may be the person who cuts your hair (who’s great, but talks incessantly), or the barista at your coffee shop: You try to put a positive spin on your interactions with her, but she just gets under your skin.
Conflicts are an inevitable part of relationships, but when the relationship is with someone who isn’t necessarily all that close, it can be difficult to find the words to bring down the heat. If you tell your hair stylist not to talk so much, she may give you a bad haircut, or that barista may make your latte way too sweet. You could still switch hair salons or coffee shops, though, if the situation really deteriorated, but co-workers with whom you have longstanding relationships present a different case: They are both less avoidable and less interchangeable. You would hardly leave your job over them, without some other very good reason. And if the person who bothers you is a family member or neighbour, there really is no easy way out.
One of the reasons people bother other people has to do with what Freud referred to as countertransference. You’ve probably heard of transference, which is the process through which a patient transfers feelings held toward parents onto the therapist. In traditional psychoanalysis, transference becomes an important part of the therapeutic process. Psychoanalysts themselves also experience feelings toward their patients, and then they must confront and manage those feelings. As they do, the therapists are better able to understand how their patients interact with people in their own everyday lives.
A recent study conducted by the University of Maryland’s Andrés E. Pérez-Rojas and colleagues (2017) provides insight into the process of countertransference, putting it to an empirical test. A sample of 382 supervisors identified through the American Psychological Association’s directory of practicing therapists completed the online Countertransference Management Scale (CMS). They rated their employees on a variety of behaviors representing the handling of their feelings toward their patients. Items on the CMS relevant to the general concept of being bothered by others include, for example, “Effectively sorts out how his/her feelings relates to client’s feelings,” “Is able to step into client’s inner world,” and “Understands the basis for own atypical reactions to clients."
In condensing the countertransference scale down to its underlying dimension, Pérez-Rojas et al. identified two factors — the ability to be empathic toward clients, and the ability to understand oneself and manage anxiety, or as they define it, the “possession of appropriate boundaries within the therapy hour, and an ability to contain, regulate, and experience anxiety during psychotherapy." Translating these items to your own interactions with the people who bother you, this would mean that being able to tap into the other person’s worldview and then hold onto your feelings of being bothered would be adaptive coping strategies.
With this study in mind, let’s look now at those five tips on handling the people who bother you:
1. Reframe the situation in a positive light.
As bothered as you are by this person’s behavior, ask whether you’re so sure that this person is a truly bothersome individual. People can be poorly behaved for many reasons, and it’s possible that your overly talkative hair stylist is simply lonely. She may also believe that her clients wish her to talk constantly, and there may even be some truth to this. It’s just you who finds her conversational style to be one that makes you uncomfortable.
2. If possible, obtain validation that the bothersomeness comes from the other person rather than you.
There are some people who you will never like, no matter what, because you just don’t. They may be perfectly fine in general, but they are not your cup of tea. As the Pérez-Rojas and colleagues study showed, countertransference is almost unavoidable, no less so in therapy than in everyday life. This person may remind you of a teacher you absolutely could not stand or the brother of a friend who just rubbed you the wrong way. To find out if this is the case, ask a friend to either back you up or, alternatively, show you’re wrong. If the person is not objectively bothersome, you can learn what it is about you and your past that causes you to feel this way around certain people.
3. Try to help the person become less bothersome.
If the person is just generally boorish and rude, perhaps you can figure out a way to help intervene with some suggestions for toning things down. Rather than writing the person off as just plain bad or irredeemable, your positive interventions could help change his or her life. This is particularly important with people whose problematic behavior is a constant feature of your life together. Start the conversation off with an “I” statement about how this behavior affects you, rather than by hurling complaints or attacks at them. Such steps would be consistent with the first factor of the CMS involving being able to empathize with others as a vital skill in therapy.
4. Don’t let your feelings about this person gnaw away at you.
The more you think about this individual, the angrier you get, so the logical thing to do is to stop yourself from replaying your unpleasant conversations in your head. Similarly, don’t let your unhappiness leak out into your interactions with other people in your support network. Based on the Pérez-Rojas et al. study’s second CMS factor, managing your feelings will help you react in a more adaptive manner when people bother you.
5. If the situation is truly actionable, then find out how best to act.
The bothersome behavior may include inappropriate attention directed to you that could qualify as harassment. If this is in the workplace, there are steps you can take, as outlined by Smith (2018) and described on the APA Center for Organizational Excellence website. If the harassment occurs with family members, friends, or neighbors, you won’t be able to turn to this form of protection. Make notes about the incident or incidents, and then plan your strategy. Seek out a family member who you think will be objective and hear your side fairly. In the case of a person you interact with around the neighborhood or community, there may be no way that you can act other than to stay away or to make your unhappiness clear to the person, and then walk away if necessary. Therapists may have supervisors with whom they can share their feelings toward their clients, but in the everyday world, you have to rely on other sources of support.
Fulfillment in relationships can come from many sources, and when a relationship is particularly unfulfilling, it may be worth finding out what’s behind your feelings of being bothered. Not all of these feelings can be resolved, but if you’re willing to make the effort to manage them, you may find the outcome will be pleasantly surprising.
Written by Susan Krauss Whitbourne. Republished with permission of Psychology Today.