De-Stress For Success with Isabella Ferguson
This podcast is about finding calm. I talk to the experts and bring you evidence-based practical methods to help you destress and live purposefully. In my early 40’s, I bowed out of a 20 year legal career “to spend more time with the kids”. However it was more than that. Decades of running on high anxiety and drinking to cope had had its toll on my nervous system and I was burnt out. I didn’t know it at the time, but from there I started years of recovery and ultimately stepped into a new way of living. I went to rehab, retrained as a counsellor and coach, created a successful counselling practice, became a motivational & corporate wellness speaker, took up painting and now support others to destress for success.
https://isabellaferguson.com.au
De-Stress For Success with Isabella Ferguson
6. Managing Difficult People: Practical Strategies with Dr. Rebecca Ray
Today's episode is all about difficult people. You know the ones! Those people in your life that press your buttons, make you feel like you are the problem, that leave you ruminating over what was said and wondering why you feel so awful. Who better to help us learn how to deal with difficult people, that the author of Difficult People, clinical psychologist, Dr Rebecca Ray.
Dr Ray takes a compassionate lens, seeking to distinguish genuinely difficult people from those just having a rough patch. Dr Ray also illuminates how such people are often products of their past, and how this understanding can foster empathy. Still, we need to ensure that this doesn't compromise our own psychological safety. We learn about various personality archetypes that cause stress and how to avoid feeding into cycles of difficult behaviour.
The great news? Dr Ray's book, Difficult People, includes over 100 scripts to help you navigate tricky conversations and create effective boundaries with difficult people. Tune in for an engaging conversation that leaves you armed to manage difficult people effectively and compassionately and lessen the ensuing stress that these conversations usually create.
To learn more about Dr Rebecca Ray, visit https://rebeccaray.com.au
Rebecca's instagram handle is: https://www.instagram.com/drrebeccaray/
Dr Ray is the author of 6 fabulous books, including Difficult People, all of which can be found in good bookstores, in print on the Kindle and audio formats. Highly recommended!
ISABELLA FERGUSON
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Dr Rebecca Ray is a clinical psychologist, author and speaker, who helps big picture thinking people master their psychology. Over the course of two decades, she has encouraged thousands of humans to live a life that's fulfilling, unapologetic and free. I love that. Dr Ray is the author of six wonderful books, and the one that we're talking about today, released this year, is called Difficult People. You know the ones, and you may be conjuring up an image right now of one the ones that continually press your buttons, make you feel like you are the problem, whose conversations you just ruminate on that in essence cause your stress levels to skyrocket. Yes, this book is about them. We know them, but how do we deal with them? Welcome?
Speaker 2:Dr Ray, thank you so much for having me. Isabella, oh, you're really welcome.
Speaker 1:I like to kick off the podcast just with a question that I ask all the guests how do you know when you are stressed and what is one of your go-to methods of managing it?
Speaker 2:So there's a number of signs. It's not just one sign. When I'm stressed, there's usually a number of things that happen and there's a gradation to it. So sometimes, if I don't catch it early like there's early signs and then there's more severe signs the early signs are that I'll overthink. That's kind of my go-to symptom. I'll start to overthink and I'll start to get anxious, and what follows that is racy behavior. So I tend to rush, I tend to do more, my expectations rise in terms of productivity, so my subconscious answer to stress is do more and that will fix it. So what I've learned is actually that's the opposite of what I need to do when I'm in that state, and it's been a lifelong lesson, something that I still have to consciously practice, which is to actually go slower when I'm in a state of stress rather than to buy into that, buy into that rushing and buy into that almost desperate behavior.
Speaker 2:So my strategies are again. They're multifaceted. I've got internal strategies that I use and external strategies. The internal strategies are I've made a great deal of progress in terms of how I treat myself. My relationship with myself as a human is the best that it's ever been in my life, and that's coming from someone who was very unkind to myself.
