The world is full of people who can make you miserable. If you want to live happily as a human, it will help to identify the worst of them and stay away. Several of my books and the checklists on my website (www.albernstein.com) may be of service in that regard. Unfortunately, it is not always possible to stay away from difficult people, especially if they are your friends, coworkers, relatives or lovers. The second line of defense then, involves recognizing how difficult people make you miserable, and learning techniques to avoid the worst of it.
Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina begins: Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. Though it may seem so to a novelist, or to people who endure the misery of unhappy relationships, as a psychologist who has spent the last 40 years ministering to miserable, I must respectfully disagree.
Being made miserable, like every other human relation, follows predictable patterns. It is a series of interactions, dances in which one step seems to lead inevitably to the next. When the music stops you end up feeling hurt, disrespected, misunderstood or used. I am not suggesting that these feelings are imaginary, only that if you recognize the steps soon enough, you may choose not to join the dance.
Here is a simple example:
How many times have you told people no and had them somehow twist the situation around in such a way that you found yourself trapped into agreeing to do something you really didn’t want to do?
Here’s how they did it: When you said no, they asked you why not? In the mistaken belief that there is a law that says that when someone asks you a question you are obliged to answer, you gave your reasons for refusing. Suddenly, the fact that you said no was completely forgotten, and the discussion was about why your reasons were invalid. Was this manipulation? Absolutely, but it could not have worked if you had seen it coming. Then, you might have either declined to elaborate because we all have a right to say no, or you might have emphatically established that you had refused to do whatever it was before continuing with the conversation.
The basis of all techniques for preventing the difficult people in your life from making you quite so miserable is to switch off your autopilot and pay close attention to the interaction. Questions are extremely powerful. Always consider them carefully before you answer.
The next example is a bit more complicated, but it can show you how to use the automatic tendency to answer questions in your favor. A simple technique, if applied carefully, can prevent a surprising number of arguments.
Suppose someone criticizes you unjustly. The oldest part of your brain is hardwired to interpret such an attack on your view of yourself as equivalent to an attack on your body. Your choices are to fight back or run away. The impulse that bubbles up from the depths will be either to defend yourself, or attack the attacker. Either response is guaranteed to intensify the conflict, because it taps into the primitive side of the other person’s brain as well as your own. The result from each of you is a lot of growling and posturing, but little resolution, since neither of you is using the part of your brain that is capable of resolving.
What if instead of defending yourself, you asked a simple but powerful question: What would you like me to do? To answer, the other person would have to stop and think, thereby 
switching to the part of the brain that can think. Your question can turn the discourse from what you may or may not have done wrong to what might be done to rectify the situation.
The essence of living well as a human is self-awareness. If we pay attention, we can make it much harder for difficult people to make us miserable. We are endowed with a multilayered brain that is capable of considering our thoughts and reactions, and deciding which of them to act upon. If happy families are all alike, perhaps the reason is that the people in them are circumspect enough to exercise that capability.
Emotional Vampires
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Guest Author Bio
Albert J. Bernstein PhD
Albert J. Bernstein PhD lives in Portland, Oregon with his happy family. He has been practicing as a Clinical Psychologist, Speaker and Business Consultant for more than 40 years.
He prides himself on teaching people how to think like psychologists without having to talk like them. His books on dealing with difficult and dangerous people have been translated into more than twenty languages. The best known are Dinosaur Brains, and Emotional Vampires. His newest, Emotional Vampires at Work will be published by McGraw-Hill in the spring of 2013.
Blog / Website: http://www.albernstein.com
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Hey Gil…that’s exactly the strategy a lot of women know to use on men! My aunt is an expert, telling me many years ago how she could manipulate my uncle into thinking her desire was his idea when she had merely planted the alternate into their discussions consciously. She lives a very charmed life so this strategy must work.
I just wonder if most of us can adjust quickly enough in the moment in order to counter their strategy. Most of us aren’t so actively alert to manipulation, and manipulators are successful because they are well practiced at what works for them where their marks aren’t.
I have learned that we all have choices. If you get to that point where you’re saying, “There must be something better out there than this,” then it’s time you made a choice to continue to be the mat this person is walking on, or not. If you stay, you can expect more of the same because something else I’ve learned is that I don’t have the power to change anyone else. I can only make a choice to continue to have this kind of relationship, or move on. Either way, it’s a choice I have.
I agree the argument starts off as a primal response, but when it continues and then escalates it can quickly become abuse…something I would never want to say anyone should learn to adjust to. My X-husband was a manipulator…a very passive-aggressive one and no one would have believed what he was capable of. His insecurities escalated sufficiently to become an assault one night as I got up from an innocent discussion with him one night to feed the cat. My lesson was to be very careful with master manipulators because they are not always so easily identifiable in order to protect oneself. No one was more surprised that night than I was, and I’d been in that marriage for six years.
The good doctor is talking about people who are capable of negotiation. Master manipulators don’t waste time learning how to negotiate because their manipulating skills work just fine. The clues being why and how someone learned to use manipulation versus negotiation in the first place. I look back today on my X-husband’s past and can clearly see why and how. That’s why he’s an X-husband.
Violence: anything that diminishes the human spirit.
Hi Albert,
Excellent advice. Thank you. The R-complex can be a hard thing to deal with!
I was mentioning to Dan Hays that I once worked with a fellow who was an expert at flipping things around. He had been the captain of his debating team. I eventually figured out how to turn things around on him. To start my argument (discussion), I would express the exact OPPOSITE of what I wanted. Then, without knowing it, he would quite effectively argue for me … and of course, I would let him win!
Cheers,
Gil