About Difficult People

An explosive boss, a controlling boyfriend, a gaslighting colleague, an interfering mother-in-law, a friend who talks only about herself – we all know them, but how do we deal with them?

Difficult people take over our lives. They live rent-free in our heads. We steel ourselves before we meet them. We can’t relax when we are with them. We ruminate on their behaviour after they’ve gone. They harvest our empathy and operate without regard for our feelings.

In Difficult People, Dr Rebecca Ray shows us how to recognise (and understand) difficult people and provides us with practical strategies for self-preservation. From learning when to say no, limiting contact and managing our reactions, to knowing when to walk away for good.

With her expertise, insight and guidance, we learn to understand how and when another person’s behaviour puts our psychological safety at risk and what steps we can take to restore our boundaries.

Compassionate, honest and authoritative, this is your complete guide to getting your life back from the grip of a difficult relationship, and learning how to avoid them in the future.

Also by Dr Rebecca Ray

Be Happy

The Universe Listens to Brave

The Art of Self-Kindness

Breakthrough

Setting Boundaries

Believe

Small Habits for a Big Life

Good, Great, Perfect

To the people I have been difficult for: thank you for your grace and guidance upon realising the pain behind my actions and for staying by my side as I did the work of healing. And thank you to those who showed me the door in the days before I took responsibility for the way I carried my wounds. Your boundaries helped me learn about who I want to be.

To the people who have been difficult for me: thank you for helping me understand what I will and won’t accept in my relationships and interactions. Thank you for testing me to ensure I am committed to my circles of preservation and empowerment. And thank you for teaching me that my inner peace is both priceless and my responsibility. I hope peace finds you also.

acknowledgement of country

This book was written on the lands of the Jinibara and Kabi Kabi (Gubbi Gubbi) peoples. I pay my deepest respects to their Elders, past, present and emerging and honour the ancient wisdom and connection to First Nations peoples that this land holds. Sovereignty was never ceded.

Preface

Dear reader, hello! If we’re meeting for the first time, I’m Dr Rebecca Ray, but please call me Beck. I’ll be by your side in text form throughout these pages. And if we’ve met before because we shared therapy space during my time in clinical work, or through my earlier books and audio content, an audience I’ve presented to, my social media presence, or my courses, hello again! It’s my privilege to continue alongside you for this part of your journey.

However you’ve found you’re way here, I’m betting that you are not here because boundaries are brand new to you. No, you are here because you’ve realised that boundaries are the most powerful gift you can offer another person when you are interacting with them. If you’ve read my book Setting Boundaries, I don’t need to convince you of the positive influence of boundaries on your psychological well-being. The reader response I received to the book was stunning. Yet, there was a question asked frequently enough that it was clear that we needed to continue the conversation: ‘What do I do when my boundaries don’t work with a challenging person in my life?’

The book you have in your hands now exists in reply to that question, because real life is more nuanced than simply identifying your boundaries and learning to say no.

It is destabilising and distressing when someone repeatedly fails to respect your circles of empowerment and perseveration. You know this person, don’t you? The person who doesn’t seem to care about your boundaries. The one who unsettles you, dismisses your attempts to communicate your expectations, and confuses you into thinking it’s you who is the problem. This person violates your psychological safety. They fail to manage their feelings effectively and leave a trail of emotional baggage for you and everyone else around them to trip over. While they don’t quite fit into the league of dangerous people, their behaviour is problematic enough that it knocks you off centre. And it makes you question whether something is wrong with you.

Dear reader, there is nothing wrong with you. Yes, we must acknowledge that we are all difficult people sometimes (we’ll explore this throughout the book). I’m not about to pander to you by absolving your personal responsibility when we both know that relationships are a two-way street. However, it’s just as important that you understand that difficult people can compromise your perception of what you know about yourself, what you can trust in others, and whether or not you have agency in your own life to set boundaries around what you need and want to live bravely and meaningfully.

Mentor, not master

I am here as your mentor, not your master. I’m not here to tell you what to do. I am here to shine a light on the boundary areas that aren’t working for you and to equip you with the tools you need to make decisions about the direction you’ll take with the difficult people in your life. I’m not a master at boundaries, because no one is or can be, given the ever-evolving nature of relationship dynamics. And I’m not your master, because the foundation of all my work is to empower you to design your own life, rather than give away that power to someone else.

I do, however, know quite a bit about boundaries given my two decades of work and practice as a clinical psychologist. I have a couple of additional decades of experience at being human (which possibly count more than my academic qualifications). I am an ex-pilot (you probably didn’t see that coming), who subsequently had her clinical career cut short by severe burnout. Now, I’m an author (obviously, Beck), a speaker, and mentor to people like your incredible self.

I once dated men until I met a woman who is the life partner of my dreams. You could say I’m an expert in pivoting, but I promise you that it’s never felt like I knew what I was doing when I was in the thick of changing direction. That woman is Nyssa, now my wife, co-creator and constant inspiration. She puts up with me cherry-picking stories from hers and our lives for my books (with consent), and she is the epitome of someone for whom love matters most. We are parents to our spectacular 5-year-old son, Bennett, who likes to randomly introduce himself to strangers while we’re grocery shopping and for whom a show-and-tell schedule was developed at day care to avoid him commandeering the spotlight on a daily basis.

I loathe cooking and love mowing the lawn. One day, I’ll have miniature highland cows and donkeys. Right now, we are Ray’s Retirement Village for Senior Supermodels, and our call sheet includes 13-year-old Henry, a Weimaraner I’ve had since he was 9 weeks old, and two rescue Irish Setters with special needs, Jetfire (aged 9) and Jackie (aged 11), adopted during lockdown in 2021. Yes, we vacuum a lot, and I’m sure I’ve earned an honorary degree in vet nursing thanks to the dogs’ medical schedules.

I am here as someone who is committed to reminding you of the authority that you hold over yourself, despite what others may do or say. There’s no one who knows you better than you. However, I’ll bring a metaphorical spotlight and whiteboard to assist you to identify patterns keeping you in relationship cycles that hurt you. Once we’ve uncovered the patterns, I’ll show you how to break those cycles in favour of a more workable approach. Together, we can change your life. And we will, assuming you want to (wink).

Privilege

I am an able-bodied, cisgendered, neurotypical white woman. I was born in Australia, a first-world, democratic country with free healthcare and (relatively) equal rights for women, raised in a middle-class family with parents who remain married and who loved and provided for me as a child. As an adult, I have multiple levels of tertiary education under my belt, and a career that’s afforded me an income that has never had me questioning where I will sleep at night or how I will access my next meal. The amount of privilege in these sentences is significant and this privilege must be acknowledged because it shapes my life experience. It means that my life has not seen the barriers that people of colour, underrepresented identities, low-resourced settings, and countries with fewer rights and greater threats to safety face. As Kerry Washington’s character in Little Fires Everywhere articulated, ‘I didn’t make good choices. I had good choices.’

You don’t get to choose your parents. You don’t get to choose your personality. No one chooses to be traumatised. You don’t get to choose your race. Your sexuality. Your gender. The country, culture and socio-economic status you were born into, and the opportunities, education, healthcare and citizen freedoms therefore offered you. You don’t get to choose the generational history laid out before you arrived, or the choices the adults in your life make that change the course of your childhood for better or worse. Every single one of these circumstances not of your choosing shapes the load you carry and its relative weight. You don’t get to choose the load. You don’t get to choose the weight. But you do get to choose how you carry it.

I am a complex trauma survivor who consciously manages my mental wellness and residual psychological scars on a daily basis. I am in a same-sex relationship and was only legally able to marry my partner just a few years ago. I am a woman and know what it’s like to navigate the world in a plus-sized body. These things also shape my perspective, but they don’t negate my inherent privilege due to my race, access to resources, and capacity to set boundaries because my culture allows me to.

I have no right to speak on your lived experience. What I can offer you is transparency about my perspective and privilege, as a white Australian clinical psychologist whose training and clinical experience has existed largely in settings where people can access healthcare and the benefit of creating change in their lives without the significant weight of oppression on their shoulders. Please know that I understand your interpretation of this book can only ever be through your own lens. I acknowledge the limits of what I can write and thank you in advance for recognising those limits as you read this book.

Behaviours vs people

When we speak of difficult people, we are actually talking about behaviours they exhibit that are abrasive to receive. It gives us greater scope for change if we focus our perspective on difficult behaviours rather than tarring people as wholly difficult, and therefore unworthy, and likely ‘defective’.

Most people are capable of changing. However, whether they have insight, motivation and willingness to make those changes is another matter entirely. As such, when I refer to difficult people in this book, I am using this phrase to refer to difficult behaviours of people who have developed coping strategies that cause problems for others, or who struggle to have insight into their behaviours and have low motivation to change those behaviours, or who don’t have the skills (or willingness to learn the skills) to do things differently in their interpersonal world.

Blurred lines

Forensic, violent and clinically diagnosable disorders of personality don’t belong in this book. However, because many things can exist at once in the complexity of human behaviour, difficult people can often straddle a blurred line on the spectrum of psychologically unsafe behaviours that escalate to dangerous behaviours. I’ve attempted to include as much nuance as possible to help you make decisions about what has been ‘normal’ for you and more importantly, what you’ll define as acceptable in your relationships moving forward.

Changing them

I don’t blame you if you’re impatient to arrive at the part of the book where I teach you the magic words that allow you to confront the difficult person in your life, force them to take responsibility for their actions and, ultimately, change their ways. If changing others was possible, then relationships wouldn’t be the source of discomfort that they often are, and this book wouldn’t be necessary! You already know this at your core, though. The good news is that we are going to work on something far more effective: taking control of yourself to decide who and what you allow into your space.

Discombobulation before integration

You are more than capable of making the changes you desire in your relationships. But at the outset it may not feel like that. You are not doing it incorrectly if it gets harder before it gets easier. There is always a time when the learning is bigger than the knowing and when you feel entirely discombobulated before integration occurs. You are not alone through this. I’m right here with you, and I’m going to walk beside you as you learn to trust yourself to create the life you want to live. For now, all I need you to do is repeat after me: ‘I relentlessly believe in my own potential.’ Say it again: ‘I relentlessly believe in my own potential.’ With that commitment, take my hand and let’s walk forward together.

Introduction

Difficult People is your DIY guide to building better boundaries with the people in your life who have a habit of ignoring, dismissing or outright dismantling the boundaries you’ve attempted with them to date. Our map looks like this:

Part 1. Being human is complex. In the first section of the book, we’re going to explore how people arrive at using difficult behaviours as their primary methods of connecting. We’ll look at how children are shaped to land in adulthood with behavioural patterns that are uncomfortable and/or damaging for others – behaviours that create chaos rather than connection, that violate psychological safety rather than encourage it, and that confuse and disrespect your boundaries rather than recognise and honour them.

We’ll traverse attachment patterns and interpersonal coping strategies and how these contribute to the development of the nine archetypes of difficult people. We’ll break down poor behaviour with a process for deciding whether you are actually dealing with a difficult person, or a person who is struggling just in that moment.

Part 2. Difficult behaviours. The second section of the book is your glossary of difficult behaviours: how to know what they look like in the difficult people in your life, and the impact they have on you and others, supported by real-life examples and boundary scripts to help you respond effectively.

The difficult behaviours are categorised according to attachment and interpersonal coping style followed by archetype, to help you navigate straight to the issues specific to your difficult person.

‘But wait, Beck! I need more than just scripts!’ I’ve got you. The foundations of Parts 1 and 2 allow us to scaffold your boundary-setting skills in Part 3.

Part 3. Boundary basics. The third section of the book is a pocket guide of reminders for the essential knowledge and skills you need to identify, set and reinforce your boundaries. We can talk about boundaries in an abstract way forever, but it will be a vacuous discussion without an understanding of your body when it’s overwhelmed, how to regulate your responses to the world, and honing the skills of creating connection. Please note that this book assumes you are proficient (not perfect, because no one is) when it comes to the basics of boundary setting. If you feel like a refresher on those basics would be helpful, head to my book, Setting Boundaries, for the unabridged handbook on boundaries for everyday living.

Part 4. Moving gently and bravely forward. The final section of the book positions you on your own path: the one where you retain control over how you live your life, who you allow by your side along the way, and who you choose to let go to maintain your inner peace. You’ll move forward from a place of conscious and authentic inner authority to set empowered boundaries for empowered relationships. We’ll put the finishing touches on your boundaried being, leaving you with the power squarely in your hands about what you will and won’t accept in your world from here onwards.

How to use this book

I encourage you to initially read this book from cover to cover, in the chapter order offered, because each topic builds upon the information covered in the prior chapter. Then give yourself some time for the information to digest, and only when you feel ready, come back to the sections you want to re-read. And don’t be afraid to mark up these pages with highlighting and margin notes. You’ll be doing your future self a favour when you want return to the sections that resonate for you most.

Permanent change occurs via action. The reflection exercises throughout the book translate words on a page into the shifts you seek in your daily life. If nothing changes, nothing changes. If you are serious about rebuilding your boundaries with this difficult person, then please be serious about completing the exercises. They will transform your experience.

Difficult People has been written in reply to your challenges. Although we don’t know each other personally, I am deeply committed to your freedom around the difficult person in your life. As such, this is not a book where rainbows and unicorns and false promises and platitudes are used to gloss over your pain. Life with difficult people is complex, and the depth of this book reflects that. Parts may feel confronting. Parts may feel like they will break you open emotionally. Parts may hold up a mirror. Parts may ask you to see more expansively than before. Stay with me and with yourself through it. You’re not doing it wrong if you feel. Feeling it leads to healing it. Allow the feelings to be there, and hold yourself gently as you move with them.

With that said, we need to begin by speaking the same language.

The language of difficult behaviours

Humans use language to make meaning of and share our experience. If you don’t have the words to articulate what’s happening, it’s tough to describe your experience, let alone make sense of it.

The language we use matters. Some words can act like bombs in a conversation, without actually articulating the behaviour that is problematic. While they may elicit nods of sympathy or an empathic scoff of disgust from whoever is listening, their use in this way is ableist and obscures where they are helpful descriptors versus emotionally charged barbs.

I want you to have the benefit of using language that helps you describe your experience, rather than falling prey to buzzwords that diminish your experience because those words are casualties of concept bracket creep, and now so overused that they’ve lost their power.

Further, there’s a tendency for mental health diagnoses to be flung around in the name of humour or insult. This is particularly concerning, given that the reality for individuals who meet criteria for these diagnoses is no laughing matter (and even where humour can be found, it’s up to these individuals to lead the jokes). To ensure we share the same understanding, here are some definitions for how we’ll be using the language of boundary setting with difficult people.

Boundaries

Boundaries can be statements or instructions to others about your preferences and needs or they can be values that you hold within that don’t need to be said out loud. Boundaries enable you to set and communicate your choices about how you want to distribute your personal resources to live in alignment with your values. They are lines of connection that form your own personal operation manual to show others how to love and respect you while ensuring you do the same for yourself. They are not combat weapons designed to defeat others so that your needs can ‘win’; nor are they selfish, unkind or unreasonable. It can feel that way if you habitually ignore your own needs, though. If you tend to dismiss your own needs, here’s a quick example of how honouring your needs using boundaries is kind to both the person asking something of you, and yourself. A friend wants to catch up this week because she’s going through a tough time and would value your support. However, you are exhausted. There’s very little left in your tank for supporting yourself, let alone holding space for a friend. A healthy boundary would sound like: ‘I’d love to see you, but my energy levels are low. I can meet you next week instead, so that I can give you my full self and undivided attention.’

Boundaries underpin the safety of our relationships. They help you to reflect on not just why this person is behaving the way they are, but why you are allowing them to. They help you acknowledge where your (lack of) boundaries may be giving permission for others to continue with unhealthy behaviours that are negatively affecting you.

Locus of control

Locus of control is the extent to which you feel like your actions determine the events and outcomes in your life. It’s how much you lean towards participating in the conscious creation of the life you want to live (internal locus of control), as opposed to believing that life happens to you and much of it is outside of your control (external locus of control). Trusting that you can shape your life is an essential ingredient to setting boundaries that protect you with the difficult person in your life, rather than giving away that power.

As a trained professional, I will always encourage you to utilise your agency and take responsibility for what’s not working in your life, and to do what you need to do to improve it. As a living human, I love a little woo-woo and like to believe that there is something bigger out there that might be supporting us.

Our journey as humans is a combination of both, but rests heavily on us knowing that we can control what we do, what we believe, how we interact with others and the world, and how we regulate ourselves, while understanding that we can’t control the same for others.

For healing to begin, we must focus on where our responsibility starts and ends, and accept that it cannot depend on someone else deciding to change.

‘Normal’

One of the most common phrases I uttered in my time in clinical practice was, ‘It’s normal to feel this way’. Normalising feelings (and behaviour) is part of the task of validation and helping a client feel seen, heard and understood. Our inherent need to belong creates a strong desire to know that we are ‘normal’; not defective, and not so different as to be excluded. In this sense though, normal doesn’t necessarily mean ‘right’. It means commonplace, or typical within the realm of similar circumstances.

If you were raised by difficult people, you don’t know any different. When your first long-term relationship is with a difficult person, you don’t know any different. When your first job is working for a difficult person, you don’t know any different. When the significant people in your life have allowed difficult people to get away with their behaviour without setting boundaries, you don’t know any different. When the significant people in your childhood allowed difficult people to have access to you, you don’t know any different.

Difficult is, or becomes, your ‘normal’.

You expect that loving and being loved will be fraught with emotional landmines. And when it is, while you don’t find it easy, it is familiar, which can be confusing because the brain interprets what we know as safer than what we don’t know. ‘Normal’ feels safer than anything outside it.

Clara’s normal was difficult. When I met her for her first therapy session, she was 21 and working as an erotic dancer to pay for her studies in occupational therapy. She was in an ‘on/off’ relationship with Josh, whose style of relating to Clara is best described as one of convenience. Clara’s reason for seeking therapy was short and simple: ‘I feel anxious all the time and I want those feelings to go away.’ At first glance, a full-time study load combined with 10-hour overnight shifts multiple times a week, and a dissatisfying relationship, could easily be a load to overwhelm most people’s personal resources. However, the very nature of psychological treatment is to explore beyond first glance. Sure, Clara had a lot on her plate, but it’s not always the load that’s the problem. The way we cope with that load can exacerbate its weight.

Clara’s coping style was complex, because her childhood was complex. Raised in a family of four sisters, her parents modelled conflict management via yelling at each other and threatening divorce, or turning their emotional pain into the fault of their children and playing the siblings against each other as a form of manipulation to bring them into line. Clara learned to expect love to be conditional and that her needs would only be met through constant games of emotional push and pull.

She grew into an adult determined to ‘make something of myself’, but who believed that doing so was unlikely because ‘I’m not good enough’. Her sense of inadequacy was reinforced by her significant relationships lacking unconditional love and acceptance. She believed it was entirely normal to be in conflict with at least one sibling and/or one parent at any given time, while chasing breadcrumbs of attention from her boyfriend. For Clara, ‘boundaries’ looked like starting fights instead of expressing her needs and constantly being on guard instead of relaxing into love. She thought the problem was anxiety. But anxiety was the manifestation of relationship patterns that are perpetually difficult.

Psychological mindedness

Your presence here indicates that there is something about you not often present in people who are difficult: psychological mindedness. This broadly refers to having an awareness and understanding of psychological processes including thoughts, feelings and behaviours. It involves self-awareness, insight, a willingness and capacity for self-reflection, and the resultant desire for change based on that insight and reflection. A person’s capacity for psychological mindedness helps them to make connections between their internal world and its behavioural expression for themselves and others.

A friend of mine recently spoke to me about feelings of wanting to give up on her business because she had received a nasty review and refund request from a disgruntled customer. Despite the intensity of her feelings, she was able to note that her default response to feelings of failure is to ‘run and hide’. She also made links between the urge to give up and hide away and the feelings of inadequacy that had arisen when her father suggested she ‘Just go and get a job’. Her psychological mindedness allowed her to observe these feelings, thoughts and urges, and process them, rather than reacting unconsciously in negative ways (closing her business is not what my friend truly wanted).

Psychological mindedness allows you to reflect on your own reactions to others, and the motivations of others’ behaviours, and then use your understanding of how those behaviours came to be. You can then consciously choose healthy methods of coping.

Psychological safety

Psychological safety was first defined in 1999 by Amy Edmondson, a professor in leadership and management at Harvard University. Edmondson defined psychological safety as a concept applicable to work settings as, ‘A belief that one will not be punished, or humiliated, for speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns or mistakes and that the team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking’.

I once treated a primary school teacher who I’ll call Hayden. Hayden was dedicated to his students but feeling increasingly anxious at the demands placed upon him outside of the task of teaching. He said to me, ‘We have so little time to actually teach thanks to the administrative demands on us’.

Part way through our time together, Hayden mentioned that the principal of his school was leaving. Hayden thought this changing of the guard could be a good time to raise his concerns about administration tasks eating into teaching time.

It was halfway through the new principal’s first term at the school when Hayden spoke up in a whole-school staff meeting to suggest the possibility of a role being created for a communications manager to help reduce the inbox stress experienced by parents and teachers alike. He reasoned that a communications manager could centralise communications, increasing seamless contact between all stakeholders in each student’s life, and improving productivity for teachers who gain freedom from email overwhelm. His suggestion was met with a scoff from the principal, who asked Hayden who he thought he was to be making managerial suggestions and then laughed facetiously to the remaining staff that: ‘Hayden thinks he can do a better job than the principal, it seems, when he clearly has no idea why we have to do things a certain way!’ Some of his fellow teachers joined in the laughter, humiliating Hayden further. Not only did this lead to feelings of hopelessness, but Hayden was now averse to speaking up about any issues that needed addressing for fear of further embarrassment. This workplace was not psychologically safe.

Placing this concept in family and relational systems, it becomes the interpersonal environment where an individual is accepted and valued as they are, without fear of being punished or humiliated for recognising and speaking up for their own needs, expressing their feelings and making mistakes on the path of personal growth. Throughout Difficult People we are focused on the status of your psychological safety in your relationships.

