Dealing With Difficult People: How to Reduce Your Stress

Don’t tell your secrets to someone who gossips, rely on someone unreliable, or look for affection from someone who cannot give it. This strategy can often be effective when it comes to coworkers, friends, customers, or extended family members. This strategy is less effective for the people closest to you, such as your immediate or close family. Focus on being respectful and kind, even if you don’t agree with them.

It’s important to learn how to build real trust in your relationship. Conflict avoidant people have an extreme fear of disappointing or being abandoned by others, so they’ll figure out ways to deny or minimize https://ecosoberhouse.com/ problems so they don’t have to discuss them. The result of all this avoidance are feelings of resentment, hopelessness and anger which build up over time and eventually come out in some crappy, unhealthy way.

Pre Marriage Counseling

Instead of trying to sedate emotions like anger, sadness, or fear, try looking at them through the lens of self-compassion, and allowing yourself to see your negative thoughts with empathy. Similarly, if you’re more comforted by smells, you can keep an essential oil on hand to take a quick whiff of when you’re feeling anxious. If you’re a visual person, for example, you can relieve stress by closing your eyes and imagining soothing images. People who respond to conflict this way often expect negative outcomes and find it difficult to trust the other person’s reaction. Yelling, screaming, and an overly aggressive tone will lead to your spouse shutting down.

If you’ve been in a volatile relationship before, you’ve seen where confrontation can lead. Foresight warns you that confrontation may not be worth the potential result, which leads to avoidance. Keep being willing to show up to address problems when they involve you. You have to discern and decide what ways you can continue with family or people who don’t want to address difficult things. When something involves you and is within your realm of influence, you can bring your whole, calm, assertive self.

Conflict avoidance in the workplace

We may begin to feel anxious, defensive, or even angry. Tessina suggests people who avoid how to deal with someone who avoids conflict confrontation may be very hard workers (as a result of being inherent people-pleasers).

Remember and remind yourself that conflict will not kill you. It may feel like it will end you because the discomfort of finding ourselves in discord with another is not pleasant. When you are optimistic and concentrate on a positive outcome, you are more likely to stay focused on a solution rather than on the other person. Commit to listening and not judging possible solutions until you can evaluate everything on the table. I will be professional and interact with Julia only when I need to. I won’t go out of my way to include her, keep her up to date or interact with her unless I have to. I am not going to bring up the elephant in the room because I don’t want to have that weird — not to mention uncomfortable — conversation.