Speaker 2:I was perpetually self-critical, raised by critical parents, so that voice in my head has always been hyper-critical. And despite the fact that I think I'm not sure because I've never landed on it that we can actually get rid of those voices or those fear-based voices, I'm certainly much better at not buying into it. So the first internal strategy is to just watch how I'm speaking to myself and to lower those expectations. Because as a high achiever, look logically most of the time my average is higher than the next person's average. So sometimes I really have to consciously drop back down into your productivity is not equal to your worth, so step back from that. And then my external strategy my go-to external strategy is to talk it aloud. So I have, and that's also because sometimes my head is such a messy place to be that the best thing to do is to get out of it, and so sometimes I'll sit down with my wife. Sometimes I won't even sit down with her. It might be a passing in the kitchen where I say I'm anxious today, and I just say it out loud and she might say do you know what that's about? So we might have a quick interaction where just saying it out loud can be enough, and then oftentimes we collaborate on gratitude. So this is especially around financial stress.
Speaker 2:I'm not immune to the cost of living.
Speaker 2:The cost of living is currently killing me, and so sometimes it will simply be us standing in the kitchen and saying we're going to be okay, because we always are, and when you're reminded of that by someone who's in it with you, that can be super helpful. But I also have a support crew of people who are in business and my best friends. I don't believe that our partner can ever meet 100% of our needs, and so I have my people that I go to for certain things that I'm stressed about. So it will depend on what you know I'm ruminating on on that day, depending on whose support I seek. Yeah, but I just happen to have gotten super lucky and have these people around me who are magic, these strong and confident women who will both call me on my shit and then also say, honestly, do you not see yourself the way I see you and really be able to remind me that I'm okay? You know, I'm not a loser, because sometimes my mind is very much wanting to tell me that I am yes.
Speaker 1:Yeah, look, thank you so much, because it is such a skill to recognize the signs before you're sort of caught in a bit of a stress spiral from which it's hard to pull out from, and then be the observer of those thoughts, say it out loud and then find your people. Thank you so much for that. No worries, dr Ray. Okay, so difficult people. How would you describe or define a difficult person? How might they be different from, say, a mildly annoying person?
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's a good question, and I think that difference is the reason I wrote the book in the first place. So I wrote a book in 20 that came out in 2021, called Setting Boundaries yes, and I had such you've got it, yes Amazing. I had such a beautiful response to that book, but I kept on getting asked the same question, which was I'm now confident with my boundaries and I know how to communicate them, but they just don't work with this one person. What do I do about that person? And I was like, oh, I don't know, like that person is too hard, it's a whole nother book. I don't want to write that book. And my publisher was like, I think you should write that book. And I was like I don't know. And she said well, do you want to contract? Not really like that, but essentially the words were I think it's a great topic, I think that should be your next book.
Speaker 2:And so when I wrote Difficult People, I really set out to find the nuance in all of this, because when I sat down and really started diving into the topic, it's so complex because we're talking about a spectrum of interpersonal safety, like a continuum, and in the book I wasn't writing about dangerous people, yeah, those people who cross our boundaries sexually and physically, and to a level that we're talking about criminal behaviour.
Speaker 2:And I'm not talking about the people that we don't even really need to talk about at all, because they're so comfortable that we don't think about them, because we don't have to, they don't push our buttons.
Speaker 2:So there's this kind of messy in between, where there's these subtle behaviours that are difficult for us, and it was just as difficult for me as it is for people that often try to talk about these people to find the words for it, because many people actually don't have words for what these people do.
Speaker 2:So what I landed on is a difficult person is someone who violates your psychological safety around them. So your psychological safety is your, just your ability to be able to feel heard and understood and seen and recognised, without fear of speaking up for your needs and making mistakes and then being punished or humiliated or attacked for doing so. So, essentially, psychological safety is that you can be an imperfect human safely with this person. And then the other thing that they do often is that they don't have the capacity, like you and I, to moderate their present moment experience and then, therefore, when their emotions intensify, they end up projecting that emotional dysregulation onto you and often blaming you for it. So if you try to hold them to account for their behaviour, they'll simply turn it around and make that your problem.