Difficult people tend to violate others’ psychological safety. Let’s return to Clara for a moment. She was raised by difficult parents who created patterns of loving conditionally in their family and projected their dysregulation onto their children. Clara then repeated these patterns in her intimate relationship, settling for a partner who only occasionally met her needs as a form of manipulation to keep her feeling inadequate and therefore grateful for any attention she received. Consequently, Clara had become frustrated. She would simmer until she reached boiling point, at which time she would erupt at her partner Josh, repeating the pattern of projecting her own emotional dysregulation rather than managing it and setting healthy boundaries. Difficult people model difficult behaviours. Clara had learned that the way to cope with not being psychologically safe was to violate others’ psychological safety in retaliation.

Self-regulation

Human beings don’t walk around feeling happy all the time (unfortunately). We respond emotionally to our outer and inner worlds, giving us valuable information about ourselves and others. Self-regulation is the ability to know when your emotions are approaching (or breaching) the outer limits of your zone of comfort, and to take action to temper them accordingly. Without knowing it, you are regulating yourself all the time by responding to the stimuli around you and your internal environment, including thoughts, memories, feelings and body sensations.

The process of self-regulation is like reacting to your emotional temperature, akin to your inherent ability to know when you are too hot and to respond by going for a swim to cool down.

When you are unable to moderate your responses effectively, psychologists refer to this as emotional dysregulation. One of the most common difficult behaviours we face in others is a lack of skills or willingness to regulate themselves appropriately.

I opened a news site this morning only to read a story of a McDonald’s customer becoming so frustrated at the wait time in drive-thru that they verbally abused a crew member who requested they park in the waiting bay. The driver then punched another crew member who delivered the order to their car window. Both crew members were terrified and left in tears after the experience. Emotional dysregulation hurts others and can be not just difficult, but dangerous.

Trauma and triggers

According to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition (DSM-V), a trauma is defined as exposure to actual or threatened death, serious injury or sexual violence. The recollection of that trauma is persistently re-experienced through unwanted and intrusive thoughts and images, distressing memories, flashbacks and nightmares that affect the person’s ability to stay connected to the present moment, and can create extreme overwhelm and/or stress.

Re-experiencing symptoms are usually involuntary and occur in response to triggers – internal or external stimuli in the individual’s environment. Triggers, and responses to triggers, vary significantly between individuals, and among the experiences that those triggers are psychologically linked to within the individual. They are often sensory, including sights, sounds, sensations and smells, and less commonly, tastes. They can be overtly linked – for example, you’re strolling through the airport when you walk past the person who abused you as a child – or covertly linked – for example, your trauma occurred in December and the smell of the pine tree your family brings home for Christmas brings up painful memories.

Mental health professionals use these criteria for diagnostic information. But as with all things human, there are continuums of experience. One such concept that allows for gradation outside of rigid criteria is the distinction between ‘capital T trauma’ and ‘little t trauma’. Capital T trauma refers to life-altering events, the negative intensity of which is accounted for in the DSM-V criteria and can result in the development of posttraumatic stress disorder. This includes exposure to war, sexual abuse, physical assault, natural disasters, domestic violence and the like. People who perpetrate capital T trauma are dangerous.

Little t trauma refers to experiences that overwhelm our capacity to cope and result in a disruption of our emotional functioning. Events might include infidelity, legal challenges, divorce, being displaced or needing to relocate, financial hardship and interpersonal conflict. Little t trauma is not a clinical diagnosis, but it’s helpful as a conceptual indicator for something that caused immense hurt and turmoil that needs to be processed to help you move forward. People who contribute to little t trauma in your life are difficult, but not necessarily dangerous.

Your experience of past trauma can influence how you perceive and interact with the people in your world. You may swing towards interpersonal sensitivity and mistrust in such a way that comfortable people can be misinterpreted as difficult and difficult people can be misinterpreted as being dangerous. Or you may swing towards boundaryless subservience where you accept difficult – and even dangerous – people as ‘normal’ in your world, allowing them to behave in ways that are intolerable for others who approach the world with healthy boundaries.

Defining ‘difficult’

State vs trait vs disorder

A state is a temporary emotional response, like the anxiety about what your mother will say about your recent weight gain when you return home for Christmas. It is a temporary state of behaving in difficult ways due to abnormal or intensely stressful situations (e.g. arguing with a friend over the way she announced her pregnancy because the pressure of fertility treatment has you hanging by a thread).

A trait is an ongoing way of behaving or relating to others and the world, for example a generally pessimistic outlook. This might be a long-term and predictable way of being (e.g. acting out when feeling vulnerable by verbally attacking and blaming others).

A personality trait is a pattern of perception, thinking, reacting and relating to yourself, others and the world that is relatively stable and enduring over time. A personality disorder is diagnosed when a collection of personality traits and behaviours become so fixed, pronounced and maladaptive that they cause dysfunction across many life areas, including work and interpersonal relationships.

To summarise, a state is a temporary response to internal or external stimuli – we all experience daily changes in our state. A trait is a long-term way of being or pattern of behaviour. It can be positive or negative and we all have a combination of both that shapes who we are. The intensity of someone’s negative personality traits and their resultant impact on you when you are interacting with them, point to features of a difficult person.

Difficult vs dangerous

This book is about difficult people, but we can’t talk about difficult people unless we acknowledge the continuum of interpersonal safety.

Healing people are your people; the ones you adore so much because of who they are, and who they are to you and for you. You think about these people because they add so much beauty to your life, and it would be heartbreaking to not have them by your side. My wife, Nyssa, and two friends I consider close enough to be family, Jen and Bec, are profoundly healing in my world. For me, these women are the epitome of excellent humans. I am lucky to love and be loved by them and that looks like unconditional and non-judgemental acceptance for who I am and who I am not, and unwavering support for who I am becoming. The idea of my inner circle missing one of these women is unthinkable.

Comfortable people are the ones you don’t second-guess. You don’t feel unsettled around them or doubt yourself when they’re with you. In fact, you probably haven’t thought too much about how they are because we don’t usually question comfort or psychological safety. These people may exist in any and all areas of your life. In fact, I would argue that it would be lovely if everyone outside your inner circle was, at least, comfortable! People on this side of the continuum are safe.

A difficult person is someone who violates your psychological safety and/or is unable or unwilling to regulate their emotions and their responses to their environment, but who stops short of threatening or acting out violence. Difficult People is about precisely these people.

A dangerous person is usually someone who has started out as difficult and escalated to be someone who violates your psychological and/or physical safety, and shows no empathy, remorse or willingness to change their behaviour, or acknowledge the harm they have caused you. People on this side of the continuum are unsafe.

A friend of mine told me about her experience with a couple living up the street from her. These people were the neighbours you hope to never have. The wife was apparently rude, nasty and abusive towards anyone who parked in front of their property, while the husband was physically intimidating, vandalised their immediate next-door neighbour’s car and threatened them with physical violence. It’s fair to characterise the wife in this situation as difficult, and the husband as dangerous.

Dealing with a dangerous person requires a more complex and supported approach than simply setting boundaries. I encourage you to assess your life for anyone who causes harm with violent and abusive (and, therefore, criminal) behaviour. This person is not just difficult; they are dangerous. Please seek help quickly to take action that restores your safety.

Misuse of mental health terms

Humans love labels. They help us categorise the gargantuan amount of information we are presented with on a daily basis, especially when that information is unpleasant or painful in some way. When your boss asks you to work late again on Friday, but then undermines your extra efforts during Monday’s meeting, it’s easier to call him toxic rather than address it. When your mother-in-law spends the day complimenting your parenting style but then complains about you behind your back to your husband, it’s easier to snark that she’s ‘bipolar’ rather than address it. The thing is, we need to define something correctly to understand where boundaries are necessary, where behaviour is problematic, and where we have control (or not) for effecting change. If we rely on the commonplace misrepresentation of mental health terms and resort to name-calling in response, our capacity to remove ourselves from patterns of interpersonal difficulty will always be limited. The terms I’m referring to are:

Bipolar

This term is commonly – and incorrectly – used to describe someone whose emotions or behaviour seem unpredictable. Its vintage cousin is ‘manic-depressive’, popularised by fictional representations like Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.

Bipolar disorder is a collective term for a set of mental health diagnoses around extreme mood changes that coexist within a long-term pattern of symptoms that are much more complex than lack of predictability alone.

If your father-in-law popped over to jovially help you tidy the yard last week, and this week he’s back to criticising you and your husband’s level of debt and telling your husband that you are a ‘liability’ to the family, that’s not grounds for labelling him ‘bipolar’. It is, however, a red flag.

Depression

Depression is probably a term that you are familiar with, even if you’ve never experienced it. However, it’s not a term that just means ‘sad’. It’s part of a much broader set of symptomatology that affects thoughts, feelings, behaviours and physiology. I remember treating a man who I’ll call Chung. Chung was in his thirties and struggled to maintain long-term intimate relationships. His interpersonal sensitivity, high expectations of others, and inability to identify and communicate his feelings accurately, often led him to be easily disappointed by partners. He would then accuse his partner of ‘making me depressed’. Chung wasn’t depressed. He was frustrated with the need to compromise and would externalise his feelings as being the fault of his partner. His partners often left as a result.

Gaslighting

This refers to a legitimate form of manipulation that leads you to question your own reality. For a full definition, see Chapter 5. Gaslighting can occur when someone causes you to doubt your memory of an event or question your feelings, or turn the narrative on its head to make conflict appear to be your fault. But not every uncomfortable interaction is gaslighting. Just because someone disagrees with or questions you doesn’t mean they are gaslighting you. Gaslighting usually occurs repeatedly and in tandem with other indicators of your relationship or interactions with this person being psychologically unsafe. Your partner stating that they don’t understand why the dishes being left in the sink is such a problem is not them gaslighting you. However, if they continually tell you that ‘you’re crazy’ for doubting their trustworthiness after seeing suggestive messages from a co-worker of theirs, followed by needing to ‘work late’, then gaslighting may very well be present.

Narcissist

Labelling someone as a narcissist has become more common in response to a person who is manipulative and generally abusive, but there is a difference between narcissistic behaviour (infrequent or random state-based behaviours) and narcissistic personality disorder, or NPD, (a psychiatric disorder that offers a full diagnostic picture). Narcissistic behaviour occurs when a person elevates themselves and their needs above other people (see Chapter 5). They may use this sense of superiority to believe they are always right or to make you believe that you are incompetent. Narcissistic behaviour is common in difficult people, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that they meet criteria for NPD. Similarly, your boss’s habit of always needing to be right doesn’t make her narcissistic, or even difficult (annoying, maybe!), unless that behaviour occurs in conjunction with other red flags.

PTSD

Posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is a trauma-related condition encompassing a range of triggers, symptoms and associated life problems. As discussed earlier in the Introduction, there is a big difference between capital T trauma (which can lead to the development of PTSD) and small t trauma which, while painful and destabilising, is not diagnostically or clinically appropriate to be referred to as PTSD. Divorce is tough, but it’s not in the same category of trauma created by sexual abuse.

Toxic

This is not a recognised clinical term, but can refer to any relational, situational or behavioural pattern that is unhealthy. Perhaps you know a person for whom life seems to be overly dramatic. There’s always a problem following them that would fit well in the storyline of a soap opera. And occasionally, they project their problems onto you. It’s toxic. Toxic is a great descriptor, but unfortunately, it now tends to be casually overused, and has become something of a go-to word for any interaction someone doesn’t like.

To help you find your footing when it comes to the language of difficult behaviours, reflect on the following questions:

What role do boundaries play in your life right now? Where are they working? Where are they not working? Where are they absent, but necessary?

Who are the people in your life with whom you feel psychologically safe? Who are the people who feel unsafe to you?

Who in your life (if anyone) is down the difficult/dangerous end of the continuum of interpersonal safety? Who is so restorative in your life that you feel their presence is healing?

Note the formal definition of trauma and triggers. How does this apply to the events of your past that have caused you deep pain?

Do you lean towards having an internal or external locus of control?

Where have you confused your state-based reactions to flaws in your character?

What have you experienced that you thought was ‘normal’, which you might already be questioning as deeply unacceptable?

Are you throwing around a label out of frustration in a moment when your feelings are overwhelming, and you need something catchy to help others see and understand your experience? Is there a way you can slow down and describe exactly what it is that the person is doing that feels psychologically unsafe for you?

Don’t worry if you’re not sure of all your answers. By the end of the book, you’ll have much more clarity, coupled with the actions you need to take to move forward bravely and meaningfully.

So, now that we’re speaking the same language, curl up in your favourite spot with a cuppa and maybe a snack, and let’s do some truth-telling.

PART 1

BEING HUMAN IS COMPLEX

1

Understanding difficult people

Difficult childhoods

Dear reader, you and I had a childhood. We must start here, because we all start here. An adult who had a difficult childhood frequently still holds something from that childhood that continues to hurt in some way. This statement usually elicits a chorus of older generations of parents saying: ‘Well, they turned out fine!’ And I have to ask – did they?

They’re the children that are unsettled in peaceful environments because they were raised in chaos. Their bodies are in perpetual fight/flight mode, seeking out drama because it’s what they know how to navigate. Worse still, they’re so accustomed to abrasive environments that receiving compassion feels not just foreign, but cloying, smothering even. It feels like, if they were to relax into being loved, they’d be risking everything that has kept them safe.

Their psyches are anxious, depressed, traumatised. Their sleep is non-existent, they can’t regulate their emotions, they are reliant on others for validation, and respectful conflict resolution and relationship repair are terms that belong to weird people who know how to say sorry without thinking that person will now hate you forever.

They are difficult people.

A difficult person is not necessarily a ‘bad’ person; sometimes, a difficult person is an emotionally unskilled person, or a person who is in survival mode. A person who is doing what was done to them, and doesn’t know better.

Parenting 101: Creating psychological safety

It is the responsibility of parents and/or primary caregivers to provide a psychologically safe environment for their children. That includes unconditional love (bearing in mind that unconditional love doesn’t mean unconditional tolerance).

Families and relationships of any type are psychologically safe if each person is able to:

Speak up for their needs and rights freely.

Be valued for who they are.

Have their boundaries, needs and rights recognised and honoured.

Feel comfortable in raising issues that need to be addressed.

Feel comfortable in working with others in the relationship or family system to solve problems.

Trust that each person takes responsibility for regulating their feelings and behaviours.

Trust that each person plays a role in the relationship system that works in alliance with the other person or people.

Families and relationships of any type are psychologically unsafe if:

Needs are not able to be expressed without fear of attack, dismissal or punishment.

Rights are disrespected or disregarded.

Each person is only valued when they acquiesce to someone else’s needs or for what they can do to place the other person in control or at an advantage.

Raising issues or problems is met with boundary violations such as (but not limited to) gaslighting, humiliation, undermining or blame.

One person holds power and control over the other(s).

Self-regulation is absent, with the effects of dysregulation felt by everyone else.

Many parents were never taught what healthy emotional expression, self-regulation and connection with others looks like. No one is perfect before they have a child, and I’m not suggesting that you need to be. The majority of adults who have children plan to love them deeply and give them a better life than they themselves experienced, especially when their own childhood was peppered with unmet needs and resulted in emotional scarring. However, if we fail to hold people responsible for their actions, even when we love them, then we give up our power to heal.

The challenge is that childhood emotional scars don’t just disappear. When someone irrevocably changes their lifestyle and routines by becoming a parent, such a seismic shift can cause the load that they’ve learned to balance, pre-parenthood, to collapse when there’s a little person who suddenly needs much of what they have available to give. And it doesn’t end when they adjust to having a child in their life, because children develop and transition as they grow. Every new developmental phase brings challenges for the parent whose emotional scarring may be triggered by things that happened to them at the same age. A parent can’t necessarily know when a trigger will occur, or stop the switch from being flicked.

Problems occur when parents:

Don’t have the psychological mindedness and insight to know that they have emotional scars from their own upbringing, let alone have the awareness of when those scars are triggered;

Use ineffective coping strategies when they are in emotional pain, which result in other people (especially their children) weathering the brunt of their pain thanks to emotional dysregulation;

Misinterpret the source of the pain as coming from outside themselves, decide that the pain must be from the child in front of them rather than the scars within them, and then punish that child as a result;

Decide that if only their child behaved better, then they would parent better, and therefore, their parenting style is the child’s fault;

Claim that they are unharmed from their own childhood, and therefore repeat the same authoritarian parenting style that they received on their own child because it’s ‘for their own good’, rather than acknowledging that when we know better, we can do better;

Attempt to ‘break the cycle’ for their own child, but wind up going too far in the opposite direction, usually resulting in the creation of a permissive environment that completely lacks boundaried leadership that a child requires to feel safe.

These behaviours imprint on a child to create a pattern that influences all the relationships they go on to experience as an adult. Think of it like a relational template that is unique to the child and their grown-ups that sets the tone for lifelong interpersonal functioning. This template is called an attachment style.

Attachment styles

An attachment style represents the bond between primary caregiver and child, which creates a relational template known as an internal working model for how relationships will go throughout the lifespan. Defined by John Bowlby, it influences a child’s expectations and responses in relationships, based on whether or not their primary caregivers provided a stable, nurturing environment where needs and feelings were met and respected.

Children need a circle of security. Parents are responsible for giving a child the freedom to explore their world with boundaries for safety and learning, while being attentive, interested and supportive during that exploration and offering comfort and protection when the child returns from exploration – think of it as refilling the child’s emotional cup. Providing this circle of security creates a secure attachment for the child.

Our attachment style is intimately connected to our sense of psychological safety in that it is predicated on three fundamental assumptions about ourselves, other people and the world, as identified by Ronnie Janoff-Bulman. Children who are raised in an environment where psychological safety and self-regulation are present grow to assume that:

The world is generally a safe and predictable place.

They are generally a good person and other people are inherently good.

Good things generally happen to good people and bad things generally happen to bad people.

Our attachment style shapes how we view ourselves, and the assumptions and expectations we hold about how others see us, too. Parents who fail to meet the needs of their child, or who do so inconsistently, and/or who lead with a heavy hand (or not at all), create an environment that is psychologically unsafe for their child. The experience of a psychologically (and physically) unsafe childhood creates an insecure attachment founded upon violated assumptions of predictability and safety. An insecurely attached individual views the world as no longer safe and predictable, doubts their sense of worthiness and struggles to trust others to have good intentions.

Attachment styles extend beyond childhood and shape how we relate and connect with others as adults. There are four adult attachment styles.

Secure

A secure adult attachment style is characterised by low avoidance of closeness with others and highly positive internal working models of others. Adults who are securely attached generally view others and themselves positively. They are willing to connect and experience low (or no) anxiety in doing so. Securely attached adults believe they are worthy of receiving love and feel safe to offer love to others. They form and maintain relationships and friendships easily and uphold standards for being respected and respecting others, which are supported by healthy boundaries.

The remaining three attachment styles are categorised as insecure.

Preoccupied

A preoccupied attachment style is characterised by a desire for closeness and positive feelings about others coupled with negative feelings about themselves. Someone with a preoccupied style of attachment generally has chronic feelings of anxiety and a deep sense of insecurity, and seeks validation for their worthiness from others. Adults with this attachment style believe that they are not deserving of love from others, while viewing others as more deserving of love than themselves. This pattern often plays out in the form of people-pleasing, where a person is subservient to the needs and wants of others while dismissing the importance of their own needs and desires.

Prioritising others in this way goes beyond the helpful relational skills of nurturance and compromise and tips over into losing their own identity. They pursue worthiness in someone else’s happiness, prioritise other people’s needs over their own, and avoid conflict by being whoever they need to be to ‘not rock the boat’. This is the person who builds their identity around their partner, and the person who consistently responds to questions about their preferences with: ‘What does everyone else want to do?’

Avoidant

This attachment style is characterised by generally feeling okay about oneself (at least, on the surface), but experiencing high levels of avoidance when it comes to closeness with others. An adult with an avoidant attachment style generally believes that they don’t need or desire close relationships. They experience social isolation or superficial relationships as a consequence.

Although the avoidantly attached adult will assure you that’s how they like it – and that may be true on a cognitive level – belonging and connection are non-negotiable needs for all humans. People with an avoidant attachment style often unconsciously believe that allowing themselves to love and be loved is inherently unsafe, so they keep others at arm’s length as a form of interpersonal coping. This is the person who probably says they prefer animals over people and that, ‘being single is better than being hurt’.

Fearful

A fearful attachment style is characterised by high anxiety and high levels of avoidance when it comes to relationships. The fearfully attached adult has a negative view of themselves and of others, which influences their relationships in such a way that they struggle to trust anyone, or to relate in a stable, secure way. They deeply desire closeness, but believe that they are not worthy of love and others cannot be trusted to be a source of safe love. They oscillate between clingy and needy behaviours and hostile and withdrawn behaviours. This creates patterns of push/pull thanks to the eternal collision between needing to be loved and yet feeling unsafe when love and connection are offered.

You might recognise this attachment style around you if someone has been hot and cold: one minute they place you on a pedestal of adoration, and the next minute they devalue and reject you. The change in their emotional temperature is unpredictable from the outside and can be connected to their hypersensitivity. They have learned unworkable ways of having their needs met, which often result in precisely the opposite of what they desire – instead of bringing people closer to them, they eventually push them away.

If part of the load that a difficult person carries is a belief that they are not worthy and/or connection with others is unsafe, setting boundaries becomes an incredibly challenging task. They’ll either leave their gates wide open, permitting anyone unfiltered access to themselves and their resources, or they’ll lock everyone out, guarding their heart and depriving themselves of connection (even though it’s what they desire most) on the assumption that no one can be trusted to love them safely.

Difficult equals disempowered

There is good news, though: attachment style can be changed. It is possible for an insecurely attached adult to develop a healthy relationship with themselves and enjoy loving and healthy relationships with others, even if they don’t start out that way. It takes time and effort, but all change worth making does.

However, this is where we must be mindful of our expectations of difficult people.

Adults who are securely attached are more likely to believe that they have control and agency over their experience in life (internal locus of control). But adults who are insecurely attached, as a result of a lack of psychological safety and/or the experience of trauma in childhood, are more likely to perceive the world through the lens of an external locus of control. That is, they lean towards believing that they don’t have agency in their own lives. They lack the confidence to believe that they can impact their own experiences in the world, a perspective that could be said to predispose them to an unwillingness to participate in behaving differently in their relationships because of an expectation that nothing they do will create a better outcome. It’s thought to be a defence mechanism that grows from a childhood environment that is unsafe and lacking in nurturing. As adults, difficult people then experience a sense of chronic helplessness and powerlessness, along with expectations of abandonment in their relationships, based on what they experienced as children. This translates into insecure adult attachment and a person who gives away their power or takes it from others, feels helpless or makes others feel disempowered, and expects to be abandoned by others or leaves them first before they themselves can be hurt.

