Difficult People Are An Extraordinary Blessing

This is the first entry in a series called, Difficult People Are An Extraordinary Blessing. Once a month, I’ll share ongoing practices that help me maintain a sense of peace with difficult people. My hope is that you’ll find these posts comforting and useful.

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Difficult people are in our lives for a reason. And not just to make us grateful for the loving people in our lives.

Difficult people force us to take a hard look at ourselves and those areas where we still need to grow. I’d go as far as to say they are a integral to our emotional and spiritual development. So when we convince ourselves that it’s okay to dismiss them, because they aren’t our kind of people, we miss out on vital life lessons.

I’ll be honest. The impulse to avoid certain people makes a lot of sense. They can make us feel combative, anxious, or on edge. Dealing with them takes up a great deal of our limited energy and sometimes we don’t want to put in that extra oomph to be polite or empathetic.

Sometimes I would even say it’s healthy, especially in cases of emotional or physical abuse, to limit or cut off those relationships. But when we decide that a relationship with a difficult person is worth maintaining, like in the case of a colleague or family member, there are things we stand to gain from those relationships.

There are things we stand to gain from those relationships.

~ Anon Gray

Now let me clarify something before we go on. The word “choose” is deliberate. It may not always feel like we have a choice in the matter, but in truth we do. And it’s an important distinction to make because when we recognize that it’s our choice to keep difficult people in our lives (or not) we are empowered to make things better.

Let me give some examples. We didn’t choose to hire the annoying barista at our favorite coffee shop, but it’s our choice to keep going to that shop. We may not have chosen our difficult neighbor, but we choose to keep living there. We don’t choose what families we are part of, but it’s our choice to keep them in our lives.

Those difficult people we choose to keep in our lives? They’re there for a reason. Otherwise, we would have let them go.

So it’s worth taking the time and effort to find a way to manage those relationships with more ease. Not necessarily because there’s some higher cosmic power dictating so (though there’s an argument for that perspective). But because, on a much more practical level, we humans depend on relationships for our survival.

By adjusting our perspective, we can come to peace with all our relationships. Our efforts to develop self-awareness will allow us to recognize that no one is here to deliberately agitate us or cause us problems. Our relationships, especially the difficult ones, help us become better versions of ourselves. At the end of the day, we all get to choose how we react to the difficult people in our lives. We can run from them, fight with them, or learn from them.

Until next time, I’ll leave you with a quote:

“Instead of getting angry nurture a deep caring and respect for troublemakers because by creating such trying circumstances they provide us with invaluable opportunities to practice tolerance and patience.”

His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama

This is the first entry in a series called, Difficult People: An Extraordinary Blessing. Once a month, I’ll share ongoing practices that help me maintain a sense of peace with difficult people. My hope is that you’ll find these posts comforting and useful.

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Wait!

Before you go, I just wanted to say thanks for reading. If you’re passionate about living a meaningful life that you can appreciate right now, you might like some of the other things I’ve written about.

I write here, but I also write over on Medium with publications like Change Becomes You, Illuminations, Be You, and The Writing Cooperative.

Don’t want to chase all my articles down yourself? Subscribe to my bi-weekly newsletter “Food For Thought,” and I’ll hand deliver them to your in-box, along with some other content I don’t share anywhere else.

Thanks so much for your support! ~ Anon

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