Peaceful Holidays with Scrooge and Other Difficult People

"The cold within him froze his old features, nipped his pointed nose, made his eyes red, his thin lips blue, and he spoke out shrewdly in his grating voice ..." ~ Charles Dickens

We've all known a Scrooge or two in our time, right? Heck, maybe we've even exhibited traits of Scrooge ourselves a time or two. There are those very difficult people, however, whose patterns of behavior ripple forth and behind every holiday gathering, and many holiday memories.  Every family experiences some level of tension during the holidays. For many people, there is one very difficult person who makes the holidays particularly challenging. There are ways to experience peace despite these ripples and challenges.

One of my treasured mentors and admired authors, Janice Lynne Lundy has some sage advice when dealing with difficult people during the holidays:

"When one of your loved ones says or does something that irritates you, consider it an invitation to breathe. When you feel a strong emotion (anger, frustration, jealousy, etc.) simply notice it's there, recognize it, and breathe. Counting to 10 (or higher if you need to) with measured inhales and exhales allows space for clarity. A wise woman knows that speaking out in the heat of the moment does not usually bring optimum results or foster harmony. Time and space do.    Just breathe ..." ~ Janice Lynn Lundy

Another wise woman (name withheld  for privacy) writes:

"I choose to love them as they are, to offer compassion... and feel secure in who I am. It is a work in progress. I've been away from [home] for 28 years and I'm still learning something new about myself every time I go [back]. You have to love the journey." ~ M.C.

From one of my own students (name withheld for privacy) writes:

"I find it best to just walk away. It seems to get much worse around the holidays because you are in a situation where you want to enjoy the day and embrace everyone with love, but some people make it difficult. I think I have just been around really difficult people for so long I want to make certain I don't become the same way.  I really want to be a person of peace, kindness, and love, not resentment, bitterness, or anger. It's not easy but it's worth the effort." ~ S. B.

And from the very wise spiritual teacher, Pema Chodron:

"Somehow the root of suffering is how we escalate the suffering, how we make the suffering more intense by going on and on and on about it with our habitual reactiveness." ~ Pema Chodron

Behavior and attitude can certainly feel like a problem in and of itself. Granted. But the behavior and attitude of the very difficult person are the symptoms of how the very difficult person has experienced life and the conclusions they've come to.  When we react to the behavior and attitudes of these very difficult people we are furthering our own suffering.  While there are helpful tools for how to respond to very difficult people's behaviors and attitudes the longer-lasting effort is to try to understand and accept the frame through which very difficult people see the world around them.

I see the journey of learning to heal from interactions with very difficult people and deal with these same people as a staircase. Each step is rich with learning taking us a bit closer to the top of the landing from which we will have a clear view and peaceful heart as a result of the climb.

Here are just a few steps on that staircase during the holidays (or anytime for that matter):

1. Close your eyes. Only for three seconds.  This brings you back to yourself when your very difficult person suddenly lashes out at you or you notice you're having some irritation or anger arise.
2.. Breathe.  As a therapist and teacher of meditation and yoga I never cease to be amazed by how many people have to learn and practice how to breathe consciously. Somehow, it doesn't feel natural, at first, for people to breathe long and deeply.   I never stop being awed by how the conscious breath is the single most healing, balancing, helpful ingredient and mechanism to our every day functioning. So, when I say "breathe," I mean relax your belly, drop your shoulders down away from your ears, relax your throat and through your nose take in a deep, long breath.... Once the lungs are full, slowly release the breath from your lungs until they are emptied. Then, you can observe the natural breath with close awareness, noticing how it so beautifully flows in and out of the body on its own. The breath brings us back to our inner connection to all we know within.  The breath can settle the nervous system. The breath serves as a bridge between our thoughts and our sensations in the body. The breath can interrupt impulsive reactions and re-set our focus.
3. Walk Away. I'm not speaking of stomping off and slamming a door.  I am speaking of the process of consciously choosing to physically and gently remove yourself from the behavior and attitudes of your very difficult person in order to attend to your own self care before returning.  No matter how committed you are to living from a compassionate heart, no one deserves to stand there and soak up abusive onslaught of any kind.  From a place of love, remove yourself,  re-set, center and get clear in mind and heart before returning.
4. Set a Firm and Loving Boundaries: So, you're at the holiday dinner table and in front of all of your relatives your very difficult person says, "Gees, Jane, you sure piled your plate high. I knew when I saw you get out of the car from college yesterday you must have been eating everything in sight this semester. You've really put on the pounds. You keep eating like that and you'll be big as this house."  You close your eyes, breathe, then if needed excuse yourself from the table and if not needed proceed with this step and you say, "[Mom/Dad/Nanna], my appearance, weight and food choices are not up for discussion. I do not want to hear any further comments from you on that subject please."