What if you have an insecure attachment style?

If you are nodding in recognition so far, I see you and I’m betting you’ve developed a suite of coping responses and survival strategies, some of which you might be able to identify, others that occur automatically, which perhaps you haven’t linked to your past, and all of which speak to the load that you carry, how you love and receive love, and how you relate to others in general.

This doesn’t mean you are a difficult person. Many people have an insecure attachment style as an adult but don’t violate the psychological safety of others or project their emotional dysregulation onto them repeatedly.

Your insecure attachment style doesn’t mean you are broken or that your relationships are doomed. Please go gently on yourself. You have done the best you can with what you’ve had available. Instead of owning your ‘most toxic trait’, consider how it might feel if you held space to see, hear and understand yourself. Instead of ‘calling yourself out on your bullshit’, what would it be like to acknowledge what you’ve been through and connect that to how you had to adapt and the strategies you developed to learn to survive? How would it feel to acknowledge that’s how little you learned to obtain love and get your needs met?

Offer compassion and gratitude to yourself for doing what was necessary to keep you alive. Shaming yourself creates a spiral that can lead to the repetition of cycles that will keep you stuck in a place of survival. Recognition and compassion empowers you to begin unlearning those ways of surviving, in favour of creating a life worth living on your own terms.

You now have valuable information about how you operate in your relationship with yourself and in the relationships you have with others. With this information, you can start becoming psychologically safe for yourself, learn to meet your own needs, and respect your own rights and values as worthy. If you dismiss, ignore or misinterpret your own needs, violate your own rights by having loose or absent boundaries, and devalue your worth as a human by constantly placing unrealistic standards of relational perfection on your shoulders, then you become psychologically unsafe for yourself.

Self-created psychological safety looks like:

Giving yourself permission to have needs and advocate for them.

Understanding that you have rights and can advocate for them.

Knowing you are worthy simply because you exist.

Identifying, setting and strengthening boundaries so that your needs and rights are recognised and honoured by others.

Cultivating relationships with other people based on mutual respect and willingness to evolve together.

Taking responsibility for regulating your feelings and behaviours.

Without the presence of self-created psychological safety, and psychologically safe relationships in your life, it’s much harder to regulate your feelings and behaviours – a skill that’s essential if you desire to live with any sort of inner peace.

Exercise

Answer the following questions in your mind, in discussion with a trusted friend or in your journal:

What does a psychologically safe relationship look and feel like to you? How do you know when a relationship is psychologically unsafe for you?

Where do you see yourself in the adult attachment styles? Where do you see attachment patterns that belong to the difficult person in your life?

When thinking about the relational template your parents drew for you, what were you taught about love? Feelings? Who were you allowed to be and who were you not? What did they model to you that you want to emulate? What did they model to you that you don’t want to repeat?

Did your grown-ups create psychological safety for you (for the most part)? Were they able and willing to regulate their own emotions (more often than not)? Did they model healthy boundaries and respect for your and others’ boundaries in the family and outside it?

Consider what these questions bring up within you. How do your memories feel? And in the face of them, where are you cultivating psychological safety for yourself and where is it lacking?

What do you now understand about yourself and your relational patterns when they are placed in the context of attachment? What do you now understand about the difficult person in your life when you consider how they may have grown up? (Bear in mind that just because you understand something doesn’t mean you must allow it.)

Summary

A childhood that is traumatic and/or that is lacking in psychological safety and emotional regulation can shatter our assumptions about the safety and goodness of the world, the people in it and ourselves.

Parents have a responsibility to create psychological safety for their children. How well they do this influences a relational template known as an attachment style for their child’s future relationships. There are four adult attachment styles: secure, preoccupied, avoidant and fearful.

Difficult childhoods can lead to those children growing up to be difficult people.

Difficult adults are more likely to have patterns of insecure attachment and to perceive the world via an external locus of control.

2

Who is a difficult person?

Humans are experts at self-protection. From childhood, we develop strategies to manage the risk of physical and emotional harm, like a metaphorical door we can choose to close or open to another person who is trying to connect. Children and adolescents who don’t have the opportunity to experiment with these strategies safely and with support, ultimately learn ways of relating to others that are unhelpful. Their doors are either left permanently open, letting anyone and anything in, or they put up walls, keeping everyone and everything out. Sometimes that door becomes a tool of manipulation, opening or closing depending on the advantage the person is seeking for themselves or the punishment they are attempting to place upon someone else. And occasionally, they grow into hurt people who hurt others and/or themselves.

One of Bennett’s favourite playgrounds has a steep slide affixed to the side of a high hill. On our most recent visit, Bennett told me he was ‘ready to conquer my fears’ and go down the slide. (Perhaps this language showed up at the age of four because he’s the child of a clinical psychologist? I’m not sure, but I was impressed!) We approached the slide and he hesitated, watching an older brother-and-sister duo takes turns, squealing with laughter.

Bennett squeezed my hand and whispered, ‘I don’t think I’m ready, Mama’. This caution is physically protective. Bennett should be afraid, and the fear assists him to assess a physical challenge and evaluate his confidence in his body. We navigated this physical fear together through a series of questions:

Had Bennett conquered his fears on other playground equipment before? Yes, he had.

How did that feel? It felt ‘fun and brave, but also a little scary’.

How was he feeling right now? He was feeling ‘jumpy in my tummy’.

Is there a name for a feeling like that? He proposed that the feeling would be called ‘worried’. We spoke about how it’s normal to feel worried about things we’ve never done before.

What did he need to feel like he could try the slide? He needed ‘someone to help me’.

We approached the siblings on the slide and introduced ourselves. I asked Sam and Olivia if they would be willing to climb to the top of the slide with Bennett while I waited to catch him at the bottom. They agreed and, in less than a minute, Bennett was looking down at me, preparing to release his grip. One successful slide down and he gained immediate confidence and two new friends.

When we returned home, Bennett asked if he could grab a snack. I explained that he was welcome to choose a piece of fruit and water. While I was in another room, I heard the unmistakable rustle of a packet of chips. I went to investigate and Bennett hid the packet behind his back, denying my questioning with a giggle, attempting to assure me that I did not, in fact, hear the sound of chips. The lie is another form of self-protection, this time in response to the emotional discomfort of being found doing something he was asked not to do. His discomfort was not about hiding chips, but about the shame of being caught and trepidation around the consequences of being caught.

These are developmentally appropriate and common scenarios that a child experiences when they are learning about themselves and how they relate to others and the world. Bennett wasn’t forced down the slide after being labelled a ‘sook’. I didn’t yell at him or call him a liar and send him to his room when he reached for chips (although the chips were returned to the pantry and a fairly spectacular tantrum ensued).

Instead, my hope is that we create a space where he gets to learn, make mistakes and grow in safety, exploring risks and ultimately figuring out how to use healthy coping strategies to problem-solve when the world seems big and scary and when things don’t always turn out in his favour.

Children in adult bodies

A difficult person can often appear to others like they are behaving in ways that are clearly immature. Someone’s biological age can be very different from their emotional age, especially for people who have learned that love is unsafe and/or conditional, and manipulation tactics are necessary to get their needs met.

These individuals are children walking around in adult bodies, trying to get their needs met in ways that are regressed. When someone regresses emotionally, their behaviour often reverts back to the age they were at the time of significant trauma. Rather than facing the after-effects of the trauma within themselves (unpleasant memories, unresolved fears, limiting beliefs, feelings of unworthiness), they behave irrationally, throw tantrums, project their insecurities onto others, and generally use age-inappropriate ways of coping that kept them safe when they were young. When trying to navigate conflict in adult relationships, they feel unsafe and at a loss for what to do because there remains a wounded child within them waiting to be rescued.

The opposite can also occur where children have been expected to act as the parent in their family system. As adults, these individuals often take themselves and others too seriously because, in childhood, they were expected to behave in ways far older than their years. As adults, they struggle to connect with their capacity to play and be joyful because the experience of being a kid was robbed from them when it counted. It can feel unsettling for these individuals to let themselves be silly and have fun as adults.

Obtaining love in unlovable ways

Difficult people often experience childhoods where love is only offered with conditions. They grow up struggling to believe they are worthy of love without testing it, doing something to earn it, or being manipulative to get it. Their underlying belief is that they are not lovable as their authentic selves, and they make generalised assumptions about what and who they need to be in order to be acceptable. It might look like:

Pushing you away to evaluate whether you’ll ‘fight for’ them.

Speaking negatively about others to try to make themselves look better.

Trying to become a version of themselves that they believe you want them to be (and confusing you in the process).

Overreacting to signs that you might be unhappy with them.

Feeling responsible for your feelings.

It takes awareness, healing and practise for healthy love to feel safe and for these people to believe that they are capable of being loved unconditionally.

Lift you up, tear you down

You know you are dealing with a difficult person if you find yourself in a cycle where they idealise you one minute, devalue you the next minute, and then discard you when they are done. They lift you up, only to tear you down.

Difficult people don’t set, experience or receive boundaries in healthy ways. They don’t exist in relationships in a way that honours nuance and recognises ebbs and flows as a normal part of connection. Instead, they come at relationships dichotomously, ready to wield a metaphorical axe whenever their expectations go unmet, or launch into begging and submission if they perceive the slightest chance that you might abandon them. You become an unwitting passenger on a rollercoaster you didn’t ask to ride.

Different rulebooks

Setting boundaries can feel scary with a difficult person, because they don’t approach connection in the same way you do. Your interactions with them are unpredictable because you are not playing by the same rules, and in some cases, you are not even playing the same game . . . you are not aware that you are part of a game at all. Or your interactions are predictable, but damaging. You know what’s coming, and you don’t want what’s coming.

A difficult person’s rules around boundaries are based on past experiences where:

They were not given a choice about what or who came near them.

They had no opportunity to say no, or if they did, they were punished for it.

Their truth was invalidated, manipulated, shamed or perhaps taken away.

They were shamed or criticised or threatened with rejection or abandonment if they wanted space.

They expect other people’s reactions to be dangerous.

Their boundaries have been met with the withdrawal of love or accusations of being selfish, mean or unkind.

In comparison, a person who operates upon a foundation of psychological safety and self-regulation has rules around boundaries that look like:

I am allowed to decide who is permitted to be close to me.

I am allowed to say no whenever I need to.

My intuition is trustworthy and what is authentic to me is valid.

I am allowed to seek out space, and doing so when I need to is helpful for the quality of my relationships.

Other people’s reactions to my boundaries do not invalidate my rights, needs or worth.

My boundaries, and those I receive from others, are set for the purpose of both of us loving and respecting each other and supporting our mutual growth.

My inner peace is unavailable for disruption from people who are not peaceful within themselves.

Difficult dancing

Psychoanalyst Karen Horney proposed that childhood experiences with our grown-ups contribute to the development of our personality and form (or malform) our subsequent relationships as adults. She explains that when our primary caregivers are unavailable to meet our needs and provide safety for our emotional expression, it results in feelings of unworthiness, and subsequent relationships are experienced as inherently anxiety-provoking.

In response to this relational anxiety, we adopt one of three styles of interpersonal coping which, when used often enough, can become automatic and habitual in times of conflict:

Moving towards people (compliance).

Moving against people (aggression).

Moving away from people (detachment).

There are both healthy and unhealthy versions of each of these coping strategies. The challenge is to be able to identify when coping strategies previously used out of necessity become habitual and prevent healthy connection and restorative relationships in the here and now.

Try to notice where you see yourself in the following patterns, and/or where you see the difficult person in your life.

Unhealthy moving towards

This style of interpersonal coping is most recognisable as people-pleasing. It’s used by people who have learned that the most effective way to earn approval and avoid further rejection and criticism is via compliance. They attempt to perfect their behaviour, to be seen as ‘good’, and to ensure they are liked and accepted. The higher their anxiety around someone or the more they perceive them to be a threat, the more they tend to move towards that person using compliance as a strategy to avoid being hurt. It might look like:

People-pleasing (also known as fawning; we will discuss this more in Chapter 4).

Self-worth being dependent on approval from others.

Building their identity around others’ wants and desires.

Struggling to voice their own needs and opinions or losing their voice and opinions in deference to others.

Weak or absent boundaries.

Submitting to others’ views, needs or ways of doing things to avoid conflict.

Difficulty making decisions without checking in with others.

Coming across as needy or suffocating to others.

Ignoring their own needs in favour of caring for others.

Seeking more connection than others want or need because their self-worth depends on others being happy.

Feeling unnecessary guilt (and being motivated to ‘fix’ the guilt by making others happy).

Causing confusion for others because they can’t rely on the people-pleaser to speak up for themselves and take action to meet their own needs.

Causing others to feel exhausted by trying to ascertain what the people-pleaser truly wants because they are an interpersonal chameleon who becomes what they think others want them to be, rather than being who they are authentically.

Healthy moving towards

You connect from a place of knowing who you are and where you start and where the other person ends. You care for others wholeheartedly, while also counting your own needs as valid and important. Your boundaries are present and consistent. You make decisions that are workable for you and considerate towards others. You are able to stand up for yourself in times of conflict, while being led by kindness and empathy for other people.

Unhealthy moving against

Unhealthy moving against as a coping style is best recognised as ‘attack is the best form of defence’. Some people’s insecurities lead them to attempt to control and gain power over others to boost their sense of not being good enough. They’ve learned that aggression, resistance and control over others protects them, so they lead with hurting others before they can be hurt themselves. They are driven by an unconscious fear of being helpless and powerless. To maintain their position, they also attempt to cultivate perfect control of themselves and their emotions at all times. It might look like:

Approaching relationships as if they are a competition for power. Rather than collaborating and compromising, they are out to win.

Coming across as bossy, heavy-handed and domineering.

Manipulating, exploiting and attempting to outsmart others for their own advantage.

Struggling to consider others’ needs and wants or viewing them as less important than their own.

Believing that they are right and others are wrong.

Coming across as abrasive and uncaring (but they can also use charm when necessary to gain power over others, confusing their boundaries in the process).

Expecting others to feel obligated to meet their needs.

Refusing to admit any kind of vulnerability.

Healthy moving against

You are able to set boundaries and defend those boundaries when necessary, without walking over others and ignoring their rights and needs. You can be respectful in times of conflict and remove yourself if necessary, without making the situation into a grab for power or control. Your self-worth is not dependent on winning or gaining advantage over others.

Unhealthy moving away

This interpersonal coping style is most easily recognised as the person who stays remote from others because they are convinced that closeness only ever leads to pain. People who use unhealthy moving away have learned that others can’t be trusted to keep them safe. Therefore, the most effective way to reduce the threat that other people pose is to keep away from them.

The person who uses unhealthy moving away does so by physically avoiding others, withdrawing emotionally from others, or by being overly independent and self-sufficient and refusing to rely on others. It looks like:

Keeping emotional (and potentially physical) distance between themselves and others.

Feeling numb or attempting to suppress their feelings in relationships.

Feeling unworthy unless they meet certain self-imposed conditions, standards and expectations.

Using perfectionism, achievement and self-sufficiency to make up for feelings of unworthiness.

Keeping relationships at a superficial level.

Maintaining a high need for privacy.

Believing that their optional need for others makes them superior (but this is actually driven by self-loathing and a belief that people can’t be trusted to love them because they consider themselves defective).

A tendency to value intellectual connection over emotional connection.

A tendency to desire closeness in their relationships coupled with low motivation to change their coping strategies, or to even see these strategies of detachment as problematic.

Healthy moving away

You move away to give yourself appropriate time alone. You are comfortable meeting your own needs and you’ve learned to appreciate connection and the contribution of others to meet your needs, too.

We can further understand difficult people by looking at the relationship between insecure attachment styles and the unhealthy manifestations of the interpersonal coping styles:

Preoccupied attachment often plays out as unhealthy moving towards (compliance).

Avoidant attachment often plays out as unhealthy moving away (detachment).

Fearful attachment often plays out as moving against (aggression) or an oscillation between extremes of connection and disconnection.

These patterns connect further to categories of difficult behaviours. The result is a matrix of nine difficult people archetypes.

Difficult people archetypes

While no index of difficult people will perfectly account for every single person you encounter, and there can always be overlap between categories and within the difficult person with whom you are interacting (many things can be true at once for humans!), I offer you this taxonomy as a guide for identifying and understanding difficult people. We’ll then explore how to respond to each archetype in the second section of the book.

Each of these archetypes has behaviours common to the collective of difficult people: they disrupt others’ psychological safety and they are unable or unwilling to regulate themselves, leaving others at the mercy of their dysregulation.

Additionally, each of these archetypes has a common goal for their behaviours that stems from their attachment and interpersonal coping styles, even when they have low or no awareness of that goal or the behaviours they are using. We’ll look at these in turn.

While you work your way through each archetype, bear in mind that the difficult person in your life might behave in ways that fit multiple categories. You may recognise a primary archetype that broadly describes your difficult person, as well as features from a secondary archetype that are also applicable.

Archetypes with preoccupied attachment and unhealthy moving towards

Difficult people with preoccupied attachment and unhealthy moving towards styles of connection share a common goal of seeking validation and worthiness from the approval of others. They seek closeness on an unequal footing as they hold deep feelings of unworthiness about themselves. This plays out in three different archetypes:

The Plasticine

The Plasticine is entirely malleable. They will change shape to fit the needs and wants of someone else, giving power and priority over to that person and their needs and desires (known as fawning, see Chapter 4). For The Plasticine, their mouldability goes above and beyond the relational strengths of compromise, care and nurturing, and lapses into permissiveness and disregard for their own needs and wants. It’s difficult to know who The Plasticine actually is, because their authentic identity is shrouded by the masks they believe they need to wear to please others. You’ll struggle to know where you stand with The Plasticine because you can’t trust them to voice what is true for them. Sometimes, you might find yourself feeling like you need to stand up for The Plasticine, because they don’t do so for themselves. And after a while, it can feel exhausting trying to account for their needs when they consistently deny they have needs, or dismiss themselves in favour of making someone else more important.

The Plasticine is often experienced by others as being difficult because they genuinely believe they are unworthy and depend on others to bolster their sense of self, pandering and demonstrating chronic needs for approval and validation. It can result in The Plasticine relying on others to shape their identity (‘I like what you like’, ‘I want to do what you want to do’, ‘Whatever makes you happy makes me happy’).

It doesn’t mean that The Plasticine doesn’t have needs. They do, and the long-term effects of dismissing their own needs and having them ignored by others often leads The Plasticine to simmer with pent-up resentment and eventually erupt at the perceived injustice of their needs being ignored (even though this is precisely the pattern they created for others to follow). They may also neglect themselves (willingly or unwillingly), often justifying this self-neglect because their time is taken up caring for others.

It might initially feel easy to set boundaries with The Plasticine because they’ll accept your boundaries without question. The difficulty arises when you note over time that The Plasticine is so permissive that setting boundaries with them or around them feels like you’re taking advantage. You’ll have the sense that you’re walking all over them because you can’t trust them to care for themselves by letting you know what they have available in their giving tanks. You may feel that you are unfairly placed in the role of taker, even when you value equality for the people around you.

The Victim

The Victim feels overwhelmed by their own experience and circumstances and uses a sense of hopelessness as a tool to elicit care from others. They have an external locus of control and high expectations of others stepping in to compensate for what they can’t (or won’t) do for themselves.

Besides their victim mentality, they express their frustration by blaming others for their discomfort, circumstances and/or inability (or unwillingness) to change. They deflect responsibility with kitchen-sinking (see page 143), bringing up every other problem except the one in question, especially those problems of which you can be accused. The Victim carries the weight of the world on their shoulders as a martyr, is never short of reasons to complain about the unfairness of it all, yet reluctant to accept more equal divisions of their load lest they lose their reasons for remaining a victim. And when a parent features as this archetype, parentification can occur whereby The Victim turns the tables on their child, burdening the child with caring duties for the parent.

Boundaries are difficult with The Victim because they can attribute their feelings of hopelessness and helplessness as being your fault. When you attempt to set boundaries around their disempowerment, they will often act out, eliciting feelings of guilt from you that then drive you to help them . . . even if you promise yourself that ‘this is the last time’.

The Clinger

The Clinger maintains a tight grip on you to prevent you leaving them. They believe (unconsciously or consciously) that they can’t be without you, while simultaneously fearing that you will leave them because they are not good enough. They seek closeness that can feel cloying, even smothering to others. Because their need for connection is so intense, they often experience the opposite consequences: people leave them. The Clinger then decompensates as a way of guilting a return from the person who left, or interprets being left as a message to tighten their grip on the next person.

The Clinger uses attention-seeking, dependency and intrusion behaviours to compensate for their fragile relationship with themselves. Attention-seeking acts as a magnet, turning your focus towards them and providing them with the connection they seek. Even when brief, attention is a balm for The Clinger. The problem is that there’s no amount of attention that effectively and permanently offsets their feelings of inadequacy. They use dependency as a (conscious or unconscious) tool to keep others by their side, which creates a relational imbalance. Others who have securely attached (or even avoidant) patterns of connection can sense this imbalance and become uncomfortable, usually leading them to remove themselves.

People with fearful attachment styles or those who also have preoccupied attachment patterns can respond to The Clinger’s dependency as an invitation to fill the connection and self-worth voids they also experience. While this might sound like an elegant solution to two people with insecure attachment patterns, it’s unreliable because both parties are fragile within themselves and with others. Unstable self-worth, without an individual doing the work to heal their relationship with themselves, leads to unstable relationships with others.

And finally, The Clinger can become intrusive as part of their attempts to seek closeness. They fail to acknowledge boundaries of privacy and personal space out of a misguided belief that having access to more of you (even before you are willing or ready) will bring you closer, thus providing them with the connection that they desire.

The Clinger doesn’t have personal boundaries and, as such, they struggle to heed the boundaries of others. The drive for closeness is so strong for The Clinger that they will violate boundaries to achieve it. The violation is (understandably) met with resistance from others and corrective boundaries are put in place. The Clinger interprets these boundaries as evidence of rejection and descends into emotional dysregulation because their worst fears have been realised.

