31/07/2023
The neighbour who gossips about your unkempt lawn. The relative who grumbles about the food you bring to family lunch. A manipulative colleague or a narcissistic boss.
Difficult people are everywhere.
Chances are there's one in your life right now. And they can do more than make you feel bad about your garden or second guess your casserole.
Difficult people can be highly destructive and they can "violate your psychological safety", clinical psychologist Rebecca Ray tells ABC RN's Life Matters.
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"They cross your boundaries time and time again … [and] they often project their stuff all over you."
Sound familiar? Then take note: there are red flags to help spot a difficult person — and measures you can take to soften their impact.
When someone is 'psychologically unsafe'
At work, psychological safety means having the freedom "to innovate, be creative, make mistakes and speak up with your ideas without fear of being shamed, humiliated or punished", explains Dr Ray, the author of a new book called Difficult People.
That idea can be applied to other relationships, too. In all interactions, we should be able "to show up as our authentic selves, to be able to be imperfect, and to be able to connect vulnerably", Dr Ray says.
But people who are not psychologically safe for us make that impossible.
They can also be energy "vampires", taking more from you than you have to give.
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"One characteristic of a healthy relationship is reciprocity … With energy vampires, it tends to be a fairly one-way street," Dr Ray says.
Or, a difficult person might be "someone who is one way to your face and another way behind your back, or one way on this day and completely different on the next".
When to set boundaries and distance yourself
It's important to distinguish between a difficult person and someone who's just having a bad day, Dr Ray says.
Is the person being difficult acting out of character? Does their behaviour fit who you know them to be? Could they, for example, be going through a divorce, or are they caring for a terminally ill parent?
"It just might be a really difficult chapter in their lives. That doesn't make them a card-carrying difficult person," Dr Ray says.
Or, as in the case of new parent Sarah*, who shared her experience with a difficult person, they could be consistently and increasingly hard to be around.
Sarah explained how a family member would regularly make "offhand comments that are critical of how I parent".
Partly obscured by a dark table a person visible from shoulders down holds a small child.
This escalated to the person beginning to "mention my husband's ex-longtime-girlfriend, and how well she's doing both professionally and as a mum".
"I found myself on the brink of tears," Sarah says.
She felt overwhelmed with negative thoughts, waking in the night worrying about the relative and their behaviour.
Dr Ray says in a situation such as this, Sarah could try to set boundaries with the family member. If she was too distressed to have that conversation, she could pull in another family member to help.
There's power to be found in having an ally.
"The first thing is to make sure that you have support — that someone else in the family is on your side," Dr Ray says.
"And then the next thing is to understand that sometimes when someone is controlling, it's because it comes from a deep sense of insecurity within them.
"But that doesn't mean that they should just get away with that behaviour. So again, it can be really important to set boundaries."
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Those boundaries could include setting limits around your personal resources, time, energy, love, care and attention, so that you're not consistently drained by the difficult person in your life.
And if those boundaries are ignored, another strategy is putting some distance between yourself and the difficult person for a period of time.
Dr Ray says sometimes an individual might consider distancing to be socially unacceptable or to be a kind of failure.
"[But] sometimes the best course of action for your own self-protection and your own self-preservation is avoidance," she says.
"Remember that as an adult, you have permission to remove access to you from other adults who are being harmful to you, even if those adults share your DNA."
The difficult colleague
Amy Gallo, workplace dynamics expert and author of Getting Along: How to Work with Anyone (Even Difficult People) shared with ABC RN's This Working Life her experience of coming face-to-face with a difficult boss.
The boss micromanaged Ms Gallo, reviewed everything she did with a fine-toothed comb, critiqued her work in a way that "seemed really off base" and talked negatively to her about co-workers.
"I had to assume she was [also] talking badly about me to them," she says. It was making the job difficult to sustain.
"I thought, 'Oh, I can't do this. I can't do it.'"
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Ms Gallo considered quitting her job. But she decided not to after realising that, while she couldn't change her boss's behaviour, she could change how she interacted with her and her mindset about her.
"I realised that she was likely operating from a place of insecurity," Ms Gallo says.
She began to consider her boss's behaviour as their issue, not hers, which made interactions easier.
Dr Ray describes Ms Gallo's approach as "controlling what you can control".
We can't always change difficult people, but we can change our response to them.
"Focus on where your power is," Dr Ray says.
"Your power lies in how you respond — rather than hoping or wishing that you can change someone else who's behaving problematically."
Difficult people make you 'psychologically unsafe'. Here's how to recognise them
More than simply being annoying, difficult people can impact your psychological safety, argues expert Rebecca Ray. But their power can be diminished.