Speaker 1:Yes, thank you, and what I really think is interesting about difficult people is that we don't tend to have a roadmap of how to respond. We're not given this kind of training when we're growing up, and so our reactions can be from really flustered and you go really quiet. You don't know how to react to angry and you then do something or respond in a way that you then regret. Yeah, so what's the best way of approaching a difficult person when you innately know that you're feeling not at ease with them?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I should probably talk about. Let's talk about first, and how do we distinguish a difficult person from someone that's potentially just having a bad time right now, because I don't want listeners to walk away and say you know, you've got some loud emotions. Therefore, rebecca Ray says that you're a difficult person and I should do some kind of drastic boundary setting around you. I think the crux of the matter is that we can all be difficult at times, but that doesn't mean that we then define ourselves as hard carrying difficult people, because life is hard like life is lifey. If we're going through difficult times like, I don't know, your relationships just failed, or and you're going through a toxic divorce, or you've just had a baby and you're being woken up seven times a night, or you've just lost your job, or your housing security is compromised by the cost of living, I mean, there are any number of stresses that we can face on a daily basis, and your question at the beginning of the episode made me think about this is that when we have so much on our shoulders, sometimes actually oftentimes we're not our best selves, right? We're just walking around trying to survive and we're simply not worried about whether or not we're communicating as effectively as the Dalai Lama. Thanks very much. And so I really think it's important to understand that the difference between someone that's having a bad time and a card carrying genuine difficult person is that you know. You know that the person having a difficult time has the capacity to be different because you've seen it. So this behavior for them is out of character and you might know what's going on in their life and you might understand that that's the reason it's hard for them, or you might not, and it might be a sign to check in as to whether or not they're okay.
Speaker 2:Now, a difficult person is someone that's predictably so. You know, the most common thing that I hear about people hear from people when they're thinking about the difficult person in their life is that they can actually anticipate exactly what this person sorry, exactly what this person is going to do in the situation that they find themselves with with them because they've seen it so many times before and the anxiety shows up because they know what's going to happen. So once we get to that point and you know, you definitely have a difficult person on your hands the next thing to do and this might sound counter intuitive as a first step, but it's because you're not a psychopath, right? The first thing I want you to do is to draw on your humanity and lead with empathy and compassion. Now, this doesn't mean that you need to be in a place where you're going to excuse their behavior time and time again. That's not where I'm headed. Don't panic before listeners turn off and go no, this person is horrible. I'm not just going to empathize with them, I just want you, for your own experience, to lead with empathy, because sometimes it can be so helpful to understand that this person is doing the best that they can with the lack of skills and knowledge that they have.
Speaker 2:So difficult people often land in adulthood as the product of childhoods that are abusive or neglectful or, at best, emotionally incompetent, where their parents or grown-ups haven't given them the safety to exist as children and know that they are loved and valued and be worthy. So instead they become adults that have no idea how to interact interpersonally in safe ways, because nobody was safe for them. So they repeat what was done to them or simply just bumble their way through an interpersonal world ineffectively, where they're abrasive or they are needy or they're manipulative to get their needs met because they don't know any other way. So when you and you don't even need to express this empathy, this empathy is about you and your experience when you go to a person in your life that's making life difficult for you and you start in your head by saying you know what?
Speaker 2:I think it would be hard to be them. I think it would be really hard to be inside their skin, and the way they behave shows me that. It's evidence of the fact that not only do they make my life harder, but they're already having such a hard time just being themselves. So that helps to start off with your decision making around. Look, this person probably doesn't have conscious intent. You know, people with conscious intent are often up the more dangerous end of the continuum, but we're also not excusing their behavior that's making our lives difficult. So then, I want you to move to boundaries.
Speaker 2:Now boundaries don't exist unless you express them, unless we're talking about the inherent boundaries of physical, sexual and consent based boundaries that everyone should know and understand.
Speaker 2:So again, I'm not talking about the boundaries that can lead to dangerous behavior. I'm talking about emotional boundaries that are often intangible and the ones where we often make assumptions about what somebody should know about us. That leads us into expecting them to be a mind reader, which is so unfair because humans are not, and often we're so concerned with our own experience that we forget to check in with others. So I want you to remember that if you haven't set a boundary overtly, the person may not even know that the boundary exists. So when they're actually crossing your boundaries, the first thing is to step back and go hold on a second. Do they know, like, do they actually know that that's a problem for me? Now it's very likely that our listeners are nodding and going I've already done that, beck, like I've been there and in fact they don't care, in which case you've got more evidence that you're actually dealing with a very difficult person.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:So you've set the boundaries. You've tried to do it multiple times. They don't care, they're not listening, they're still crossing the boundary. Okay, great Hence why I wrote the book. Then we move to consequences. Now the consequences, and I need to say this because remember, listeners we're doing like a 20 to 30 minute episode.