Archetypes with avoidant attachment and unhealthy moving away

Difficult people with avoidant attachment and unhealthy moving away styles of connection and coping share a common goal of avoiding vulnerability because it feels inherently unsafe. Because humans innately need to belong to each other, these difficult people navigate connection at arm’s length, convincing themselves they don’t need or desire closeness. They generally feel okay about themselves, with a fairly stable sense of self-worth (at least, on the surface). But their fear of vulnerability complicates their relationships by encumbering any closeness they achieve with an obstacle course designed to keep you over there. This plays out in three different archetypes:

The Subtle Manipulator

The Subtle Manipulator’s modus operandi is passive-aggression. They are unwilling or unable to express their negative feelings openly, but the feelings still exist to make them uncomfortable. As a result, they (unconsciously or consciously) choose to indirectly express their feelings leading to a disconnect between what The Subtle Manipulator does versus what they say.

The Subtle Manipulator can use various strategies within their passive-aggressive repertoire, all designed to manipulate you into connecting with them while they avoid the vulnerability of offering up their authentic selves. They may breach your confidence, violating your boundaries by offering your private information to someone else. They may subtly compete with you, turning your conversations into a game of one-upmanship. They may guilt-trip you into doing what they would prefer you to do, rather than communicating their needs openly and with respect for your boundaries. And they may triangulate (see page 170), expressing their frustrations about someone else to you and attempting to place you in a go-between role.

Setting boundaries with The Subtle Manipulator feels confusing, messy and fickle. It’s difficult to know where you stand and to maintain your sense of clarity around your boundaries when The Subtle Manipulator destabilises you with their refusal to say it how it is.

The Narcissist

The Narcissist believes they are superior, special and worthy of greater attention, better treatment and more advantage than others. They can be disarmingly charming, often creating a feeling that you are the only person in the world that matters. But this charm is temporary and will be followed by the experience of being ignored, rebuffed or cast aside when you cease to be of benefit to them. It comes across as if this person believes they are not just worthy, but superior in worth in comparison to others. Their grandiose ponderings about their own greatness are actually driven by a poor self-concept and deep-seated beliefs that they can only be worthy if they are elevated above others. They seek control and power over others to rectify the internal deficits and flaws they perceive themselves to have, boosting their own worthiness by diminishing others in the process.

The Narcissist uses their sense of entitlement to obtain their bounty of privileges – privileges they receive simply for being them. They use exclusion of people as a tool to enhance feelings of importance for those allowed to remain in their inner circle (which magnifies the risk that those around The Narcissist will be taken advantage of). The Narcissist also uses gaslighting to ensure that their version of reality is the only acceptable one that exists.

Setting boundaries with The Narcissist is fraught with difficulty. Usually, your boundaries won’t exist to The Narcissist, especially if those boundaries prevent or impede access to you and/or resources that they would normally use for their benefit. If your boundaries are acknowledged by The Narcissist, it will only be by making you wrong, mean or foolish for having them. If you stand by your boundaries and attempt to defend them, The Narcissist might acquiesce, especially if they fear you’ll publicly expose their behaviour or leave them. Make no mistake, though: any promises The Narcissist makes in this phase of your interactions with them are likely to be manipulation tools to shift you back into a place of disempowerment, ripe for The Narcissist to resume taking advantage.

The Brick Wall

The Brick Wall is a fortress closed to connection. No matter how much effort you put into reaching them, it will always feel like at least of part of them remains hidden and unavailable to access. It is possible to have an intimate relationship with The Brick Wall, as long as your expectations for emotional closeness are low (and just because it’s possible doesn’t mean it will be fulfilling!). Any intimate relationship lacking in emotional depth will be dissatisfying for a person who has the capacity and desire to venture beyond superficial connection.

Interactions and relationships with The Brick Wall are vulnerable to doors that were once open being suddenly, and sometimes unexpectedly, closed. Conflict will rarely be repaired, and instead, The Brick Wall will cut you off. Rather than let you know that they don’t see a future with you, The Brick Wall will ghost you out of nowhere. They disappear because avoidance feels safer than vulnerability, even when it hurts other people in the process.

Setting boundaries with The Brick Wall is difficult because your boundaries will tend to ask more of them than they are willing and/or able to give. When you express needs for emotional closeness and relationship repair to The Brick Wall, they are likely to hope that you’ll settle for how things have always been. If you pressure them, they are likely to disappear, or become emotionally dysregulated and lash out because they cannot cope with feeling vulnerable.

Archetypes with fearful attachment and unhealthy moving against

Difficult people with fearful attachment and unhealthy moving against styles of connection and coping share a common goal of wanting a stable connection. They desire closeness, but struggle with trusting others and themselves to be able to access closeness in a healthy way. They feel intense anxiety when being close to others and have a fragile relationship with themselves characterised by feelings of chronic unworthiness. The result is relationship instability, both within themselves and between themselves and others. This plays out in three different archetypes:

The Swindler

The Swindler navigates their relational anxiety by being two-faced: you’ll see one version of them and hear they were quite a different version of themselves behind your back. Or you’ll meet one version of them depending on their mood, and another when their mood changes. It’s hard to be sure of who you’re dealing with.

As they struggle with trusting others, you’ll also find The Swindler easily breaks trust with others through deception, outright lying or behaviour that undermines someone who is perceived as a threat. The Swindler often lacks a social filter that assists them to temper their communication and behaviour as appropriate to the relationship and situation. Instead, The Swindler is the veritable elephant in a china shop, using honesty as a weapon and ‘I was just joking’ as an excuse. And when you can’t quite identify why The Swindler makes you so uncomfortable, their behaviour likely falls into the frustrating category of inconsistency.

Setting boundaries with The Swindler is challenging because a) you are unsure who you’re dealing with on any given day, and b) they may devolve into emotional dysregulation at being called out and then use power-play strategies to weaponise your boundaries against you.

The Aggressor

The Aggressor attacks before they can be attacked. Even when not quite tipping over into the dangerous end of the spectrum, The Aggressor can be scary. Despite wanting closeness (albeit likely at an unconscious level), The Aggressor defends themselves at the first sign of vulnerability. This means that you could be verbally or emotionally attacked seemingly without reason, because the trigger exists within The Aggressor and may even be outside of their own awareness. Their verbal blazing guns hide deep feelings of insecurity, although this can be challenging to believe when you are faced with someone using their vocal, physical or emotional largesse to intimidate you.

While aggression is their primary approach to relating, The Aggressor has additional artillery at their disposal: bullying, revenge and trolling (if online). All three are behaviours that place The Aggressor in a position of power to compensate for their feelings of inferiority, while punishing others for daring to call them out or cause them emotional pain.

Setting boundaries with The Aggressor is difficult (and likely scary) because they will take exception to your rights being counted and respected and then project their (fear-inducing) dysregulation onto you. It can seem easier to not rock the boat. The Aggressor will not rest until they perceive power to be restored in their favour

The Controller

The Controller manages their feelings of inadequacy and mistrust of others by insisting on making the rules for the people around them, the household in which they reside, and possibly their workplace, too. They insist others prove they can be trusted by setting the highest of expectations . . . even though, in reality, they predict those expectations will not be reached. As their expectations are unrealistically high, The Controller thinks they are usually right: others disappoint them. They use these failures as proof and justification for punishing the people that fall short (silent treatment, anyone?!).

The Controller spends their energy testing and questioning those around them, intentionally tripping them up to confirm their beliefs for how relationships and people are inherently unsafe. It’s very difficult to ‘win’ with The Controller because they need you to remain as a passenger in the relationship, only doing what you are told, to avoid them having to feel vulnerable. Therefore, setting boundaries with The Controller usually doesn’t go well because it directly challenges their safety strategy: 100 per cent control and at all times.

In summary, the nine difficult people archetypes are as follows:

Avoidance of discomfort

We all struggle at times. Our feelings overwhelm us. Our thoughts darken our perspective. Staying in the present moment seems unacceptable. Difficult people are no different. Their preference, like many people, is to avoid their discomfort, now. However, the use of avoidance strategies can often complicate their difficult behaviours and connection styles, magnifying their unhealthy ways of being.

Successful and healthy relationships, including the one we have with ourselves, require emotional resilience. Emotional resilience is the ability to sit with and regulate feelings of discomfort and distress with healthy inner and outer tools to be able to stay connected to the here and now. On the contrary, the goal of any avoidance strategy is to relieve distress by bypassing the present moment. While we all avoid discomfort to a small degree, maladaptive avoidance strategies are those that occur to such an extent that they do so at a cost to the person’s health, who they want to be, or what they need to do to be effective. They stop the person who is using avoidance from developing emotional resilience because they prioritise temporary relief over everything else.

Avoidance strategies exist on a continuum from relatively harmless (e.g. procrastination or bingeing Netflix) to harm-inducing (e.g. deliberate self-harm or illicit drug use). Harm is mitigated for strategies that are benign, used infrequently and/or in low intensities, and aggravated for strategies that are injurious, used frequently and/or in high intensities.

Difficult people generally struggle with emotional resilience. Either adaptive responses to unpleasant feelings and events have never been modelled, or a lack of psychological safety and/or the experience of trauma in childhood and adolescence has led to the use of maladaptive avoidance strategies that continue to keep the person in unworkable patterns of relating. Trauma sustained in adulthood can also be the origin of maladaptive avoidance strategies (but it’s less likely to show up if healthy strategies are already in place). Maladaptive coping strategies include:

Short-term use of these strategies can feel good because they remove or change unwanted feelings. Most people engage in at least a couple of these behaviours during times of increased stress. However, long-term use can cause additional problems, including reinforcement of fear, disconnection from family and friends, loss of social skills, negative impact on educational and professional achievement, more frequent interpersonal conflict and deteriorating physical and mental health.

Combine these avoidance strategies with insecure attachment and unhealthy interpersonal coping styles and the unworkable patterns intensify. The problem for difficult people is, though, that these strategies usually feel necessary, even inescapable. They expect to be hurt because they have been hurt previously and that expectation leads to habitual avoidance, even though doing so compounds their pain by damaging their relationship with themselves and usually comes at the cost of the psychological safety of others.

The difficult person guards, rejects, attacks, walks over, criticises, demeans, manipulates, gaslights and abandons others. They lash out, shut down, punish, ignore, play victim and discharge their emotional dysregulation onto everyone around them. And then they employ avoidance strategies to band-aid their feelings about it all.

Why keep avoiding if it causes so many problems? Because in a sense, these strategies work. They provide relief from distress in the present moment and/or safeguard against perceived threat. Like their patterns of relating, the difficult person doesn’t necessarily recognise that these strategies violate the rights of someone else. And when they do have self-awareness, the benefit of escaping their pain in the moment outweighs the cost of the negative impact it might have on someone else. Difficult people tend to do what they’ve always done because it feels safer. An ineffective habit that works briefly will always feel easier than the effort of practising something new that is unfamiliar (even when it has the potential to be much more effective).

Psychic avoidance

Avoidance strategies are not always something you do. Some exist in the psyche and can occur at an unconscious level. These are referred to as defence mechanisms and guard an individual against emotional discomfort by avoiding thinking and facing things they’d rather not deal with. Defence mechanisms can be used in healthy ways – however, difficult people will generally use them in ways that hurt themselves and/or others.

Renowned psychoanalyst Anna Freud defined numerous defence mechanisms. Let’s explore those that tend to show up for difficult people.

Displacement

Displacement occurs by shifting the target of the original impulse or feeling to a different target, because expressing the impulse or feeling towards the original target is unacceptable. For example, a son visits his mother to tell her he didn’t get the job he interviewed for. She makes a casual reference to him ‘always struggling under pressure, unlike your sister who has got her life together’. Instead of standing up for himself and dealing with his hurt and frustration with his mother, he returns home and picks a fight with his partner, seemingly over nothing.

Denial

Denial occurs via the refusal to acknowledge facts within an individual’s personal experience, whether they be feelings, thoughts or circumstances, to protect themselves from having to acknowledge and bear that experience and its consequences. For example, a father refuses to acknowledge that his parenting style affected his children because they have obtained outward success in life.

Father (critically): ‘You’ll never be able to manage an acreage property.’

Daughter (sarcastically): ‘Thanks for the support, Dad.’

Father (defensively): ‘I’m just telling you the truth.’

Daughter (attempting to connect): ‘Your “truth” comes across as constant criticism and negativity. It doesn’t feel good to receive.’

Father (in denial): ‘Well it hasn’t done you any harm. You’ve done very well for yourself.’

Daughter (communicating hurt): ‘My income doesn’t negate the pain I still feel about how critical you were of me when I was a child, and continue to be despite the fact that I am an adult capable of making my own decisions. It would be nice to just be supported instead of criticised.’

Father (remains in denial): ‘Well, how I am has worked because of how far you’ve come. I helped you reach your potential by not letting you settle for less.’

Projection

Projection occurs when someone fails to recognise negative traits or behaviours in themselves, and instead perceives those same traits or behaviours in other people. For example, a spouse has been unfaithful, but instead of acknowledging their infidelity, they begin to accuse their partner of cheating.

Regression

Regression involves the display of age-inappropriate behaviour in response to intense distress. For example, two women in their thirties are close friends. They have a falling out over one friend breaching the confidence of the other, and their communication deteriorates. The friend who violated trust feels threatened and reverts to name-calling, stating that ‘We’re not best friends anymore!’. It feels like high school.

Rationalisation

Rationalisation refers to distorting the facts of internal experiences or external situations at a cognitive level to make them less threatening. For example, you communicate to your brother how hurt you are that he told other family members that you are questioning your gender identity. Rather than acknowledge that he blatantly crossed your boundaries and caused you pain in doing so, he justifies his behaviour by telling himself that he was doing you a favour because the family would have found out eventually.

Introjection

Introjection refers to the unconscious mental representation of external factors belonging to another person that you adopt as part of your identity, including personality traits and characteristics, values, attitudes and beliefs. This can occur when we repeat ways of being modelled by our parents. For example, a father models yelling at others as a way of coping with stress and his son grows up to mimic lashing out when under stress. It can also occur for people who have a tendency to be too compliant. Compliance behaviours can extend to a person adopting another person’s ways of being in the world to the point that they become disconnected from their own identity.

Compensation

Compensation occurs when an individual attempts to make up for what they consider to be flaws or imperfections in themselves, or dissatisfaction with an area of their life. The compensation behaviours are real and can be in response to either real or imagined shortcomings. For example, a 30-year-old woman feels inadequate because she is single while her friends are coupled and planning marriage. She compensates by focusing her energy on career achievement. This can turn ‘difficult’ in a similar way to introjection, in that the person’s attempts at compensation for their perceived flaws hinders their ability to stand strong in their own identity. Instead, they turn themselves inside out and upside down to become who they think they need to be, rejecting their authentic selves in the process and making it challenging for others to experience interactions with them that feel genuine.

Splitting

Splitting occurs when a person perceives others or themselves as either all good or all bad, but not a mix of both. Fearfully attached archetypes are prone to this, and it can extend to viewing external events and internal experiences dichotomously. For example, a difficult person finally finds a general practitioner who makes them feel seen and heard. They idealise the doctor, complimenting them and leaving 5-star reviews wherever they can. And yet, this all changes one day when the doctor gently confronts the difficult person about their decision to cease their medication against medical advice. The glowing compliments are replaced with verbal attacks and 1-star complaints.

Conversion

Conversion occurs via the unconscious transfer of psychological distress into idiopathic physiological pain or discomfort that cannot be explained by any other illness or disease processes. For example, a daughter expects her father to criticise her and suddenly develops a headache when it’s time to visit him. She’s unaware of the anxiety that now exists as physical pain.

Avoidance as a coping strategy is about tempering relational discomfort to a level that the difficult person believes they can withstand, and that means either exerting or rejecting control.

The boundary pendulum

Difficult people tend to swing towards extremes of control or permissiveness when it comes to boundaries (or oscillating between the two). Their archetype will hint towards the direction they tend to swing.

Control

A difficult person uses control to compensate for a childhood that was unpredictable and inconsistent, where they felt powerless and unsafe. As adults, they manage anxiety and create a sense of stability by controlling themselves, their routines, the patterns in their environment and, where possible, those around them. This control can show up as constant criticism towards others because shaping others’ behaviour helps them to feel like they can predict their environment and keep themselves safe. It can show up as excessive monitoring in the name of ‘safety’, and it can also show up as an intense need for order, neatness and routine. It’s a coping mechanism. Fearful attachment combined with unhealthy moving against can swing towards high need for control. Here, we have The Swindler, The Aggressor and, obviously, The Controller.

Dangerous people will extend their power play to the level of coercive control.

Coercive control

Coercive control goes beyond control for coping’s sake and is used by dangerous people as a systematic form of oppression designed to instil fear in the victim while also taking away their power. It’s dangerous, it’s abusive and it’s never okay. Signs of coercive control include:

Gaslighting (denying your experience to destabilise you and cause you to doubt yourself).

Removing your freedom and autonomy (e.g. forcing you to ask permission to do things, controlling what you eat or wear).

Isolating you from your support system.

Denying you access to money.

Emotionally and psychologically abusing you by criticising you, throwing jealous tantrums and making you feel like you are never good enough.

Implementing constant surveillance of you and your activities (might include tracking your whereabouts, and/or video-recording you in your home, with or without your knowledge).

Making sexual demands against your will.

Threatening your children or pets (to ensure compliance from you).

If you notice these signs in your relationship, your safety must come first. You need a plan and support to remove yourself from the relationship.

Permissiveness

Sometimes, difficult people don’t look ‘difficult’. In fact, their entire suite of coping mechanisms centre around making sure everyone else is happy. Permissive people tie their worth to the happiness of others. It plays out like this:

Step two behaviours might include:

Being incredibly hard on themselves, turning themselves inside out and upside down to be everything other people want them to be.

Failing to say no when necessary for their own self-preservation.

Making excuses for other people’s difficult behaviour.

Staying quiet to be lovable and thus avoid rejection or conflict.

Over-explaining themselves whenever they feel they’ve let someone down.

Consistently allowing other people to walk over their boundaries (if they have any).

Permissive coping can be exhausting for others who are (unintentionally) made to feel responsible for validating, making decisions for and guiding the feelings of a permissive person.

Archetypes of preoccupied attachment and unhealthy moving towards swing closer to permissiveness (The Plasticine, The Victim and The Clinger), whereas archetypes of avoidant attachment and unhealthy moving away (The Subtle Manipulator, The Narcissist and The Brick Wall) can swing either way depending on what advantage they are attempting to gain for themselves.

Fix them

Before we go any further, let me be clear: we’re not working towards a magical prescription for how to fix the difficult person(s) in your life. That chapter doesn’t exist in this book, or in the philosophy underpinning any of my work. Yes, difficult people do things that are unnecessary, unfair and often damaging. They are problematic (so much so, that this book is necessary). However, focusing externally is simply not helpful because you are giving your power away to someone who is not you. As much as we might wish to, we can’t control or change other people, and we can’t make them be someone they are not invested in being. No amount of work you do will fix them.

What if your dad never changes, never recognises or apologises for the harm he’s caused, and dies without ever expressing some form of guilt or remorse? What if your ex-partner never acknowledges how emotionally incompetent they were in their relationship with you? What if your boss continues to be awarded bonuses despite bullying you and your colleagues while the corporate machine ignores their behaviour?

I don’t want your healing to be dependent on someone else. I don’t want you to disrespect yourself by waiting around for years for someone to finally act appropriately. To do so is to compromise your worth, and it will mean that you constantly undervalue the price of accessing you. Recognising the need for boundaries to protect yourself with these difficult people is a great start. Recognising that you have a choice in how you respond is priceless.

The remaining chapters in this book are designed to help you identify, understand and set boundaries around the difficult people in your life and to practise the skills to protect yourself in an empowered way. Yes, it will take a little time and effort, but I promise you that this energy is better spent here than on waiting around for the difficult person to miraculously stop being a dick.

The work we do together will help you anticipate when your psychological safety is at risk and take steps to restore your safety by setting boundaries. As we do so, please remember that you don’t have to be perfect to be effective. Change is possible and it’s possible for you, even when you’re a fallible human dealing with other fallible humans.

Exercise

Answer the following questions in your mind, in discussion with a trusted friend or in your journal:

When considering the difficult person(s) in your life, which interpersonal coping styles most accurately fit their behaviour?

When considering the difficult person(s) in your life, which archetypes most accurately fit their behaviour?

Which avoidance (practical and/or psychic) strategies is the difficult person in your life using?

Where are these strategies harming you or impacting you negatively?

What shows up for you as your understanding of the difficult person(s) in your life expands? What feels possible now that perhaps didn’t feel possible before?

Do you see yourself in any parts of this chapter? Can you offer yourself compassion and empathy for what has led you to learn these ways of connecting and coping?

Summary

Difficult people often grow up to be emotionally stunted. They appear to others as children in adult bodies because of their regressed ways of connecting and coping. They attempt to obtain love in unlovable ways. They create cycles of lifting you up and then tearing you down. They play relationship games you don’t want to play and use a rulebook for connecting with which you are not familiar. It’s confusing and destabilising.

In addition to being insecurely attached, difficult people have unhealthy styles of interpersonal coping. They move towards (too close). They move away (too far). And they move against (too harsh).

Based on their insecure attachment style and interpersonal coping style, difficult people can be categorised into nine archetypes:

Preoccupied attachment and unhealthy moving towards: The Plasticine, The Victim, The Clinger.

Avoidant attachment and unhealthy moving away: The Subtle Manipulator, The Narcissist, The Brick Wall.

Fearful attachment and unhealthy moving against: The Swindler, The Aggressor, The Controller.

Everyone uses practical and psychic avoidance strategies to cope on occasion when their reality feels overwhelming. For difficult people, these avoidance strategies and defence mechanisms complicate and intensify their insecure attachment and interpersonal coping behaviours. The more frequently, intensely and longer term their use of the coping strategy, the more harm it is likely to do. Difficult people can be so committed to protecting their vulnerabilities that they’ll use their avoidance strategies while disregarding the hurt they cause others.

Difficult people can swing primarily towards permissive boundaries or controlling boundaries, or oscillate between the two, depending on the archetype they fit into.

3

Are they actually difficult?

A breakdown of poor behaviour

Annoying fact: poor behaviour exists. It exists in the world at large and in the tiny worlds we create within it: our daily interactions, partnerships, families, friendships and workplaces.

Second annoying fact: you and I are guilty of poor behaviour. Damn, that mirror is confronting sometimes.

Do these facts mean that we are surrounded by difficult people? Do they mean that you and I are difficult people? No, not in isolation. Humans are a little more complicated than that.