5.Shift Gears: This goes along with the tactic of ignoring as an alternative to the previous tactic.  Let the hurtful jab roll off and you roll on in a decidedly different direction. After your very difficult person lays into you about your food intake and appearance and everyone at the table has dropped their gazes to their own plates chewing in uncomfortable silence you smile widely and look at Uncle Denny and say, "Hey Uncle Denny, how is that winter garden I heard about? What all have you planted this year?" or look across at your sister and say, "Hey sis, so I heard you're trying out for the spring soccer team! When does the season start?" 
6. Return to Compassion: It's most effective to do this before you're going to be in the presence of your most difficult person and again after.  Very difficult people are deep down in a lot of pain and though they may not be able to outwardly receive your words and actions of love and support (sometimes this only spurs on further dysfunctional behavior oddly), from a distance you can remember that there is some deep rooted reason they are the way they are and say a prayer or hold a vision of them healing and whole.  
7. Consider the Company you Keep: We can't choose the family we have and can't always choose the people we work with or certain others we just have to interact with; but we absolutely can choose what we read, what we watch on tv, who we hang out with.  If you have a very difficult person - or two - in your life that you can't permanently walk away from, be sure you are consciously choosing uplifting other people, articles, shows, movies, songs in your every day life.  If you've spent years dealing with a very difficult person - especially if it's a parent - you might have a tendency to unconsciously draw in more very difficult people over the years. If you open your eyes to this you can begin making some different choices about the company you keep.  

While it may be only a shred, there is hope.  Scrooge did have a major shift in behavior and attitude thanks to the Ghosts of Christmases Past helping to open his eyes and re-ignite his heart.  Somewhere inside your very difficult person, behind and beneath all the sharp edges, barbs, cold heart and mean-spirited behavior is a spark of goodness and warmth. Keep that in mind. Look for it. Every once in a while you may see a glimmer.  If Scrooge can have a change of heart, it's possible for all.

Mindfully yours... and peaceful holidays,

Lynn Louise Wonders

How Many Licks Does it Take to Get to the Center?

How many times do we have to take licks from the very difficult person in our lives before we learn what they are here to teach us? Before we get to the heart of the lesson? Before we are able to find our own center? How many verbal assaults and other forms of attack do we have to endure before we are able to get relief?

I've got news. The licks will keep on comin' if we're waiting for the very difficult person to change. Very difficult people rarely change because they, most often, are incapable of seeing how very difficult they are. In fact, they usually think they are fabulous and everyone else is messed up! And often they are charismatic enough on the front end to be able to convince others of the same... for a short while... After all, how else did they end up in your life? You were hooked by their charm in the beginning quite possibly, right? Or somebody you love was and you're in it by default.

This kind of very difficult person might be categorized by diagnostic clinicians as having Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD).  Sometimes they have a sprinkle of Borderline Personality traits and a dash of Histrionic Personality Traits. Heck, sometimes there are even some Antisocial Personality Traits.  The point of this blog is not to go around diagnosing people. Bad idea. Rather, the point of this blog is to understand what we're dealing with and make the necessary shifts and changes in ourselves and the way we are moving through the crap they hit us with and move around these very difficult people in order to heal from past pains and move onward and upward.

So, back to the licks.  Very difficult people often like to hook us in and then beat us up. It helps feed their belief that everyone else is wrong and they are ALL right.  So what to do?