Speaker 2:I wrote an entire. I don't know how many pages the book is, but it's big for all the nuance in this. So I'm about to give you a sound bite, but there is so much nuance to the dynamics between you and this and your difficult person and the cycle that occurs predictably between the two of you. So what you'll notice is that, habitually, they do this and you do that, and then they do this, and then you do that, and around and around we go. So, while I might not be talking for your exact circumstance, please know that I've tried to cover so many different complexities in the book itself. But once you've expressed your boundaries, you move to a place where there are consequences for this person. Now the consequences might be that you remove access to you until this person can actually be safe for you. Now, that doesn't necessarily mean that you cut them out of your life because, for whatever reason.
Speaker 2:There are many of us that have difficult people in our lives who have genuine and valid reasons for not wanting to completely become estranged from them. So then we need to look at well, what can you control? You can only control your side of the relationship. I had a conversation with my publisher, random Tangent, at the beginning, where we talked about this book and I said you do realize that at no point in this book will I be showing you the solution for changing them, because we can't. Now, my publisher is well-versed in psychology and self-development and she knew exactly that I wasn't going to write that. But it's important for our listeners to know that we can wish upon 15 million stars that they will be different, and they won't. So we have to come back to what's within our control. The thing that you can control that can be really helpful, but sometimes we don't think about it because it's quite obvious is to just control the format of contact that you have.
Speaker 1:Okay, that actually is, then, setting quite a concrete boundary between access to you from that person. That's right, and yet you don't.
Speaker 2:It's not something that you necessarily need to express, so you might just decide that no longer are you actually going to visit that person.
Speaker 2:So being face-to-face with them might activate your nervous system in a way that's so uncomfortable that you decide you're not doing that for now or you're not doing that from now on.
Speaker 2:And then you might decide that phone calls are fine, and if phone calls become too much, you might decide that text messages or emails are the way to go, and then you might reduce it, even if that's too much, to a seasonal card at the right time of year. And once we get to that point, you might establish that this person is actually fine in your life. At that level it's manageable, and for someone that you don't want to get rid of out of your life completely, we just need to shift them to a manageable place so that you're not conscious of that, you're not constantly in the place or in the way of harm. And finally this is really, really important If you remember nothing else from this episode, please remember this and it's that as an adult, you have permission to completely remove access to you from another adult that has proven that they're unsafe for you, even when that lack of safety is emotional only or it's such a wonderful freeing statement even just to hear, isn't it?
Speaker 1:Because often you don't think you've got that permission.
Speaker 2:No, especially if we share DNA with that person and sometimes, as women or family identifying folk, we're often conditioned to be the negotiators, the placaters, the peacemakers, the ones that turn ourselves inside out and upside down to make the situation okay.
Speaker 2:You don't have to do that and in fact sometimes the hardest decision we make to remove someone from our lives completely is actually the one with the most freeing circumstances or consequences, because it's the decision itself that is so painful, but afterwards it's relief. You know, I'm not going to say that you feel great. It's a rare person that sits down and goes, oh, my life's so great now. It doesn't really work like that. Most people will say, look, I still needed to go through a grief process and there's still part of me that grieves for what that person couldn't be for me, that I really wanted them to be. So I'm not. I'm certainly never gonna sit here and tell you that it's all rainbows and unicorns on the other side, but what I am gonna tell you is that the freedom comes from your emotional safety being restored, and unfortunately, you're the only one that can restore your emotional safety around the difficult person, because they're very unlikely to do that for you.
Speaker 1:Yeah, thank you so much for sharing that point, because I can think of you know, probably only one or two people in my life that have fallen in that category over the course of my life. But gosh, there were, if not years, if not several years really wasted caught up in mental mind games. And, yes, you're right, always thinking on a different next time, I'll just give them another chance. And on it goes and goes, and I really liked your approach there of compassion and empathy and sort of thinking Okay, so there's a back history there as to why they're presenting in this way. Is there a good time for you to sort of think well, why do I always react this way? Can you learn about yourself? Yeah, when you're thinking, why is there a certain personality that I find difficult, you know that makes me react.