In this chapter, we’ll explore whether you are dealing with a bona fide difficult person, someone in the midst of temporary struggle, or someone who does things differently from you, and in doing so, rubs you the wrong way. We’ll take what has happened (or keeps happening), what you know about this person, and what you know about yourself, to evaluate whether you have a difficult person on your hands with whom boundaries are not just necessary, but critical to your self-preservation.

Case study: Linda and Angela

To assist our exploration, let me introduce you to Linda (59) and her daughter, Angela (34). Linda and Angela have a somewhat fractious relationship. Angela often feels like her mother doesn’t ‘get me’, and Linda believes that if only Angela took her advice, then she’d ‘have a chance at getting her life together’.

What’s wrong with Angela’s life? Nothing, according to Angela. But the fact that she’s single, childless and spends money on travel rather than saving for a house deposit, and devotes her remaining time to work and her cat rather than dating is enough to make Linda frustrated. Linda doesn’t have much of a filter either, and struggles to keep her thoughts to herself. After visiting her mother, Angela often leaves feeling misunderstood at best, and not good enough at worst.

Is Linda a difficult person? Let’s find out.

What they do (or fail to do)

The first thing that will lead to you questioning whether you are dealing with a difficult person is something uncomfortable happens (or, as you’re reading this book, you reflect on the things that have previously happened, and possibly continue happening) with this person. It’s so uncomfortable that you are thrown off kilter.

Action Behaviours

Difficult action behaviours occur when this person does or says something that hurts you. They inject something into the interaction or environment that destabilises you. These actions could include:

Yelling.

Name-calling.

Swearing.

Slamming doors/throwing objects.

Blaming/accusing.

Gossiping.

Undermining.

Lying.

Invalidating or dismissing your feelings.

Intimidating body language.

Projecting their dysregulation onto you.

Talking over you.

None of these actions feels good to receive. However, your discomfort might also be created by something this person does not do.

Inaction behaviours

Inaction can be just as difficult to receive as difficult actions. Inaction behaviours refer to something this person fails to offer you, or something they remove from the interaction or environment, which spawns discomfort by its absence. They include:

Silent treatment.

Ghosting.

Lack of empathy.

Lack of validation and acknowledgement of your feelings.

Avoidance of the topic at hand.

Lack of accountability.

Leaving the interaction without acknowledging they are leaving and without marking the interruption as a break.

Failing to reply (via text/email).

Blatant ignoring (e.g. putting on headphones in the middle of your interaction with them).

Closed body language.

Unconsciously using defence mechanisms to avoid their present-moment experience.

Lack of insight.

Case study: Linda and Angela

In terms of action behaviours, Linda doesn’t become loud when she’s talking to Angela about her life choices. However, she does invalidate Angela’s feelings and dismiss Angela’s clearly communicated values: ‘You’ll wake up one day and want to have a baby and then you’ll regret not finding a man!’; ‘Cheryl has just become a grandma and I have to embarrass myself in front of her by saying the closest thing I have to a grandchild is a cat!’

In terms of inaction behaviours, Linda displays lack of accountability, validation and insight. She uses the defence mechanism of denial to avoid acknowledging that her behaviour around Angela causes Angela distress.

Is Linda a difficult person at this point? She definitely makes Angela feel uncomfortable, but she’s not glaringly violating Angela’s psychological safety. We need more information before making a decision.

Okay, so there’s no question that you’re feeling uncomfortable because of what this person has or hasn’t done in their interaction(s) with you. Depending on the intensity of actions and inactions, you might already know that your psychological safety was violated and/or their dysregulation was problematic.

However, one instance of such interpersonal unpleasantness doesn’t necessarily certify this person as difficult. The snowball builds when you assess their way of being during the interaction(s).

How they do it

‘I can’t explain it. It’s not what they said, it’s how they said it.’ You might know this feeling. You can’t quite explain why the interaction made you uncomfortable because it’s not always obvious. Sometimes (can I use this word without feeling nauseous?) it’s the vibe of the interaction (okay, apparently, I can’t). It’s not what they did but how they did it.

Disingenuous

Do their behaviours match their words? Do you trust them to do what they say they will do, or do they tend to be one person to your face and another behind your back? Have you seen evidence of them charming others only for their own gain? Do you know a ‘side’ of them that other people don’t ever see? Does that side of them cause you pain on a regular basis?

I once got a job in a small department that was part of a larger mental health service. I was in the early years of my career with lots of energy fuelled by my love for the work. I worked alongside another psychologist, a woman with a couple of decades more experience than me. While she was charming and supportive to my face, even going out of her way to chat with me in between clients, it was a different story behind my back. I discovered from co-workers that she sniped, gossiped and complained about me, regularly expressing frustration that I saw too many clients, making her clinical work statistics ‘look bad’. I didn’t stay long in that particular role – disingenuous behaviour is tough to work alongside.

Communication style

What is their standard communication style, and how does this change (if at all) in times of conflict? Do they listen to what you say or talk over the top of you? Are they aggressive (fearful attached, unhealthy moving against archetypes), passive-aggressive (avoidant attached, unhealthy moving away archetypes), or passive (preoccupied attachment, unhealthy moving towards archetypes)? Do they raise their voice, call you names, belittle and criticise you? Do they threaten you and invalidate your experience? Do they engage with you or enter into the conversation ready to win?

Attitude

What is their attitude towards you and others? Is it respectful or dismissive? Is it curious and welcoming or judgemental and excluding? How do they respond when they cause someone else pain? Do they seek to apologise and repair, or do they turn the blame outward to the other person, refusing to take responsibility?

In workplaces, personal attitudes can be reflections of the broader organisational culture. This is not always the case, because the odd ‘bad egg’ can be present, but it is often the case because humans are easily influenced to behave in ways consistent with the rest of the group because of our need to belong and fit in. One of my undergraduate degrees was a Bachelor of Business in Human Resource Management. As part of my coursework, I did work experience in the HR department at Dreamworld, a theme park on the Gold Coast, Australia. Even though I was only there for eight weeks and not a paid employee, I was welcomed with open arms. My time there was not only spent learning HR practices in a real organisational setting, but included visits to the tigers before the park opened and the odd rollercoaster ride on our way to calling on other departments away from the HR building. My HR mentors lived and breathed an organisational culture of fun and professionalism and my days there were unforgettable for the best reasons.

On the other hand, personal attitudes can be a reflection of an unwelcoming organisational culture. One of my clinical placements was at a youth mental health service. Remember that sometimes interactions are difficult, people are difficult, the culture is difficult not because of what is said or done but because of how it is said or done. I wasn’t spoken to rudely . . . I just wasn’t acknowledged at all unless I was called into a session to shadow a superior. I wasn’t given anywhere to sit other than the kitchen, where I was ignored while the service employees chatted and laughed on their breaks. I wasn’t given anything to do other than ‘whatever you’ve got for uni, just do that’. I felt that I was an inconvenience and an annoyance. I was embarrassed to be required to turn up to a placement where I wasn’t wanted. It was so uncomfortable that I negotiated with my placement co-ordinator to end my time there prematurely in favour of extending my time at another placement. Attitude – personal or organisational – is no small thing.

Intention

Be mindful of intent. Do they mean to be hurtful? What can you gather about whether they wanted to cause you pain, or whether your discomfort is an accidental side effect? Sometimes, all you have to go on here is your intuition. Other times, you’ll be able to gauge intent by the interaction or pattern with this person also being devoid of responsibility, accountability, empathy and willingness to change.

For people who use avoidance as a habitual coping strategy, lack of awareness about the impact of their behaviour is common because they are fixated on reducing their own discomfort. They don’t necessarily intend to hurt you. Your pain is a side effect of their inability to prioritise anything other than their own struggle.

Be particularly aware of when someone appears to lack empathy, though. Lack of empathy (see page 100) can be a sign that intention is present and it usually leads to low motivation to change because of the high reward of getting their own way.

One of the key differences between difficult and dangerous people is that difficult people, with or without insight, usually don’t have intent, or they display some kind of remorse after the fact. A dangerous person, with or without insight, usually has intent, and no empathy or remorse.

If intent is not present, it doesn’t automatically relieve the person of their difficult status. Continually prioritising their own coping when it’s harming someone else is also a marker of being difficult.

Duration, intensity and frequency

The relational markers listed above aren’t necessarily problematic in isolation. Pay attention to the duration, intensity and frequency of this person’s concerning behaviours. Does the intensity of their reaction appear excessive? Does it last longer than what appears to be appropriate? Does it happen repeatedly?

If your brow is furrowed as you try to ascertain exactly how you know where the line is, I see you. When does intensity shift from appropriate to inappropriate and duration shift from ‘this long’ to ‘too long’? And exactly how many times does a behaviour need to occur in order to be considered difficult? I’d love to drop a set of steps here that is both practical and absolute. I can’t, though, because doing so would betray everything I know about being human: as similar as we can be when behaving poorly, there will always be factors that are unique to the person being difficult and to you as the person receiving them.

In acknowledgement of the complexity of the difficult person experience, here are my suggestions to help your decision-making process:

Your intuition is a powerful source of information. Trust your gut here.

Your assessment of difficult-level intensity, duration and frequency will always be based on what you choose to allow in your life. You have the choice to be more tolerant or less tolerant based on the type of relationships you want to cultivate.

Having said both of these things, difficult people can cause you to lose trust in your intuition and generally doubt your own experience. If you feel unsure, ask someone you trust for their objective opinion.

Intensity: Does their behaviour appear to land outside of what you and/or others would consider socially acceptable or reasonable if you were in a similar position? Could it indicate they have problems regulating themselves because their overwhelm is projected onto you? And does it create very strong negative feelings in you (fear, shame, guilt, sadness, anger)? If so, the difficult-level intensity box has likely been ticked.

Duration: Does their behaviour continue even after the interaction is over? For example, are they still giving you the silent treatment days later, or continuing the argument via text for hours or days at a time, or devolving straight back into the same behaviour over the same issue the next time you seen them? If so, the difficult-level duration box has likely been ticked.

Frequency: Are you and/or others no longer surprised by this person’s behaviour? Has it happened so often that you can now predict when it will happen again? If so, the difficult-level frequency box has likely been ticked.

Case study: Linda and Angela

Angela was less concerned with what her mother did and didn’t do, and more concerned with how she did it. While putting Angela down to her face, Linda’s friends regularly told Angela that she was the apple of her mother’s eye. This was confusing to Angela because she believed she was a constant disappointment to her mother. However, Angela was also aware that her mother was overly concerned with what other people thought of her, and did her best to paint a picture of who she wanted others to perceive her to be. It was disingenuous.

Linda’s communication style was generally passive-aggressive. Unable and/or unwilling to own her grief, and acknowledge that her expectations that her adult child must live according to her wishes were unrealistic, Linda was left with passive-aggressive digs at everything Angela was ‘missing out on’.

Linda’s attitude was best described as misguided love. She believed she had Angela’s happiness at the forefront of her attempts to force her to prioritise relationships and babies. However, Angela received this as negative judgement and non-acceptance of her as a human being.

Did Linda intend to cause Angela pain? No. In fact, she believed she was trying to help her. It was precisely this insistence and simultaneous dismissal of Angela’s feelings that was hurtful, though.

The intensity of Linda’s behaviour was fairly benign. The duration and frequency were not. Angela couldn’t speak to her mother on the phone or spend time with her in person without Linda suggesting she was ‘on the wrong path in life’ and ‘destined to be left on the shelf’. It happened multiple times per conversation/visit, causing Angela to dread seeing or speaking to Linda.

Can we say that Linda is difficult at this stage? Well, she’s not easy. She’s not loving Angela unconditionally. Let’s gather more information.

Now, you have valuable data about what this person has and hasn’t done and how they have done it. Still not entirely sure if they are difficult based on the information you’ve gathered so far? Then next we must dive into what you know about them.

What you know about them

Dear reader, please pay attention because this is one of the most important indicators in your entire experience with a potentially difficult person: look for patterns.

We need to distinguish between a bad day and a pervasive pattern of behaviour. A single unpalatable action is quite different from a collection of actions and attitudes that all point in the same difficult direction. Some of the following markers have been mentioned earlier in this chapter. Now, consider them in terms of the patterns you’ve seen occur within and around this person.

Lack of insight

Difficult people often lack self-awareness. They are quick to blame you for failing to read their mind and meet their needs immediately before they descend into dysregulation (they then blame you for that dysregulation). If only you were a better partner, sibling, parent, child, family member, friend, employee, therapist, boss, doctor, pool attendant, then said difficult person would behave better!

Patterns that demonstrate lack of insight will show up across topics, situations and people for a truly difficult person. It won’t just be one thing. What it will be is a consistent tendency to overlook the self-led origins of their behaviour, and the impact it’s having on you.

Insightless behaviour occurs when someone has no awareness of the impact of their behaviour on others. It’s different from gaslighting in that people who gaslight do so consciously and with intention, whereas people who are insightless don’t have intention or conscious awareness.

Insightless behaviour can be transformed into insightful behaviour if the person has a level of psychological mindedness available. And when psychological mindedness is supported by willingness to change behaviour that is unworkable, this is how we grow and become more effective. Insightless behaviour without psychological mindedness and willingness to change causes others to experience feelings of hurt, disbelief, anger, resentment, sadness, a loss of trust and, eventually, a breakdown in relationships.

Lack of accountability

When asked to take accountability, it’s common for the difficult person to launch into externalising the reasons for their behaviour. Accountability often feels like an attack when the person being called out is not ready or willing to acknowledge how their behaviour harms others. It can show up as repair incompetence, where the person fails to apologise and/or refuses or avoids actions to make amends or reconnect when conflict has occurred or they have been made aware that someone has been hurt by something they did (or didn’t do).

Lack of empathy

The difficult person might appear to lack empathy – the capacity to put themselves in someone else’s shoes and see the world from their perspective. Often, it’s not that empathy is entirely absent, but that the desire to protect their ego from being wrong is stronger than the desire for connection in that moment. The result is disconnection, conflict, invalidation and more hurt. Note: if empathy is entirely absent, this is a common indicator of a dangerous person.

External chaos

The external chaos that a difficult person creates around them is reflective of the internal chaos experienced within. The don’t know how to get their needs met in healthy ways. They have learned ways of coping that now perpetuate harm towards themselves and others. They often experience an unstable sense of self (‘I don’t know who I am’) paired with feelings of inherent unworthiness (‘Whoever I am, I am unimportant’). Or they can experience a sense of themselves as separate (‘I don’t need other people’) or as perpetually in a state of mistrust (‘I can’t trust anyone else, but I can’t trust myself either’), along with intra- and interpersonal loathing (‘I am not okay as a person and other people are also not okay’).

Reasonable response to an unreasonable situation

The next factor I invite you to consider about what you know of this person, is are they demonstrating a reasonable response to an unreasonable situation? There’s a difference between a card-carrying difficult person and someone who is going through an intensely stressful time and responding the best they can. Stress can bring out the worst in people. It can cause people to temporarily behave in ways that are very different from who they are and who they want to be.

Perhaps we’re not talking about an ongoing stressor, but you know this person well enough to observe that they are out of sorts. Their behaviour is not consistent with who you know them to be, and the change seems obvious, but recent. Are they having a bad day? In these situations, your knowledge of the person helps you to understand and contextualise their behaviour rather than judge them negatively.

If this is a person you know well, you might be aware that they are currently under extreme stress because their parent is terminally ill, or they have lost their job and the bank is repossessing their house. Or they are experiencing an episode of mental ill-health and are on a waiting list for treatment. These are abnormally intense situations in which behaviour can understandably slip. Are they having a tough time?

A friend of mine, who I’ll call Chelsea, runs a small creative business with a team of around six employees. Her second-in-charge was a woman I’ll call Orsa. Orsa was usually full of energy and flair and had the intuition and initiative to run with ideas and make them happen. She was a valuable asset in providing the entire team with support and leadership. Chelsea described Orsa as ‘a joy to work with’.

Two years into their working relationship, Orsa fell pregnant and sadly lost her baby. She took some time off work to grieve and recover physically and Chelsea ensured Orsa was not pressured to return before she was ready. When she did return, Chelsea offered Orsa the chance to do so on a flexible schedule, which allowed time for medical and mental health appointments. Orsa was irritable, impatient and easily frustrated with her co-workers. Chelsea’s attempts to cushion and support her were often met with defensiveness: ‘I don’t need special treatment!’ Orsa would lash out at difficult clients (with whom she’d previously been diplomatic), refuse to respond to emails if she believed they were unnecessary, shut down other people’s ideas at team meetings as ‘lame’, and generally be an abrasive presence in the office.

This behaviour was very out of character for Orsa, and Chelsea knew it because she’d known Orsa for years now. Orsa wasn’t a difficult person. She was a mother grieving the loss of her baby while trying to get on with her life. Her behaviour, though, was difficult and needed to be addressed. Chelsea didn’t write Orsa off as problematic. She didn’t take a human resources stance and formally discipline her. She didn’t call her out in front of other employees. Chelsea chose to speak to Orsa gently and privately. She validated her grief and reminded Orsa that she was supported, wanted and valued in the business. Chelsea then drew boundaries around Orsa’s behaviour, reiterating their business core values and the necessity of respectful communication in order for the whole team to do their best work.

Orsa acknowledged that her grief had impacted her at work and turned her ‘into someone I don’t recognise’. Chelsea asked her what she needed to help her cope and if there were any adjustments that could be made in her role or schedule that would further support Orsa. Orsa elected to take another month off. While this month was never going to ‘fix’ Orsa’s grief (and nor was that the point), it did provide her with the relief of a pause. During this time, she was able to work with her therapist on alternative ways of expressing her feelings when she was overwhelmed at work. Difficult behaviours don’t always point to a difficult person.

This doesn’t mean we give everyone a get-out-of-jail-free pass by making the assumption that they are going through something horrid. It means that what is happening within a person’s psyche and in the circumstances of their life cannot be discounted as having a negative effect on their way of being.

Past behaviour

It’s cliché but true that the best predictor of future behaviour is past behaviour. What do you know about this person from how they have behaved previously? Is this behaviour unusual for them, or is it consistent with previous behaviour? Perhaps you are able to identify patterns that tell you that this person is predictably difficult in certain situations, interactions or relationships.

When you observe these patterns, do they suggest that your psychological safety with this person is probably okay or likely to be at risk? I’m not saying that this person will be difficult with you, but Maya Angelou’s quote, ‘When people show you who they are, believe them the first time’ is popular for a reason.

Take the information at hand and note where you see repetition. Humans are fairly predictable: between 40–45 per cent of what we do on a daily basis is done by habit. Take this on board when it comes to behaviours you see time and again from this person that appear to be poisonous for your relationship with them. Notice cycles of negative reactions to your boundaries. Notice repeated dysregulation. Notice patterns in their communication that intimidate, confuse, manipulate or undermine you. Notice when they are continually unable to be safe for themselves and implode into a puddle of self-loathing, seeking you out to prop them back up. The repetition may be subtle, but if there are patterns present, take heed.

Unhealed wounds (and no plans to heal them)

Most people operate under the assumption that humans are generally good and maintain positive intentions. People who have experienced past trauma can have these assumptions shattered and unconsciously decide that humans are inherently dangerous and cannot be trusted. The shattering of these assumptions influences how they relate to others until that pattern is healed (assuming they are offered access to treatment and safe relationships within which healing can occur).

The problem is that not everyone who is going through a tough time or who has experienced past trauma is able to seek out, participate in and benefit from such treatment. They may not be willing to, or they may not know how, or they may simply lack the means and resources for access. This is when we must assess if this person is someone who is difficult but will likely heal and shows signs of that process being in place, versus someone who is difficult and is not yet at the stage of taking responsibility for themselves (and may never arrive at that stage).

They might be difficult now, but this may not be permanent. Healing is a process that can take many years, many attempts and many methods. Where this person is at in their healing journey will determine how challenging they are for you. Part of the behavioural buffer is giving people permission and time for multiple attempts at recovery and having an understanding that they might go through periods where they improve, and then suddenly (or insidiously) relapse before having to start again. It might be hard for you to be around this person during that time, and it’s okay to set boundaries as and when you need to. But it doesn’t necessarily mean this person deserves to be written off.

Some people are too invested in the pay-off from their difficult behaviour to ever change. What they achieve from being difficult includes benefits for their sense of worthiness, power and control that they would not have if they behaved respectfully and fairly. Those advantages are preferable to the effort and discomfort of change, so their motivation and willingness to address their behaviour is low or non-existent. If walking over other people achieves an advantage in their favour; if manipulating others achieves reduced effort on their behalf; if blaming everyone else allows them to escape damage to their ego; if playing the victim achieves the attention that they are craving; if wielding power and control over someone else achieves a sense of (temporary) worthiness to fill the void within them; then it can be very difficult to see any genuine reason to give up these strategies to change (assuming they actually have the awareness that their behaviour is problematic). It’s then up to you to decide if you are sticking around or cutting ties. Even if they want to change, if they don’t acknowledge themselves as the problem and seek support to heal, then they will remain psychologically unsafe for you.

Mental ill-health can sometimes cause someone to act like a difficult person when their symptoms are playing out. People with anxiety disorders can be judged as being aloof and controlling. People with depression might be judged as being negative and lazy. People with PTSD can appear antagonistic and reactive. People experiencing addiction might appear uncaring and single-minded. Again, these illnesses and their symptoms are not excuses, but they are worth being aware of. And the most important part of this is mental ill-health doesn’t inherently make someone a difficult person. Their willingness to take responsibility for themselves and their symptoms will influence whether they are truly difficult or temporarily difficult before they enter and participate in treatment.

The difficult person in front of you now could heal to become their authentic, loving selves. While you’re assessing that, pay attention to whether this person has a reason or season for their behaviour, or whether they truly intend to be harmful towards you for their own gain, entertainment, or to continue a pattern of control and manipulation over you (even when you hope for change in the face of much evidence to the contrary).

Emotional and impulsive type personality disorders

Not every difficult person behaves in a way that is consistent with a full diagnostic picture for a personality disorder. Some will, though, and it’s worth understanding what those diagnoses look like if and when they are appropriate.

Narcissistic personality disorder (NPD) refers to a collection of traits and patterns of behaviour in a person that sees them have an inflated sense of their own importance along with a sense of entitlement and need for admiration and attention. People with NPD often lack empathy for others’ feelings, especially when there is advantage to be gained.

Borderline personality disorder (BPD) is a pattern of unstable moods and behaviours that impacts negatively across all areas of a person’s life and makes it difficult for them to form and maintain relationships. People with BPD often struggle with feelings of worthlessness and insecurity and can be impulsive in their behaviours in response to emotional instability.