1. Don't take anything they say to heart. Very difficult people are really skilled at taking one tiny thread of truth and weaving a quilt of a story that is absolutely baseless and try to smother you with it.
2. Don't defend. Defense is often a form of attack. You don't want to take anything they say personally and you don't want to get down in their mud with  retaliatory attacks. Trust me on this. It only feeds them further.
3. Ignore 'em.  Really.  Act like you don't even see them and hear them when they act out.
4. Don't react. Okay, so you're going to have an internal reaction when they are saying outrageously false things, accusing you of heinous acts that are baseless or insulting your mother. The trick is to note the internal reaction and do what you need to do to work through that emotion in  a way that is healthy (like pounding out some miles and hills on the treadmill, taking a brisk walk, deep breaths, kickboxing) and then try some meditation or yoga... really, a regular practice really helps you find center.
5. Set and maintain firm boundaries the Mr. Spock way. When you need to address their outrageous behavior and set some boundaries around what you will and won't tolerate, do so in a matter-of-fact manner. Never respond or address their behavior from a place of emotion. Get your cool, calm, clear head on first.
6. Avoid the hooks.   They love to hook you. They thrive on it. Look out. Keep conversations short. Be prepared to politely hang up when they start throwing out those hooks or walk away.

Here's the irony. These very difficult people are giving us opportunity to get to the center of who we are. To work through some junk internally (we all have junk). To hone self restraint, patience, self discipline. To look at our own actions and reactions with greater mindfulness. These very difficult people are here to teach us something about ourselves and to help us become better people. I'm convinced.

Birth of a Blog: Dealing and Healing

I was having trouble going to sleep one night. I went to my meditation cushion, I did some gentle yoga, I drank some sleepy tea but sleep was not accessible. So, I sat down at the computer and thought I would take care of a few administrative tasks on line and a new message showed up in the inbox. I made the mistake of opening it here in the midst of my insomnia. It was from a very difficult person I've been dealing with for years. She's someone I can't completely distance myself from for reasons I won't go into in order to protect the identity of all those concerned. It was a fairly typical message from her of the nasty variety, full of snide remarks, personal attacks and unproductive rhetoric.

I sat back in my chair, sighed a big sigh, perplexed as to how I might ever get out of this ongoing onslaught of darts and flame balls this person seems to thrive upon throwing. I wondered if I went fishing in the great ocean of the internet if I might find some answers to what else I can possibly do to deal with this difficult person.

In the search box of one very popular search engine I typed in some words that describe this difficult person and her role in my life and up came a blog article. I clicked on the link and it took me to a woman's blog created and used to vent to the world about her troubles with a very difficult person in her life who eerily resembled the very difficult person in my life. Fancy that.

What was more fascinating were all the comments posted by readers. People from all over the world were posting that they were up at night searching on the internet for help with dealing with their very difficult people and came across this blog too. Instant camaraderie. None of us were alone!

After reading the litany of comments I began feeling a bit ill. The cursing, complaining and criticizing of the readers of this blog just felt like more of the same stuff my difficult person was always dishing up. I don't want to get down in that mud.

I finally felt sleepiness come over me and turned off the computer and went back to bed that night. Finally asleep, my brain didn't let go. My contemplation on this subject formed a dream that has stayed with me.

In the dream, I was in high school, racing down the hall to get to class with a big, heavy book bag. As I ran down the hall the bag got heavier and heavier and my anxiety about being late was starting to morph into panic. I cursed the teacher who had required me to cart around all those heavy books and notebooks full of assignments. I finally limped into the classroom dragging the back pack behind me and there, in the front of the room at the teacher's desk was my difficult person. Familiar face, snarling at me, giving me the evil eye.  My difficult person was my teacher. The same teacher who burdened me with this heavy back pack. I woke up breathing heavily and sweating.

It's like that isn't it? Difficult people are those teachers we didn't ask for. Sometimes you can get your class schedule changed so you don't have to interact with that teacher anymore. Most of the time you gotta deal. And you can deal by gnashing and thrashing, kicking and screaming, resisting to the nth degree. Or... maybe we just accept this is the teacher who has something from whom we can learn.

What can be learned from someone who is such a pain to deal with?

That's what this blog is about... dealing and healing...

"The teacher is always with us. The teacher is always showing us precisely where we're at—encouraging us not to speak and act in the same old neurotic ways, encouraging us also not to repress or dissociate, encouraging us not to sow the seeds of suffering. So with this person who is scaring us or insulting us, do we retaliate as we have one hundred thousand times before, or do we start to get smart and finally hold our seat?" ~ Pema Chodron

Let's hold our seat and learn what we're here to learn. This is the only way old wounds can heal and we can move forward.

More to come...

Lynn Louise Wonders