Speaker 2:To learn a bit about ourselves oh, absolutely, and one of the most common questions I've been asked since the book came out is what if I'm the difficult person yes, I also addressed that in the book and how? None of us are immune to our upbringing and the forces that have shaped us, including the experience, the potential experience of trauma, whether that happened in childhood, or whether whether you were fine until trauma occurred in adulthood, especially interpersonal trauma that's been perpetuated by someone who's not safe for you. So, ah, yes, we are all imperfect, wondering about the world and wondering why other people can't be better for us, and yet Where's? We need to be in a situation where we have enough awareness about our own contribution to the cycles that we're experiencing, and I think it's really important to do that from a place of Psychological insight, which listeners of this podcast would already have. So psychological insight is essentially your capacity to think about your thoughts, feelings and your actions and your internal world. People that don't listen to personal but already personal development generally have a lower level of psychological mindedness or don't don't have an interest in it, and so listeners can probably already say, okay, yes, that's me, I fall into that category, but sometimes we can weaponize that awareness against ourselves and decide that you know, if only we were less defective and more perfect at our communication than this wouldn't be happening.
Speaker 2:That's not always the case. You know, generally with difficult person people, they're often difficult for everyone that they come into contact with, and so I want you to be really careful about making this a you Problem or fault yeah, when it's very likely of them problem. However, I'm also betting that you've fallen into habitual cycles with this person where you actually do things that make this person continue to behave in that way or perhaps even intensify in their behavior, and that can be things as simple as not setting boundaries with them because you don't want the pushback, and so you bitch and moan about how bad this person is in your life, and yet you keep leaving the door open and whinging when they walk through it. And if you keep leaving the door open and complaining because they walk through it, that's no longer a them problem, it's a you problem because you left the door open.
Speaker 1:What really springs to mind for me is that Swindler archetype. A lot of our listeners well lots of them are lawyers, barristers, other professionals and I really, and then in my own practice get a lot of people that just stuck ruminating on one or two particular people in their workplace. And I loved the way that your book actually for each kind of personality archetype or difficult person or just set practical tips of how you can phrase a boundary just to start to start the process of protecting your personal space.
Speaker 1:And yes, for me it was the Swindler. I think I've come across the Swindler many a time in my previous life as a lawyer.
Speaker 2:Yeah, they're common, that that well, all those archetypes are common, but particularly the subtle ones, like the Swindler. The Swindler is a harder one to put words to because oftentimes their behavior is behind the scenes and it's a vibe you know. Not that that's a clinical term at all. In fact, one of the most common things I've had people say around difficult people is they make me feel ick. Yes, okay, that's not not a clinical term, but we do need to consider the fact that there's an ick factor here. And that's how you know there's a gut reaction that you have to these people. And you know, one of the most common questions I also get asked is how do I say it? Like, how do I set the boundary?
Speaker 2:And when I first started in this world where I was putting my work out to the masses, I used to fall into the trap of trying to give a solution for that, like give a sound bite. And now I refuse to because there's absolutely no way that I can give you some concrete statement that's going to work for every single person and the difficult person that they're in a dynamic with. That's going to fit. And so instead the whole middle of the book, as you've seen, is filled with, probably close. There would be more than 100 scripts that you can use for different interactions and circumstances that you find yourself with, and that's because I wanted to reflect the nuance and complexity here.
Speaker 1:Listeners. I really highly recommend this book. It's an invaluable guidebook to really help you master difficult people, at least to start thinking about the sorts of boundaries you want to take with people that make you feel icky, that are already in your life or those that will inevitably come into your life, that are around the corner. Thank you so much, dr A, for coming on the podcast Now where can listeners find you? And just to learn a bit more about you, all of the books that you've written and, in particular, difficult people.
Speaker 2:Listeners can find me at home on the web at rebeccawraycomau. That's R-A-Y. I'm across all the socials. As at Dr Rebecca Ray, I spend most of my time on Instagram because that's where most of my people are. But all my books are available in all good bookstores and online retailers. Many are available in print around the world. Some are not, but all of them are available in either Kindle format or audio format around the world as well, if you can't get them in print.
Speaker 1:Thank you so much for coming on. Destress for success.
Speaker 2:My flesh out. Thanks for having me.