Antisocial personality disorder (sometimes referred to as sociopathy or psychopathy) is a pattern of behaviour without moral or empathic regard for the rights and feelings of others or the law.

Histrionic personality disorder is a collection of traits and patterns of behaviour that are displayed as attention-seeking and dramatic in their expression within the context of rapidly changing emotional states.

Anxious type personality disorders

Avoidant personality disorder is characterised by chronic feelings of being inadequate and the associated assumption of, and sensitivity to, being negatively judged by others.

Dependent personality disorder is marked by the fear of being alone, and especially of not being able to cope if left alone or unsupported in a situation. This can extend to needing someone with them to cope with basic tasks.

Obsessive-compulsive personality disorder is characterised by a need for extreme order and neatness and an approach to things shaped by extreme perfectionism. The person experiences distress when order can’t be attained or is not maintained or when they perceive perfection is not present or possible.

Case study: Linda and Angela

Let’s explore what Angela knows about her mother, Linda. Angela knows that Linda lacks insight, in that she believes her concern for Angela’s choices is helping her daughter to redirect her life. She also knows that when called out, Linda reacts defensively, claiming that her comments are ‘coming from a place of love’ and ‘you are probably feeling hurt because you know what I say is the truth’.

Linda doesn’t lack empathy, because Angela has seen her mother genuinely support her in times of distress in the past. Further, Linda is not necessarily creating external chaos because her manipulations are more subtle than that.

Linda is not experiencing an out-of-the-ordinary event or set of circumstances in her life. Angela’s experience of her mother over the decades tells her that Linda tends to staunchly believe that her values are the only correct values to live by, and that her choices for how her life has played out are the right ones. She’s likely to continue to hold fast to these beliefs and continue forcing them onto Angela.

And finally, Angela is not sure about whether Linda has unhealed wounds. Angela didn’t know her grandparents and Linda has never spoken much about her childhood.

Can we say that Linda is a difficult person with the information we have so far? I think we can confidently say she’s unlikely to change. For a definitive difficult person decision, let’s explore Angela in a little more detail.

You’ve paid attention to patterns. Now we need to see how this snowball changes or expands because of what you know about you.

What you know about you

Deciding if this person is difficult also requires a little mirror work. Your external data about the person who is challenging you needs to be compared with your internal data of who you are and how you move through the world, because one always influences the other.

Your lens

Your own life experiences, attitudes, beliefs, values and background form a lens through which you see the world and, in it, other people’s behaviour. Think of a curated feed on Instagram where the owner of the profile uses the same filter on each image to give every post a similar visage, or the experience of looking at the world with polarised sunglasses on. Your interpretation of the potentially difficult person in your life is through a filter unique to you that colours what you see. This can create a divide between what is actually happening versus what you interpret is happening once that information passes through your lens.

Someone having a joke with you versus you feeling disrespected; someone setting a boundary with you versus you feeling rejected; or someone being direct with you versus you feeling insulted – these things are not necessarily one and the same.

We can become so used to hurtful relational patterns that we habitually respond to all interpersonal challenges from an assumption that we will again be treated poorly. Being mindful of your lens offers you a chance to reflect on your judgements about someone’s behaviour. Are they being difficult or are you interpreting them as being difficult because they remind you of someone who has been difficult for you in the past? Is this person someone around whom boundaries are essential to protect yourself, or is this a situation where you need to adjust or expand your perspective to tolerate someone who does things differently from you? And while we’re looking inward . . .

Your relationship with yourself

Our exploration of difficult people in this book means we’ll largely be focusing on when others cross our boundaries. This is usually the way we figure out what our boundaries are: someone crosses a line and it feels uncomfortable. We note that discomfort and make adjustments to restore our circles of self-preservation and empowerment.

However, boundaries also exist in our relationship with ourselves. We cross our internal boundaries and note how it feels to be out of integrity with our values. It feels uncomfortable. But unlike boundaries that involve another person, we often let our own boundaries slide. For most people, it’s easier to be out of integrity with ourselves than it is with others. And being consistently out of integrity with yourself can lead to feelings of inadequacy and inauthenticity, negative self-talk, loss of self-trust and disconnection with your ability to realise your true potential.

When you are evaluating whether someone is a difficult person, please ensure that you check in with the status of your relationship with yourself. If you are out of integrity with yourself; if you are treating yourself harshly and speaking to yourself critically; if you are not psychologically safe for yourself, then consider if you are dealing with a difficult person, or if it just seems that way because of how you are relating to yourself. (And yes, it’s true that difficult people become harder to manage if we are difficult with and for ourselves.)

They did something you don’t like

If only the world could always go our way and people could consistently show up as their best selves, doing things that feel agreeable for us! Alas, we are humans dealing with humans, bumbling our way through this experience of living as best as we can with what we have available to us. Sometimes, we make a mess of it. Sometimes we fail. Always, we are beautifully imperfect.

In the space of imperfection is where others will inevitably do things you don’t like – from the people you love most in the world who occasionally fail to show up for you, to the stranger who cut you off in traffic this morning. You don’t have to like everything everyone in your life does but, for your own peace, you do need to allow a buffer of behavioural leeway. This might look like choosing to take the high road rather than descending to the other person’s level when they’re having a bad day, resisting the urge to correct someone you know is wrong in favour of a smooth interaction, or overlooking a less than generous response when you reach out for connection, conversation or basic friendliness.

The good news is not everyone is the same. The bad news is not everyone is the same. You will like many people and dislike some people. Many people will like you and some people won’t. That feels uncomfortable, doesn’t it? The idea that anyone doesn’t like us goes against our inherent need to belong. We can dislike others, but heaven forbid someone feels that way about us! I wish there was a mental leap I could teach you that would rid you of the unpleasant feeling of not being liked. Alas, you care (and will continue to care) because you are not a psychopath. You can learn to accept the presence of these feelings without making them mean something negative about yourself, but deleting them entirely is unrealistic because our DNA is wired for connection. Some people will feign indifference as a way of protecting their ego, but the truth is they care deeply. Watch out for the people who legitimately feel indifferent to being unliked – that’s a sign of a difficult (and potentially dangerous) person.

Remember, though, that just because someone doesn’t like you does not mean they are difficult, just as them not liking you doesn’t make you difficult.

You are hurting

This factor of your own experience will already be apparent to you: their poor behaviour has a negative impact on you. It hurts. It’s not something you can gloss over because it feels wounding. And if their poor behaviour happens repeatedly, the pain compounds and becomes impossible to ignore in all future interactions with this person. However, when you attempt to call out the hurt and set boundaries around this person’s behaviour . . . they seem to make your life harder.

Your attempts at setting boundaries don’t go well

Despite you being clear about your boundaries and setting them successfully in other interactions and relationships so both parties feel respected and valued, your boundaries don’t seem to work with this person. No amount of communicative gymnastics makes a difference with this person. Their poor behaviour continues, as does your distress.

From their perspective, it looks like this:

Interruption occurs: Receiving your boundaries is perceived as a threat, which interrupts this person’s sense of power and control (either over themselves or over you), or triggers their insecurities (e.g. they feel vulnerable, attacked and/or perceive that they are about to be rejected).

Ignition occurs: As a result, their unhealthy coping strategies and reactionary behaviours are ignited.

Impact follows: Their dysregulation erupts over you and anyone else present like lava from a volcano, impacting everyone and everything in its path. They attempt to regain their stability or sense of control but steal your psychological safety in the process.

You become dysregulated

Despite your best intentions, it’s difficult to avoid becoming dysregulated when the person in front of you erupts or decompensates, especially if this has become a cycle between the two of you that plays out every time emotions are high. What you’ll notice within yourself is that it feels harder to access your best self around this person. They will trigger you to behave in ways that don’t match who you want to be.

From your perspective, it plays out like this:

They react: You attempt to set a boundary and receive intimidating, confusing, decompensating or unpleasant behaviour as their reaction. This is a sign that the person may not be psychologically safe for you. The greater the number of these reactive behaviours and the more frequently they occur, the more likely that psychological safety will not be available with this person.

Rupture occurs: If and when their behaviour escalates, the breach of your boundaries creates a rupture in your relationship. This rupture will feel so uncomfortable that you may lose the ability to self-regulate and become dysregulated. The disconnection between the two of you is undeniable. Your distress, even if you don’t show it, is undeniable.

You respond: If you’re well-practised at boundaries with difficult people, you then respond with healthy coping behaviours and boundary consequences. If not, or this person has escalated to such a level that you become dysregulated yourself, it’s common to respond with unhealthy coping behaviours and a crumbling of your boundaries.

Let’s take a moment to consider what is showing up for you as you read through this section. These questions will help you reflect:

What do you notice in yourself when you are responding to this person? Does your behaviour change and intensify? Does your attitude change so that you don’t recognise who you are being?

Are you normally able to self-regulate unless you are around this person, in which case you become dysregulated?

Are you in or out of integrity around this person? Do you find yourself making decisions that go against who you want to be and what you want to stand for?

Does your communication deteriorate to a form and style that doesn’t fit who you usually are or who you want to be? Do you regress and become immature, as if you are back in high school or a child fighting over a toy?

If you find that this person triggers you into taking the low road instead of the high road, or to lapse into behaving in ways that make you dislike yourself, assess whether this is about self-protection or a wound that you carry that needs addressing (see Chapter 7 for more on this), or whether it’s something that is unique to your relationship with this person.

Eggshell effect

Do you notice that being around this person leads you to be overly sensitive? Does this person have you walking on eggshells, attempting to orchestrate an environment free of provocations? Is there a pattern where no one stands up to this person for fear of their behaviour worsening or intensifying, resulting in no interpersonal fences to rein in their behaviour? If you notice an urge to walk on eggshells, then this person is contributing to a psychologically unsafe environment for you.

Case study: Linda and Angela

Let’s explore what Angela knows about herself and how that informs her relationship with her mother. Angela is aware that her unique lens on the world is more expansive compared to Linda’s. Angela has travelled around the world and lived abroad for five years. She values learning about lifestyles different from hers and being experimental and curious in her work, hobbies and goals for herself. Linda, on the other hand, grew up in a different generation that tended to be more rigid in their views. She hasn’t had the opportunities to explore the world like Linda has. And unfortunately, Linda approaches Angela’s ‘carefree’ attitude with the same rigidity, viewing it as immature and irresponsible.

Angela’s relationship with herself is generally sound. However, her mother’s constant criticism of her lifestyle wears her down and causes her to doubt herself.

This isn’t a case of Linda simply doing something that Angela doesn’t like. This is a pervasive pattern of Linda denouncing Angela for being an adult and making her own choices.

Angela is hurt. Linda’s feelings about Angela’s life course and timeline are a source of significant friction between the two of them. Linda feels entitled to pass her opinion because Angela is her daughter. The more she comments, the more she believes that Angela might eventually take her perspective on board and ‘settle down, get married and have children, before she misses out on the most important part of life’. Despite the fact that Angela has expressed that she is living in alignment with her values and that her relationship status is not a priority for her, and she desires to remain childless by choice, Linda refuses to accept this.

When Angela attempts to set boundaries with her mother, requesting that she refrain from offering opinions that were not asked for and making it clear that discussion of Angela’s relationship and parental status is off limits, Linda becomes defensive and devolves into tearful passive-aggression and guilt-tripping, followed by silent treatment. Angela then feels like she is either walking on eggshells, or ready to snap and yell at her mother’s inability to ‘just let me live my life’.

Is Linda a difficult person? We’ll enter the information we have into the checklist on page 120 to arrive at the answer.

Are they difficult?

Entering all your information into this checklist allows you to decide how confident you can be about whether this person is actually difficult (and therefore, likely to continue being difficult).

The caveat here is that this is not a formal psychometric measure of someone’s psychological status, so please don’t use it as such. It is a guide that will help take a wider perspective of this person’s behaviour to evaluate how you want to move forward with them. The higher the number of checkboxes ticked, the more confident you can be that you have a difficult person on your hands.

Even if you can’t articulate exactly why, if you tick the box that your psychological safety has been repeatedly violated, then you have a difficult person on your hands. If you haven’t ticked many additional boxes, and yet you can still say that your psychological safety has been repeatedly violated, it’s likely you have a difficult person on your hands, and I’ll show you what to do in the chapters to come.

If you haven’t ticked the psychological safety box, and the checklist boxes are 50 per cent yes or below, this person may be a difficult person, but you can’t be sure right now. Wait and see or set boundaries in anticipation.

If, through this process of elimination, you’ve arrived at their behaviour being a one-off event or there was no violation of psychological safety, noted that they were uncomfortable but not dysregulated and they are going through a difficult time, see that they apologise and/or attempt repair and there was no intent, then the person is not difficult and you can set boundaries with them the way you would with someone who is healthy for you to be around.

Case study: Linda and Angela

Is Linda a difficult person for Angela? The checklist would suggest yes. The interesting (and possibly, relatable) thing about this example is that Linda is not yelling and calling Angela names. She’s not threatening her or gaslighting her. In my experience many people expect difficult people to be bombastic. Often, difficult behaviours are more subtle than that, but that doesn’t mean it’s not possible to have your psychological safety violated.

Linda likely falls into the archetype of The Subtle Manipulator. Her behaviours are insidious but long-term, and she shows no sign of changing her ways.

Exercise

Use the process described in this chapter, and the checklist provided, to determine if you are dealing with a difficult person.

Summary

Difficult people can be identified by:

What they do:

Action behaviours

Yelling.

Name-calling.

Swearing at you.

Slamming doors/throwing objects.

Blaming/accusing.

Gossiping.

Undermining.

Lying.

Invalidating/dismissing feelings.

Intimidating body language.

Projecting dysregulation onto you.

Talking over you.

Inaction behaviours

Silent treatment.

Ghosting.

Lack of empathy.

Lack of validation.

Avoidance of the topic at hand.

Lack of accountability.

Leaving.

Failing to reply.

Blatant ignoring.

Closed body language.

Defence mechanisms.

Lack of insight.

How they do it:

Disingenuous.

Poor communication style.

Attitude.

Intention is present.

Duration, intensity and frequency is excessive.

What you know about them:

Long-term pattern of lack of insight.

Long-term pattern of lack of accountability.

Long-term pattern of lack of empathy.

External chaos is often present.

Not a reasonable response to unreasonable situation.

Long-term pattern of past poor behaviour.

Unhealed wounds and no plans to heal them.

What you know about you:

Your lens is not causing misinterpretation.

Your relationship with yourself is stable.

They did something you don’t like.

You are hurting.

Your attempts to set boundaries do not go well.

You become (or could become) dysregulated.

Eggshell effect is present.

Use the information you can gather to develop a difficult person radar that can help you protect yourself.

PART 2

DIFFICULT BEHAVIOURS

A note on part 2: The spectrum of difficult behaviours

Your psychological safety has been disrupted. The difficult person is dysregulated and it’s spilling all over you. This is not the first time the behaviour has occurred. There is no awareness or insight from them. No apology either. Your intuition is telling you that this is not okay. What do you do now?

Many of the behaviours that follow are mild and fairly tolerable in isolation. But when combined and repeated – as we see on the Difficult person checklist (page 120) – their intensity increases and your capacity to cope with them decreases (as it should, because having limits is healthy!).

As you work your way through Part 2, consider the future of your relationship with this person. How many times will you allow them to engage with you in this way? You may not want (or be able) to cut ties completely, but perhaps you can limit how often and how long you see or interact with them.

Consider how you interact with this person. Perhaps you can FaceTime instead of catch up in person. Or call instead of FaceTime. Or text instead of call. Or email instead of text. Consider whether changing the format of the interaction would assist in reducing the stress you experience. Just because someone wants to have lunch with you doesn’t mean you are obligated to say yes. Just because someone asks you to call them back doesn’t mean you must respond in kind.

You also have the option to choose in favour of your own inner peace and remove this person from your life rather than make accommodations for them. You are in control. The discomfort of your present-moment experience is sending you a message, and your today self paying attention to that message is exactly what your future self is relying on for peace.

Please remember that many things can be true at once for humans, which means that the behaviours categorised within each difficult person archetype can cross over and also be displayed by other archetypes. The archetypes are guides, not rules. I encourage you to read through this section in its entirety to fully understand the breadth and complexity of behaviours of difficult people. For each behaviour, we’ll explore: how it’s defined, what it looks like, real life examples, and scripts that you can use in response to someone who is using that behaviour. And for ease of reference when you want to return to specific behaviours, here is where you’ll find them:

Chapter 4 – Preoccupied behaviours

The Plasticine behaviours

Fawning

Eruption

Self-neglect

The Victim behaviours

Blaming

Kitchen-sinking

Martyrdom

Parentification

Victim mentality

The Clinger behaviours

Attention-seeking

Dependency

Intrusion

Chapter 5 – Avoidant behaviours

The Subtle Manipulator behaviours

Breaching confidence

Competition

Guilt-tripping

Passive-aggression

Triangulation

The Narcissist behaviours

Entitlement

Exclusion

Gaslighting

Narcissism

The Brick Wall behaviours

Cutting off

Ghosting

Repair incompetence

Chapter 6 – Fearful behaviours

The Swindler behaviours

Weaponised honesty

Inconsistency

Weaponised joking

Lying

Undermining

The Aggressor behaviours

Aggression

Bullying

Revenge

Trolling

The Controller behaviours

Control

Unrealistic expectations

Questioning

Testing

4

Preoccupied behaviours

The Plasticine behaviours

Fawning

Definition

Fawning is a behavioural adaptation designed to appease someone else and therefore avoid perceived conflict or harm. The Plasticine has a strong urge to do whatever is necessary to please the other person, even if it’s at their own expense.

It is most often used as a strategy of self-protection. It can be used consciously or subconsciously. While it can be a relational strength if the person doing the fawning is doing so once their own needs are met, it can also function as a manipulative form of obtaining love, approval and validation from others, not by asking for it directly, but by implicit coercion through excessively nice behaviour. It’s designed to make sure others are happy at all times, even if that’s at the cost of The Plasticine’s self-worth and well-being.

Fawning causes a sense of obligation that you must return the ‘niceness’; confusion and frustration because you never quite know where you stand or what the needs of The Plasticine really are; and a pattern of others obtaining advantage from The Plasticine because that advantage is on offer. It can also cause simmering resentment within The Plasticine because their needs are constantly overlooked (usually by their own doing), and disconnection of The Plasticine from themselves. When they fawn so often, The Plasticine can reach a point where they no longer know what their needs and wants really are.

What does fawning look like?

‘People-pleasing’.

Saying yes when they really want to say no.

Not asserting their boundaries.

Allowing other people to get away with bad behaviour that negatively impacts The Plasticine.

Avoiding conflict.

Going along with something they don’t agree with to keep the peace.

Chronic self-surveillance to make sure they are doing the ‘right’ things.

Tying their self-worth to having the approval or validation of others.

Taking on other people’s feelings as problems that The Plasticine feels they must fix.

Fawning in real life

Jackie’s father was manipulative and emotionally abusive. Jackie’s mother had passed away a few years prior to me meeting Jackie. Despite her father’s abuse, Jackie told me that she’d stayed connected to her parents for her mother’s sake. But now that her mother had passed, Jackie stated that she was her father’s primary carer ‘because he doesn’t have anyone else’. What’s more, he continued to manipulate and be emotionally abusive to Jackie whenever she wasn’t immediately available for him. I questioned Jackie about why she was continuing to support him when he behaved that way. She said that ‘it’s just easier than dealing with him being upset with me’. She was perpetuating a cycle of coping that had also been used by her mother since Jackie was a child. Don’t rock the boat, make sure he’s happy, it’s just easier that way. The problem was that it wasn’t easier: Jackie was anxious, depressed and an unstable volcano of resentment because she was giving over her power to her father and being emotionally abused in the process.

Boundary scripts in response to fawning

‘Your needs and desires matter to me. I’d like us to decide together to make sure that we come up with something workable for both of us.’

‘I appreciate your flexibility here, but I’m also interested in what you’d like to do.’

‘I’m concerned that this person is taking advantage of you. Do you feel that way, too? How can I support you to set boundaries with this person?’

‘It’s safe to speak up about your needs with me. Please let me know what fits for you here, too.’

Eruption

Definition

An eruption occurs anytime someone is dysregulated and their emotions spill over in a loud, dramatic manner. It often occurs after a period of emotional simmering, which others may or may not be aware of. The Plasticine is unhappy about their boundaries being crossed, but fails to communicate their feelings time and again . . . until they explode. In the case that others are not aware that The Plasticine was increasingly frustrated, the eruption can seem to come out of nowhere.

Unlike blatant aggression, eruption is not often a consciously used coping strategy. It’s more likely to occur in response to The Plasticine attempting to stifle their feelings (because those feelings are perceived as unacceptable or overwhelming), causing them to explode when they can take no more. It functions as a release of that pent-up emotion.

Eruption causes shock, surprise, fear and mistrust in others, especially if The Plasticine can’t be trusted to speak up for their feelings in future, and is therefore prone to more unpredictable eruptions.

What does eruption look like?

Yelling.

Throwing objects.

Slamming doors.

Big gestures.

Foot stamping.

Swearing.

Eruption in real life

When I asked about this on social media, I received the following scenario, which I think might be familiar for many: ‘I can’t stand mess. It makes my head messy, so it’s a boundary for me. But my teenagers cross it daily. Therefore, I lose my shit and it’s not pretty. Then I feel bad. Sometimes I go to my lowest and call them names. I hate myself when I do this. I let people push my boundaries and then blow my top instead of asking them to stop earlier.’

This person demonstrates psychological mindedness. She is aware of her behaviour and the fact that it’s inconsistent with who she wants to be. Whether she’s a difficult person depends on her willingness to learn and practise strategies that support her to calm herself and express her boundaries in a way that doesn’t violate the psychological safety of her children (or, at least, doesn’t continue to erode the communication patterns between mother and child).

Boundary scripts in response to eruption

‘I disagree with how you just expressed your anger, not with who you are.’

‘I am feeling a little upset by the way you are saying that. Could you take a moment to collect your thoughts and say that in a calmer way?’

