Problem People: They suck, but your making them worse.

Interactions with other people and creatures are the petri dish for EVERY thing of value in life as a human.  So paying attention to and optimizing how you interact with others has an incredible life benefit for every ounce of effort you put in.  

The world has a lot of dicks in it and a few are bound to get worked into daily life.  Dealing with them effectively will turn them into a positive influence instead of a constant rainy day you can't control.

A simple preset system and philosophy for dealing with problem people is an extremely powerful tool.  Problem people, especially when they have authority over you, screw up your entire biology.  They can make you think irrationally, rewire your hormonal balance, and can spin you into depression, anger, and self loathing for no good reason and often not even on purpose.   This biological reaction makes it extremely difficult to react productively.  Problem people make you emotionally stupid.  So “proacting,” in advance and while your still smart, is the solution. 

Different systems will work for different people and I’ll make some initial research suggestions further down the page for places to start figuring out what works for you.  But what’s important is the guiding philosophy behind the system.  This will determine how well it works in the short and long run.  Make sure the system boosts understanding, compassion, and respect for the problem person and yourself at the same time.  Don’t make yourself feel good at the expense of the other person, and don’t raise your respect of them at the expense of yourself.  Aversion and hate from the other person and yourself will screw yourself further and multiply the damage the problem person initially caused. 

Just remember the following:

If every baby was given the intelligent powers they have as an adult but without any experience of the world, every single person would chose the same thing when filling out a form of how they’d like their life to go.  They would want as many people as possible to love them, they would want to love lots of people, and they would want to do no harm to others and leave a positive impact on the world.  Every single person ever created, including Hitler and psychopaths and rapists, would fill that out.  But life gets complicated, suffering happens, culture and ideology and points of view are confusing, the brain can be a wonky weird thing that doesn’t work correctly or logically, and problem people are created. 

When they do problem things that make our lives horrible, it’s not because they are demons sent to make us unhappy for their own personal gain, it's not that they are inherently inferior or more selfish, it’s that their confused and hurt and dealing with bad information and bad coping tools.  Being selfish and hurting people for your own gain isn't the road to happiness, any tumblr page on spirituality will tell you this.  So when someone is going down that road, their trying to escape from suffering just like everyone else, but their suffering more and their using the wrong roadmap.  They don’t want to do harm.  They want to leave a positive impact with lots of love for everyone.  Something about them just got messed up along the way and they are suffering because of it.  Acknowledging this doesn't make their actions any less harmful, but it allows for your response to those actions to be more helpful to your own life and the rest of the world.  

Here are some research starting points for developing a system for interactions with problem people:

1.     Your own body language can help you change your attitude. 

Especially if a superior is giving you a hard time, your self-esteem can start to lower (because of hardwired pack mentality circuits in the brain, studied extensively in baboons) despite all you know logically about how awesome you are.  Change your body language so that it reasserts your confidence.  Run to the bathroom or close your door, and when no one is looking, flash an awesome super hero power stance.  Doing it in front of the mirror has been suggested to emphasize the effects.  Hold the position for five seconds or more, and then flash another one.  Have fun with it and be crazy.  Do it in front of your coworkers to inspire them to feel good about themselves as well, they probably feel the same way about the boss as you do.  This helps to reset the chemicals in charge of your self confidence.  Thinking it will only get you half way there, when your body gets involved it becomes much more powerful.    

2.     Create a healthy plan for depression or low self-esteem. 

Many people seek immediate physical comfort after a stressful day at work.  Especially when dealing with problem people that create anger and depression.  This can turn into junk food, drug, alcohol, tobacco, and TV addiction (or some combination thereof).  This of course exacerbates the self-esteem problems instead of solving them.  The short term benefit often only lasts for five or ten minutes.  So come up with a plan in advance for dealing with depression and anger.  Do extra walking, break out of your routine, meditate, throw rocks off a cliff, call a friend, etc.  Just know what it is before hand and make sure it’s strong enough to overpower unhealthy urges.  Don’t underestimate the power of your lizard brain if you’ve had problems with it in the past.

3.     Recognize developmental problems in your childhood but don’t let them determine problems in your present. 

Some people who have an extra hard time with problem bosses may have had a hard time with problem parents in their childhood.  Or maybe if you always got picked last for kickball you may have a harder time as a manager of other employees or in leadership positions.  This is one of the punch lines of life.  Since the brain is so malleable as a child, getting beat up by your dick step dad for three years can determine the shittiness of the next seventy years of your life.  Therapy can help if it’s causing major emotional problems for you.  But also remember “My mommy didn’t hug me enough as a child” is a cliché for a reason.  No one has the perfect childhood, when they do, it usually becomes a problem how perfect it was, making it just as imperfect as everyone else's.  The fact that you're now scared to stand up to your boss because you had an overpowering parent is completely ridiculous in logic, but rooted in biology and neural development.  

Good news is that once you recognize it, decide that you’re not a victim doomed to a life of suffering for no reason, you can start to change it fairly quickly.  Recognize things like negative automatic decisions or negative knee jerk reactions, and set up systems to protect against them and rewire them for the better.  Whatever you do, don’t accept your hard childhood as an excuse to suffer needlessly.  It wasn’t your fault you were abused or neglected or bullied.  But as soon as you recognize as an adult that it’s causing you problems, the negative effects of that childhood are completely your fault if you decide not to fix them.  Don’t worry about goals and benchmarks in this venture, just be sure to always be increasing your awareness of your own mind and always growing for the better.  You're going down the same journey as everyone.  Don't feel disadvantaged or unlucky.  Lots of times, a realization that the mental problems from a hard childhood can be solved, can produce more tools for success and happiness than you would have had without the suffering in your childhood.