Self-neglect

Definition

Self-neglect occurs when someone fails to meet their own basic needs for nutrition, movement, rest, sleep, enjoyment, creativity and love. The Plasticine uses self-neglect as a coping strategy – ignoring their own needs allows them to better prioritise other people’s happiness instead of having to manage the feelings of guilt and selfishness that arise when they consider themselves. Self-neglect also protects The Plasticine from facing responsibility for looking after themselves because they are too busy caring for others. This avoidance is seductive for The Plasticine because it feels comfortable. However, long-term self-neglect further disempowers them as their physical and mental health are compromised.

Self-neglect causes:

For The Plasticine doing the self-neglecting: loss of energy, and increasing fatigue; poor attention and concentration; feelings of unworthiness stopping them from moving towards their potential; being stuck in habits that are unworkable; feelings of guilt when they think about taking time out for themselves.

For you receiving The Plasticine: concern about their health and well-being; loss of trust in them being able to look after themselves and meet their own needs; potential relationship conflict when you suggest that they create space for self-care (because this is perceived as a threat by The Plasticine who only feels comfortable when other people are placed on a pedestal while their own needs are dismissed).

What does self-neglect look like?

Poor nutritional choices.

Not enough regular movement in the day.

Working beyond the point of exhaustion or focused concentration.

An imbalance between activities for productivity and enjoyment.

Passive relaxation instead of intentional relaxation.

Considering others’ needs as more important than their own.

Not valuing themselves.

Caring for others better than they care for themselves.

Self-neglect in real life

I once treated a woman in her fifties who I’ll call Rose. Rose was referred by her doctor for symptoms of depression, which her doctor attributed to Rose’s weight and lack of mobility. Rose lived in a bigger body and had been diagnosed as pre-diabetic. She attended her therapy sessions alongside her husband, Martin, and was not an obviously difficult person. Quite the opposite, actually . . . she was warm and gentle and quick to smile. Rose acknowledged that her doctor’s suspicions were true: she was often physically uncomfortable and frustrated that her mobility was now restricted, and felt down about her quality of life disappearing.

Here’s where the pieces of the puzzle started coming together for me: Martin was very supportive of Rose. He encouraged her to ‘do whatever she needed to do’ to regain her quality of life. They had the money to access specialist services and treatment and Martin was willing to accompany Rose to all of her appointments as well as participate alongside Rose in any treatment programs that were suggested.

However, Rose wasn’t having it. She said that she didn’t have time or space to ‘do things differently’ because ‘Martin needs me and the kids need me.’ Martin denied this claim and reassured me that their two children were now adults and lived out of home.

Rose was so attached to who she had always been for her family (and, it turns out, for her job), that even now all the demands were removed she couldn’t conceive of a life where she could come first (or, at least equal to Martin).

This had become difficult for Martin. He expressed to me privately that he was deeply worried about Rose’s health and the possibility of ‘losing her long before her time’. He was at a loss as to what to do to help Rose because she wasn’t open to prioritising herself.

Boundary scripts in response to self-neglect

‘Your health and wellness matters to me. I want you to know I’m here to support you to meet your needs.’

‘I love you so much and want to support you to follow your doctor’s advice. I believe in you and your ability to do hard things.’

The Victim behaviours

Blaming

Definition

Blaming occurs when The Victim externalises the reasons for their behaviour, emotions, experience or consequences. For The Victim, blaming feels like a get-out-of-jail-free card and prevents them from having to look at their own behaviour.

The function of blaming is ego protection. If it’s someone else’s fault, the difficult person doesn’t need to face the discomfort of acknowledging where they failed or where their own behaviour is blocking them from reaching their potential.

Blaming causes a breakdown in trust because The Victim fails to take responsibility for themselves. The person receiving The Victim can experience feelings of invalidation, betrayal, anger and disloyalty, and conflict is common because of the sense of injustice and lack of reciprocity in the relationship.

What does blaming look like?

Accusing others of causing The Victim’s discomfort because they won’t do what The Victim wants them to do.

Scapegoating (blaming someone else for their own faults and mistakes).

Not respecting their own boundaries and then blaming others when they don’t respect them either.

Not reinforcing or following through on a boundary, then growing resentful when someone keeps crossing it, blaming them for not recognising the boundary when its position is The Victim’s responsibility to communicate.

Expecting people to honour their boundaries after stating them just once, and then blaming the other person when that doesn’t happen.

Refusing to take accountability for hurting someone on the grounds that they hurt The Victim, too.

Blaming in real life

Chris came to me to work on anger issues, but was quick to point out that he wouldn’t be so angry if only his family stopped provoking him. When I asked what he meant by being provoked, he stated that his wife continuously reminded him when he hadn’t done his share of the housework and that the kids played too loudly.

When I asked if he felt he was contributing fairly around the house, he said, ‘Well, no, but I work so hard!’.

Chris blamed his anger on his family and his lack of contribution around the home on his work. His wife felt unheard, disrespected and frustrated that Chris was unable to see the unfairness in their household loads. Further, she was at a loss as to what to do because she couldn’t express her discontent to him without him blaming her ‘nagging’ for his anger, and then projecting his dysregulation onto their kids, blaming them for being too loud in the process.

Boundary scripts in response to blaming

‘I don’t want to fight with you. It frustrates me when you are blaming me for something that is happening within you. I don’t feel heard. Can we take a break until we can both think clearly?’

‘This is starting to get heated, and you placing the blame on me is not helping us to face this problem together. We should pause because I don’t want us to say something that we’ll regret.’

‘I love you, but I won’t take the blame for your feelings and behaviour. I want to respect your experience, but I need you to own and manage your experience, too.’

‘I have no control over the decisions you make or how you feel, so I’m not going to pay for something you appear to be regretting.’

Kitchen-sinking

Definition

Kitchen-sinking refers to a communication style during times of conflict where one person shifts away from the issue at hand and brings in a much longer list of complaints, even if they’ve happened in the distant past – that is, they bring in ‘everything but the kitchen sink’.

Kitchen-sinking is a tool of deflection. It functions to turn attention away from The Victim’s behaviour and onto the opposing person’s behaviour, thus enabling the difficult person to avoid addressing what has been levelled at them.

Kitchen-sinking causes an escalation in conflict, problems festering rather than being solved, and division rather than connection (me against you rather than us against the problem).

Please note that it’s not kitchen-sinking if the issues are still being processed and/or the wrongdoing party has not yet taken responsibility for their actions and the hurt they caused.

What does kitchen-sinking look like?

The Victim responds to issues raised about their behaviour with a list of issues about the other person’s behaviour.

Whataboutism; that is, the tendency to respond to something confrontational with a counter-accusation of something at best adjacent and at worst, unrelated.

Kitchen-sinking in real life

I once worked with a couple who were in a state of conflict because the husband had sequestered money that the wife didn’t know about for a hobby. It caused a deep rupture in their relationship, but they loved each other dearly and wanted to repair their marriage.

Even though their finances had now recovered, they were struggling to move past the issue because both of them tended to launch into kitchen-sinking every time another issue arose in the present.

Wife: ‘So what if I do X! You stole money from us!’

Husband: ‘Can’t we move past that and focus on how you always make us late, gossip about me to your girlfriends and have turned your family against me?’

Boundary scripts in response to kitchen-sinking

‘We are both hurting right now. Can we focus on the issue at hand to help us move forward?’

‘I know I’ve hurt you before now. I want to build trust again with you and would appreciate if we can stay focused on today.’

‘I would love us to be on the same team here. Can we take a break and come back to this when we are both feeling a little calmer?’

Martyrdom

Definition

Martyrdom is a form of emotional manipulation that occurs when The Victim exaggerates their suffering in order to obtain sympathy from others. It can be subtle or overt.

Martyrdom functions as an emotional crutch for The Victim. They tie their worth to being needed, then receive validation and attention for what they do for the person that ‘needs’ them.

In The Victim, this causes a cycle of needing to be needed for feeling worthy and then feeling burnt out by what they do to prove they are needed.

In the person being manipulated, there may be feelings of confusion, guilt, frustration and exhaustion because they feel like they ‘can’t win’.

What does martyrdom look like?

Self-sacrifice in the name of helping others (but really in order to receive thanks/feel needed).

Not asking for help, and then being annoyed when no one helps.

Creating a crisis if no one needs them.

Overt complaining about how much they have to do but refusing support or dismissing validation about their load.

Constantly feeling unappreciated, but needing to be needed for their self-worth to be buttressed.

Complaining about their suffering or sacrifice for others but being unwilling (or actively refusing) to change the situation.

Martyrdom in real life

Sam was at home most of the time while looking for new employment, and tension had arisen between her and her partner, Sarah, over housework. Sam felt that Sarah was taking swipes at her about not contributing to the housework, but whenever she offered to help, Sarah rejected it. When Sam took initiative and did what needed to be done, Sarah complained that she didn’t do it correctly, and huffed and puffed while she redid those same chores.

Sam felt belittled and Sarah was clearly frustrated, but the cycle kept them in a state of disconnection.

Boundary scripts in response to martyrdom

‘I hear you. You feel like you are the only one putting in effort here and that makes you feel frustrated. I don’t want our relationship to be out of balance. I want to contribute.’

‘When I offer to help, you tend to reject it. This confuses and frustrates me. I feel sad about it. Perhaps we can find a way to change this cycle that neither of us wants to be in.’

Parentification

Definition

Parentification occurs when there is a role reversal between parent and child. The Victim turns the tables on their child, burdening the child with emotional and/or practical caring duties for the parent. The Victim relies on their child to perform duties that they should be performing for themselves, or accessing from another adult. The child takes on the responsibility for The Victim parent’s emotional needs, adjusting their behaviour to make the parent happy or mediating family conflict. The child might also take on responsibility for practically supporting The Victim parent by assisting with an inappropriate amount of housework or family tasks like food preparation, or looking after younger children.

Parentified children don’t necessarily realise what is happening at the time it is happening to them because they are children, after all, and they don’t know any differently. But they unconsciously learn that their needs and desires are unwelcome, and that the comfort of their environment depends on them making others happy and taking responsibility for feelings that do not belong to them.

What does parentification look like?

Parentification happens in the home, so it can be easily hidden from other adults by The Victim parent. However, it’s identifiable by observing:

A child who has been given an inappropriate emotional or practical load by their parent.

A child who acts like a parent towards their parent (and their parent allows this).

The child steps in to mediate conflict between their parents or grown-ups.

The child is encouraged and praised for being their parent’s ‘little mum/dad/best friend’ or being ‘mature for their age’.

If you were a parentified child, you might notice the following signs in your adult experience:

High sensitivity to others’ needs and changes in emotions followed by the urge to step in and fix.

Struggling to recall times in childhood when you could ‘just be a kid’ and difficulty allowing yourself to relax into playfulness as an adult.

Only feeling truly comfortable when you are being the responsible one, the caretaker and/or peacemaker.

Being expected to play the peacemaker role in your family.

Having a strong need for control and/or being overly self-reliant because it feels unfamiliar to trust others to care for themselves, let alone care for you.

Parentification in real life

I once treated a 22-year-old woman who I’ll call Maha. Maha was seeing me for anxiety and depression that she attributed to the stress of managing her TAFE studies. I initially figured that she was overwhelmed by the study load, and we’d be working on adjusting her load and/or building emotional resilience for the process. However, as we explored what else was happening in Maha’s life, she explained that she lived at home with her mum, who also suffered from depression and anxiety.

Noting the potential heritability of Maha’s symptoms, I didn’t think any deeper about her living situation until I asked Maha about her sleep patterns. Maha disclosed that she and her mother slept in the same bed and tended to stay awake all night and sleep during the day. I had never before, and never since, treated an adult who slept in the same bed as their parent, so I was curious, to say the least. It turns out that Maha’s parents had separated when she was around 11 years of age. Since this time, her mother had struggled to recover emotionally from the separation, and ‘found comfort’ in Maha sleeping next to her. Her mother was unable to work because of her symptoms of depression and anxiety, so Maha managed part-time work to support them while she studied at TAFE. Further, her mother was apparently more likely to feel distressed during the day, so tended to be awake at night while sleeping away the day. Maha tried to stay up with her because ‘she likes my company’. Parentification was stopping Maha from individuating and establishing her identity as an adult.

Boundary scripts in response to parentification

‘I hear that you are struggling, Mum, and I believe in you to work this out for yourself.’

‘Dad, I am not available to continue being your sole source of emotional support. Please reach out to your friends, or perhaps see your doctor for a referral to speak to someone about your feelings.’

‘Mum, I understand that you’re frustrated that I’ve helped you with this before but I am now saying no. I value you and our relationship, but it’s not appropriate that you continue to rely on me in this way.’

Victim mentality

Definition

Victim mentality is an avoidance strategy that occurs when The Victim perceives that the world is against them. The Victim archetype generally holds an external locus of control, feeling helpless to do anything about their circumstances, or relying on others to ‘fix’ their problems. The Victim may also maintain their victim mentality because they gain some form of advantage for doing so. It is employed to dodge responsibility and/or obtain a pay-off (e.g. attention, support, resources they wouldn’t otherwise have access to).

Victim mentality causes feelings of helplessness and hopelessness, isolation because they exhaust people and drive them away, and a cycle of worsening problems and more complaints.

What does victim mentality look like?

‘Pity party’ for themselves.

Won’t take responsibility, expects others to provide solutions.

Has difficult circumstances but won’t take responsibility for managing those circumstances.

Uses ‘I have boundaries’ as an excuse for laziness or not taking responsibility.

Makes excuses.

Puts themselves down but doesn’t take action to better their perceived flaws.

Takes things personally as evidence to support their role as The Victim.

Self-neglect.

Not owning their feelings.

Blaming others for their life overall.

Victim mentality in real life

In my time in clinical practice, I treated many people with chronic mental health conditions. Some faced their symptoms head-on and applied the strategies I offered them with gusto, figuring out what was most workable for them and rebuilding their mental health. Others experienced symptoms that a) contributed to their victim mentality or b) were intensified because of their victim mentality. It can be challenging to see a different perspective when your mental health is compromised. For some clients, therapy and healing work helped them break a pattern of wallowing. For others, a victim mentality clouded their willingness and readiness for change.

Boundary scripts in response to victim mentality

‘I’m sorry you are experiencing this. I have 30 minutes free if it would be helpful to have someone to listen.’

‘I can’t solve this problem for you, but I am here to help you through it.’

‘I care about you, but we seem to be talking in circles. Let’s return to this conversation another time.’

The Clinger behaviours

Attention-seeking

Definition

Attention-seeking behaviour refers to unconscious or conscious attempts to become the focus of a person or group of people.

The function of attention-seeking behaviour goes beyond The Clinger’s natural desire to belong, which comes with normal needs for attention and connection, and lapses into monopolising attention to serve their insecure attachment and interpersonal coping styles. If the attention-seeking behaviour seems sudden and unusual, it could be driven by a temporary sense of jealousy, or an increased need for support when experiencing a difficult situation (e.g. divorce). However, chronic attention-seeking behaviour is often a strategy to compensate for a preoccupied attachment style, loneliness caused by a lack of meaningful relationships, and unhealthy moving towards that arises from the need to boost feelings of inadequacy via validation from others.

Attention-seeking behaviour causes interpersonal conflict when the other person feels that their interactions with The Clinger have become one-sided. The other person experiences interpersonal burnout from the exhaustion of spending time with or supporting The Clinger because their need for attention seems endless.

It can also cause second-hand embarrassment for the people around The Clinger, who see through their behaviour, as well as the feeling that they are being manipulated in terms of where their focus must go.

What does attention-seeking look like?

Exaggerating their experience to gain sympathy.

Overreacting or being argumentative to draw someone’s focus onto them.

Feigning ignorance or the inability to do a task that they are actually capable of, but refuse to do because being supported feels emotionally safer.

Compliment-fishing and/or big-noting their achievements.

Intentionally being controversial, cryptic, complaining or victim-minded (especially on social media).

Oversharing (especially on social media).

Not asking about other people’s lives to keep the focus remaining on themselves.

Interrupting.

Speaking loudly with dramatic gestures.

Creating drama.

Attention-seeking in real life

Katrina experienced anxiety following a period in her life of increased stress. She had recently fallen pregnant, and it had caused conflict in her relationship with her sister, Lucy, who had been trying to conceive for a year and had become increasingly angry at anyone else who was able to fall pregnant in that time. Lucy turned every conversation towards herself, always interrupted Katrina when she tried to discuss her baby, and made passive-aggressive social media posts about the situation.

Katrina said Lucy had always had a tendency to ‘make everything about her’, and while it didn’t usually bother Katrina, the ‘final straw’ came when Katrina’s parents refused to attend Katrina’s baby shower and discouraged Katrina from posting about her pregnancy online because ‘it will upset your sister’.

Katrina had empathised with Lucy’s difficulties conceiving, but felt hurt and frustrated that she was now expected to essentially hide her own pregnancy.

Boundary scripts in response to attention-seeking

‘I can tell that talking about my pregnancy is painful for you. I don’t want to cause you more hurt, and I would love to celebrate this precious experience, too. I am here to support you with what you’re going through, but I am also not going to hide my pregnancy journey.’

‘I want to hear all about what’s happening in your life, and I would really appreciate if I could finish what I was saying, first.’

‘I can tell that [insert topic] has been bothering you and you need to talk about it. I’d love to listen when I have one hundred per cent of my energy available. Can I call you tonight?’

‘I can tell that you really need to talk about [insert topic], and I’d also really appreciate hearing your thoughts on [insert your own topic]. Can we allocate time for both these conversations today?’

‘When you interrupt me to offer an example that’s relevant to your life, I feel like that disrupts my train of thought and distracts from my own experience. I appreciate your wisdom, but would it be okay if we just focus on what’s happening for me right now?’

Dependency

Definition

There are elements of dependency in even the healthiest of relationships. One of the major benefits of relationships and friendships is reciprocity – that we can rely on each other for certain roles and needs to be met.

However, dependency becomes a problem when it causes one person to be so reliant on the other that they can’t or won’t function autonomously for themselves.

Dependency is a way out of taking responsibility. It relieves The Clinger of having to hold a cognitive, emotional or practical load in favour of another person carrying, managing and problem-solving that load for them.

Dependency disrupts the balance of responsibilities in the relationship and puts pressure on the person tasked with providing for The Clinger who won’t take responsibility for themselves. This can cause the person being depended upon feelings of frustration, anger, resentment and bitterness towards The Clinger (and/or a cycle of enablement if the person being depended upon has a high need to be needed).

What does dependency look like?

Needing validation.

Excessive need for contact and/or quick responses.

Deferring to another for decision-making.

Deferring to another for guidance on what their own opinion should be.

Playing down their capacity or skills to manipulate another to do things for them – a cycle known as ‘weaponised incompetence’.

Giving away their self-agency to another.

Dependency in real life

Taylor was in her thirties when she came to see me for symptoms of depression and anxiety. She was single and lived with her mother and sister, also aged in her thirties. They shared rent and expenses and provided emotional support to each other. All were unemployed. The problem was that whenever Taylor tried to better her situation by going for a job interview or dating, the other two would quickly derail her efforts with negativity.

Taylor wanted a different future for herself, but her mother and sister were deeply threatened by any moves that could disturb the triad of dependency that had formed. Taylor felt deeply guilty for trying to create a new future, believing that she was letting her sister and mother down. It took a few months for Taylor to shift her perspective in such a way that she could see beyond their dependency and into the possibility of reaching her potential. While her guilt didn’t immediately disappear, it did ease once she found employment and began to experience the benefits of standing on her own two feet.

Boundary scripts in response to dependency

‘I’m not always able to respond immediately. Thank you for being so kind and patient with me.’

‘It’s important to me to pursue my own goals. It doesn’t mean I love you less in doing so.’

‘I would love to support you with this, and I will get back to you the moment I feel recharged and have the energy to.’

Intrusion

Definition

Intrusion occurs when The Clinger involves themselves in a situation where they have not been invited, are not welcome, go beyond the boundaries of appropriateness, and/or have no right to be in. It functions to satisfy The Clinger’s curiosity, desire for power, and/or the gratification of having their opinions heard and thus being ‘needed’.

When The Clinger fails to heed boundaries, intrusion causes the other person to experience a sense of violation, feelings of betrayal, feelings of anxiety and a breakdown of trust.

What does intrusion look like?

Giving unsolicited advice.

Love-bombing – showers you with affection one day and shows no interest the next.

Oversharing.

Gossiping.

Asking very personal questions without an appropriate level of intimacy between you and the other person being present.

Being dismissive of other people needing more time to make decisions or take action and attempting to force their hand.

Daily monitoring of someone’s behaviour, whereabouts, social media activity.

Hacking someone’s emails, phone or social media profiles (usually for the purpose of easing The Clinger’s anxiety that they are not at risk of being rejected or abandoned).

Expecting to have a say in another adult’s life when they haven’t given The Clinger express consent (even if that person is The Clinger’s adult child).

Comments about another person’s choices, appearance or way of living their life that haven’t been asked for.

Intrusion in real life

I once dated a guy who was a ‘mummy’s boy’. His mother demonstrated some behaviours consistent with The Clinger archetype and was uncomfortable that our relationship had become fairly serious. I’d written him a cute letter, placed it in an envelope, and left it on the kitchen bench for him to read when he got home from work. She had a key to his house and visited without warning, opened the envelope and read the letter, then phoned him to tell him about it. On another occasion, they were at a family gathering I couldn’t make it to, and she grabbed his phone to read his text messages to me. I was not okay with this behaviour, but he failed to see what the problem was and was unwilling to set boundaries. We didn’t last.

Boundary scripts in response to intrusion

‘Please don’t go through my things. I value my privacy and would be grateful if you respected my space.’

‘Before you share anything, I would love to share what happened today with you. I’m not looking for advice I just want you to listen. Would that be okay?’

‘This is a personal matter for me. I’d like to keep it private.’

‘Can we talk about something else? I’m not comfortable talking about this topic.’

‘Dad, I understand your concerns wholeheartedly and value your advice and I am choosing to do what I feel is best for me.’

‘Thank you, but I am not looking for anyone else’s input right now.’

‘I’ve really valued times in the past when you’ve helped me figure things out. Right now, I’m working on listening to my own intuition, and I’d love it if you can support me in that.’

Exercise

Identify if the difficult person in your life is using any of the preoccupied behaviours and which archetype they match most accurately. Use the boundary scripts to support your practice setting boundaries with them.

Summary

Preoccupied behaviours include:

Behaviours primarily belonging to The Plasticine: fawning, eruption and self-neglect.

Behaviours primarily belonging to The Victim: blaming, kitchen-sinking, martyrdom, parentification and victim mentality.

Behaviours primarily belonging to The Clinger: attention-seeking, dependency and intrusion.

5

Avoidant behaviours

The Subtle Manipulator behaviours

Breaching confidence

Definition

Breaching confidence occurs when The Subtle Manipulator shares information that was held as private to that interaction or your relationship with them. Please note that this does not refer to situations where someone is required by law to pass information onto authorities.

The function of breaching someone’s confidence can be a number of things for The Subtle Manipulator, including attempting to create a closer connection to another person (the shared information becomes a secret between The Subtle Manipulator and the person receiving the sensitive information), attempting to undermine or damage the reputation of the person whose information is being shared, or carelessness (but lack of intent) on the part of The Subtle Manipulator.

Breaching confidence causes loss of trust in the current relationship, a sense of betrayal and anger, potential loss of trust in future relationships, and feelings of exposure, embarrassment, humiliation and/or shame (especially in cases where the shared information was particularly sensitive).

What does breaching confidence look like?

Gossiping.

Sharing information explicitly told to you in secret (e.g. someone says to you, ‘Don’t tell anyone this . . .’).

Sharing information implicitly told to you in secret (e.g. someone lowers their voice to explain something that is clearly sensitive to them. They don’t overtly say, ‘This is a secret’, and The Subtle Manipulator uses that as their justification for sharing the information further).

Breaching confidence in real life

Candace had been friends with Sharon since high school. They grew apart after school and had recently reconnected, now in their thirties and excited to discover they both worked in marketing. Candace shared with Sharon that she was planning on going for a promotion, but was concerned at how the extra workload would impact her stress levels, considering she was undergoing fertility treatment. She explained to Sharon that no one at work knew about her conception journey because she tended not to share her personal life at work.

Sharon had coffee with her co-worker Georgia later that week. She divulged Candace’s concerns in general conversation. Even though Georgia didn’t know Candace, she was friends with someone who worked in the same company as Candace. Georgia went on to share that information with her contact at Candace’s work, and it was then raised in Candace’s interview for the promotion. While it didn’t stop Candace from being awarded the higher position, she felt deeply betrayed by Sharon, and exposed at work. Her friendship with Sharon was never quite the same after that.

Boundary scripts in response to breaching confidence

‘I told you that information in confidence. I should have been clear about that at the time. Please don’t do it again.’

‘Sharing my information with other people is not okay. It breaks the trust that I felt I had with you. I’m disappointed and hurt and ask that you don’t do that again.’

‘I need you to know that telling [another person] something I shared with you in confidence really upset me. I’m going to take some time to re-evaluate our friendship because trust is a very important thing to me.’

‘I know this is unusual, but I am practising setting boundaries. I don’t feel comfortable discussing someone else when they are not here, but I would love to catch up on the latest in your life.’

Competition

Definition

The Subtle Manipulator may have a habit of turning interactions, relationships and friendships into something to win. They compete to gain a sense of superiority and one-upmanship.

Competition functions to make The Subtle Manipulator feel better about themselves. It helps band-aid their feelings of worthlessness and inferiority (even when they otherwise act like their self-worth is robust), by comparing outwardly in a way that demeans others while boosting themselves.

Note that there is a difference between being positively envious of someone’s good fortune (‘Oh Rhonda got a new car! I’d love to have a new car’) and negative envy, which turns their good fortune into something with which to compete or put down (‘Rhonda got a new car, but it’s just a gas-guzzling piece of rubbish. Wait until she sees me with an EV’).

Competition causes feelings of frustration, separation, exhaustion and disconnection for the person with whom The Subtle Manipulator is competing. It can eventually cause a breakdown of the relationship entirely.

What does competition look like?

Responding to someone’s good news with something The Subtle Manipulator views as better in their own life.

One-upping the other person’s fatigue, busyness, work pressure, child’s extracurricular activities, etc.

Tanking; that is, bringing down the dreams, hopes, positive feelings, good news or achievements of the other person and (intentionally or unintentionally) drowning them in negativity.

Score-keeping; that is, The Subtle Manipulator uses anything that makes them feel superior as ammunition to win against what they see as threats to their ego in the other person’s life. Because The Subtle Manipulator is slick at being, well, subtle, the impact on the person receiving the competition can be hard to put words to. It could be described as an ‘ick’ feeling or a sense that something is off about how you’re being received.

Competition in real life

I had a friend from my university days who I’ll call Anita. We were close at university, but after we graduated it became harder to maintain the friendship. I found it difficult to put my finger on why; it wasn’t that we argued or didn’t have anything in common. It was just an ‘ick’ feeling I was left with after spending time with her.

Then one day I met up with her for coffee and she excitedly shared the news that she was pregnant. After congratulating her and talking about how she was feeling, she asked, ‘So, what’s been happening with you? Obviously, you aren’t pregnant!’ in an ever-so-slightly jeering tone.

And that’s when I understood what was happening: the problem was competition.

Boundary scripts in response to competition

‘I really value this relationship so I’d like to address something that’s showing up for me. Sometimes, I feel uncomfortable sharing news with you because I notice that you respond with something that’s happening for you instead. I’d love it if you would simply be happy for me.’

‘Way to go! I’m so happy for you. I’d like to finish telling you about my news.’

Guilt-tripping

Definition

Guilt-tripping is a form of emotional manipulation that is designed to induce feelings of guilt in another person so The Subtle Manipulator gains an emotional or practical advantage over them.

Guilt-tripping functions to give The Subtle Manipulator the upper hand. It causes the receiver to experience feelings of guilt (obviously) and confusion, which can lead to shame and insecurity that they are not good enough for The Subtle Manipulator. When the receiver identifies that they are being manipulated, they often experience feelings of anger, resentment, frustration and a sense of being controlled or duped.

What does guilt-tripping look like?

The Subtle Manipulator pointing out theirs or someone else’s efforts as better than yours to make you feel like you’ve missed the mark.

Giving you the silent treatment to make you uncomfortable enough that you take responsibility for doing what has to be done to make The Subtle Manipulator feel better.

Bringing up times in the past where they supported you, to manipulate you to reciprocate because you ‘owe’ them.

Bringing your attention to how they are struggling in order to manipulate you into helping them (especially overdramatising their struggle).

Using love as a weapon for receiving favour (‘If you really loved me, you would …’). The Subtle Manipulator might also turn this into a pattern of emotional blackmail:

o They demand something of you.

o They push back if you don’t meet their demand, then pressure you to accede the demand (‘If you really loved me, you would . . .’).

o Threats (‘If you won’t do this for me, I’ll leave you for someone who will’).

o You finally give in and comply, and the cycle then repeats.

Guilt-tripping in real life

Rachael is relatively alone in her old age, the consequences of years of difficult behaviour (guilt-tripping, manipulation, cutting people off, spouting hateful views, attention-seeking). Her family keep in touch, but they rarely visit, choosing instead to live interstate.

She has since shifted her behaviour online, because there is no one available for her to directly manipulate. She posts on Facebook about how no one loves her and how difficult her life is. Without context, this would be heartbreaking. With context, it’s a clear indication that she continues to fail to recognise any responsibility that she holds for her own circumstances.

Boundary scripts in response to guilt-tripping

‘I hear that you would like support right now and I would appreciate it if you didn’t use guilt to try to communicate that need. I would like to assist you, but I can only do so if you communicate clearly and directly, and understand that I have needs and obligations on my time in other areas of my life.’

You also have the option to disengage altogether. It’s important that we acknowledge that this can initially give you intensified feelings of guilt – a double-dose of guilt that we’ll explore how to manage in Chapter 10.

Remember that someone’s unwillingness to learn a new way of getting their needs met doesn’t have to become your problem.

Passive-aggression

Definition

Passive-aggressive communication occurs when The Subtle Manipulator is trying to assert their boundaries and needs in a way that is unclear and oblique. The communication style appears passive on the surface, but acts to convey anger and undermine the target of their anger in subtle, indirect ways. It is motivated by the need to express anger, but the inability to do so directly out of a sense of powerlessness.

This is usually because The Subtle Manipulator feels unable to confront the source of their resentment or is concerned about the consequences if they made make their feelings known.

For the receiver, passive-aggression causes feelings of frustration because the behaviour is difficult to identify, label and prove. In relationships, it creates conflict and a loss of intimacy because communication is constantly veiled.

What does passive-aggression look like?

Making snide remarks.

Subtly mistreating someone, then The Subtle Manipulator withdraws and avoids communication in the name of protecting their ‘peace’.

Resistance to cooperation.

Procrastination.

Intentional mistakes in response to someone’s demands – because The Subtle Manipulator resents the demand, the person making the demand, or both.

Cynical, sullen or hostile attitude.

Petty acts of revenge.

Passive-aggression in real life

Two words: ‘I’m fine’. You’ve heard them, and you’ve likely said them, both when they are simply not true! What is true, though, is that you’re probably not a difficult person. We can all lapse into passive-aggression when we are stressed or overwhelmed by our emotional and practical loads. Passive-aggression becomes a much bigger problem when it is the bedrock of a person’s approach to getting their needs met. The Subtle Manipulator is an expert at it.

Boundary scripts in response to passive-aggression

‘The way you just spoke to me sounded loaded. Is there something deeper we need to discuss?’

‘I notice you are not responding. I’m trying to talk to you. You are saying everything is okay but your actions tell me that things are not okay. Can we discuss it?’

‘You are being passive-aggressive and that’s hurting me. I don’t want to pretend that everything is okay, because it’s not. What is going on for you?’

‘I would like to resolve what’s happening between us. Let’s talk about the problem. Can you tell me what you are feeling, because your response isn’t matching up with your behaviour.’

Triangulation

Definition

Triangulation is a manipulation tactic designed to avoid direct communication or confrontation. It is an avoidance behaviour used by The Subtle Manipulator that causes miscommunication, further conflict, disconnection and loss of trust.

What does triangulation look like?

Telling someone to pass on a message that The Subtle Manipulator doesn’t want to say to the person directly.

Gossiping with mutual friends rather than bringing up issues directly.

Asking someone to get involved in an issue between The Subtle Manipulator and someone else to try to influence the other person’s behaviour.

Triangulation in real life

I once worked in a medical setting providing mental health treatment for patients. One of my patients had specific dietary requirements that the kitchen staff perceived as unreasonable. My patient’s family made a formal complaint to the manager of the medical service about the kitchen’s poor attempt at co-operating with the patient’s needs. The chef requested a meeting with me (despite me having nothing to do with her food intake). Because the patient had mental health issues, the chef decided I was his target. I was inexperienced at the time and just finding my feet as an intern clinician, so I agreed to the meeting without thinking it through. The chef then used that meeting to tell me all the things I needed to ‘pass on to this family’ as justification for why the patient ‘is so difficult’. My patient wasn’t difficult and nor was the family. But the chef was.

Boundary scripts in response to triangulation

‘This conversation is inappropriate. I won’t bear the brunt of your frustration or discuss this issue in a negative way behind someone else’s back.’

‘If you want to solve your problem with Inca, please go to her. Let her know how you feel. Telling me puts me in the middle and that’s not fair on me or Inca.’

‘I can see this is really tough for you and I think it would be more productive for you to discuss this directly with Inca.’

‘I’d prefer to speak directly to my sister about this, thank you.’

The Narcissist behaviours

Entitlement

Definition

A sense of entitlement is expressed when someone believes they have a right to something. In the case of The Narcissist, this is often a perceived right to someone else’s personal resources (time, money, love, attention, energy, support) or to something external that someone else has that they want (job position, partner, a particular opportunity). It is also displayed when The Narcissist believes they are superior or important and, as such, deserving of privileges or special treatment.

The Narcissist is good at feigning robust self-worth. However, it’s a cover up. Entitlement functions to quell a sense of inadequacy within The Narcissist. If you are offered more than someone else (or even more than you deserve), then surely that’s a sign that you are worthy?

The person receiving the entitlement experiences feelings of injustice, resentment and frustration at The Narcissist’s unfair elevation and resulting imbalances in how credit and resources are distributed because of that elevation.

What does entitlement look like?

Demanding more respect or credit than deserved.

A sense of bravado.

Purchasing items of status to affirm their sense of being entitled.

An attitude of what’s mine is mine and what’s yours is mine, too.

Entitlement in real life

As an intern psychologist, I was responsible for running therapy groups for veterans with posttraumatic stress disorder. I remember visiting an inpatient unit outside of town to run a group. When I entered the room, I said hello to the veterans present before sitting in a vacant chair. Upon sitting down, a large man who went by the nickname of Red walked in and stood over me, glaring down. I introduced myself and asked him if something was wrong. He said, ‘No one sits in Red’s chair except for Red, girly’. One of the other veterans present retrieved another chair and whispered to me, ‘It’s easier not to upset Red’, and later apologised on behalf of the group for Red’s behaviour – but out of Red’s earshot. I was young, green and easily intimidated and did not speak up. Today, whether or not I spoke up would be dependent on whether the patient had issues of aggression or not. Sometimes, it’s worth picking your battles.

Boundary scripts in response to entitlement

‘Our workplace is predicated on equality. Everyone has equal access to opportunities and resources.’

‘I wish I could fit you in immediately, but my schedule is booked well in advance. Please contact my assistant and he will book you in at the next available time.’

Exclusion

Definition

Exclusion occurs when someone is left out either emotionally or socially. The Narcissist will exclude someone intentionally to afford themselves a sense of power, control and superiority. Exclusion is also a commonly used form of bullying.

The person being excluded experiences feelings of loneliness, isolation, jealousy, rejection, anger, anxiety, sadness and worthlessness. These feelings can contribute to the excluded person becoming withdrawn or needy, and if it occurs in a workplace setting, decreased motivation and productivity and increased rates of absenteeism.

What does exclusion look like?

Not being invited to events.

Not being invited to join in socially (e.g. sit at the same table).

Being left out of an experience that everyone else in the group is having.

Not being offered access to the same information as others in the group.

Not being offered access to the same resources as others in the group.

Keeping secrets from one specific person.

Exclusion in real life

Julieta came to see me for what she called ‘stress’. She and her husband had recently moved to a new city and joined a new church. Julieta stated that she had ‘never felt so alone in all my life’ as a result of the chronic patterns of exclusion in the church. She said that the community appeared to be divided into factions between those who supported the current pastor and those who were loyal to a previous pastor. When Julieta refused to ‘pick a side’, she was left on the outskirts of the church community and not invited to social events. A prominent member of the church, who had initially been welcoming to Julieta, turned against her when Julieta failed to exclusively support this woman’s chosen pastor. The woman then orchestrated Julieta’s exclusion from major church events, while promoting her own standing with the pastor in question as a sign of her superiority. Julieta felt so distressed by the situation that she left the church altogether.

Boundary scripts in response to exclusion

Some difficult behaviours send a message that speaking up may not be worth it. If the exclusion is not intentional, speaking up will likely lead to a repair of the relationship and the offer of inclusion. However, if the exclusion is intentional (as is usually the case with The Narcissist, although they will likely deny it when confronted), it’s time to consider whether you really want to persist with this relationship.

If you are experiencing exclusion at work, seek out managerial support.

Gaslighting

Definition

Gaslighting is a form of emotional abuse that occurs when The Narcissist attempts to manipulate you in such a way that they distort the truth and cause you to question your own reality. They do so by insisting that you are wrong about your experience, memory or interpretation of an event, circumstance or feeling.

There is a difference between gaslighting and disagreement. When someone disagrees with you, they can agree to disagree while still hearing and respecting your perspective. They can de-escalate the conversation if things become heated and usually hold a goal of maintaining civility.

On the other hand, gaslighting is a power play in relationships designed to offer The Narcissist advantage and control over someone else, while simultaneously absolving themselves of all responsibility.

The person being gaslit experiences intense self-doubt, questioning their own sense of reality as a result. They feel helpless in this unpleasant and unequal power dynamic with The Narcissist and often lose confidence in their ability to accurately communicate what they are feeling. They may resort to people-pleasing (in an attempt to create some stability where The Narcissist is finally happy), and/or find themselves walking on eggshells when The Narcissist is not getting what they want. Once the person being gaslit realises what’s happening, they can experience frustration, anger and resentment at being controlled in this way.

What does gaslighting look like?

Showers you with affection one day and shows no interest the next – also known as ‘love-bombing’.

Refuses to acknowledge when they have caused you pain, instead blaming you for the pain you are feeling.

Trivialising your feelings to make you believe you are overreacting.

Rewriting history and forcefully declaring that their version is true.

Justifying their behaviours or accusations even after you’ve attempted to set boundaries.

Ignoring known boundaries and then justifying their ignorance by claiming they didn’t know the boundary was there.

Refusing to acknowledge or believe your experience unless it paints them in a generous light.

Attacking your perspective, sometimes followed by shutting down the conversation and accusing you of being too emotional to handle it.

Saying one thing but doing the opposite and claiming that they are the same thing.

Denying, attacking and then reversing the victim to the offender (DARVO).

Accusing you of not getting the ‘joke’.

Gaslighting in real life

Gwen was in her fifties and came to see me because her husband, Brian, had suggested she ‘needed to work on her anxiety’. When I asked her why her husband would say that, Gwen responded that she was worried that Brian was being unfaithful. He had apparently reassured her that ‘it was all in her head’ and grown tired of her ‘being a worry wart and acting crazy’, finally suggesting that she see a therapist. Brian spent the mornings surfing with his ‘friend’, a colleague named Jill. They regularly chatted outside of work time, and on more than one occasion, they had travelled interstate for work purposes together. Brian’s ‘proof’ that there was nothing going on between him and Jill was to invite Gwen to join them each morning. She would walk their dog along the beach while Brian and Jill went out surfing. By the time Gwen saw me, Brian had her convinced that her ‘anxiety was out of control and I should probably try some kind of medication’. You probably won’t be surprised to learn that Gwen had every reason for anxiety when she found intimate photos of Jill on Brian’s phone. She was right, but gaslit into doubting her own reality.

It’s also possible to gaslight yourself. You might recognise this as one of your patterns if you make excuses for someone’s poor, damaging or difficult behaviour (when they’ve proved they don’t have a reasonable excuse), blame yourself for their behaviour, or invalidate your own experience and accuse yourself of being too sensitive or overreactive. You might also be suppressing your own feelings to avoid upsetting someone. If this becomes habitual, you may become disconnected from your intuition and mistrusting of your own judgement because you’ve been focused on, and tying your sense of worth to, someone else’s happiness, approval or stability.

Boundary scripts in response to gaslighting

First, understand that when someone is not taking you seriously, that’s a problem with them and not you. There’s no point in wasting your energy on trying to force someone to understand where you are coming from when they are committed to staying fixed in their position and making you wrong for your position.

‘I need to step back from this conversation. I understand that we don’t agree on what happened and I’m not going to argue the point.’

‘We remember what happened differently.’

‘I won’t be spoken to this way and am leaving the conversation now.’

‘I hear what your experience was, but that was not my experience, and it doesn’t change what’s real for me at this moment.’

If you are gaslighting yourself, try offering yourself these self-talk scripts:

‘I can trust my experience.’

‘My feelings are real and valid.’

‘Even though this person is having a hard time, their behaviour is unacceptable and I have the right to set boundaries.’

Narcissism

Definition

Narcissism refers to behaviour or personality traits that feature extreme self-involvement; a sense of entitlement; a need to feel superior to, and gain admiration from, others; and a lack of empathy. Narcissism functions to protect The Narcissist’s fragile ego. It’s a defence against their underlying feelings of inferiority (despite The Narcissist’s talents at making it appear that they feel great about themselves).

Being on the receiving end of The Narcissist causes feelings of doubt, belittlement, rejection, powerlessness, disconnection, confusion, discombobulation between being loved one minute and ignored the next, feeling unimportant or not cared for unless The Narcissist is gaining benefit, and a sense of shame and embarrassment that you don’t measure up to them (and never will by their standards).

What does narcissism look like?

Charming behaviour to gain advantage over others.

Manipulating others to make themselves look better.

Gaslighting (see page 175).

Belittling others.

Talking above others to make themselves sound more intelligent.

Difficulties connecting with others unless they perceive there are benefits in it for them.

High need for attention and admiration, and a belief that they are entitled to this attention and admiration because they are ‘special’.

Arrogance.

Narcissism in real life

I worked for a narcissistic psychiatrist once – yes, narcissists exist in every profession! Initially, I could do no wrong in his eyes. As long as I was looking to him for guidance and support, everything was great. However, the minute I sought out additional input in my career, I was devalued and ignored. It was quite destabilising at the time because I thought I had done something wrong. I did nothing wrong, except injure his dangerously large ego.

A decade later, this psychiatrist assessed a patient of mine. The patient passed on to me that the psychiatrist had mentioned he ‘taught me everything I know’. It was a challenge to remain impartial in front of my patient when my eyebrows wanted to call bullshit on the psychiatrist’s statement.

Perhaps you can recognise a boss or person in a position of authority in your life having traits of narcissism?

Boundary scripts in response to narcissism

‘We both have a right to our own opinions.’

‘How you feel about me is none of my business.’

‘I am capable of making my own decisions, regardless of your opinion.’

‘We can agree to disagree.’

‘I see your perspective and I have my own perspective.’

The Brick Wall behaviours

Cutting off

Definition

Cutting someone off refers to when The Brick Wall eliminates you from their life. The end to the relationship or friendship can dwindle or be abrupt, and usually occurs without explanation.

Cutting someone out of your life can be done by non-difficult people for legitimate reasons of self-protection and be part of setting a clear and healthy boundary that someone has met with a deal-breaker of yours, or crossed a boundary multiple times and is now facing the consequences. However, The Brick Wall cuts people off instead of attempting to problem-solve or repair because they are conflict-avoidant.

If The Brick Wall repeatedly uses cutting people off as a conflict-management strategy, the result sees them isolated and lacking in meaningful relationships.

What does cutting off look like?

Ceasing all communication abruptly.

A slow decline in contact before ceasing all communication.

Increasing conflict and/or a fallout followed by ceasing all communication.

Cutting off in real life

A friend of mine, who I’ll call Fallon, reached out to me one day in a state of distress. She’d been friends with a guy, who I’ll call Mason, for nearly a decade, and they were close enough that they’d even produced a podcast together. Fallon was upset because Mason had recently been distant with her, and somewhat passive-aggressive online, making remarks in Instagram stories that Fallon interpreted as being directed at her. When she confronted him about it, he told her, ‘I am just speaking my truth’ and promptly cut her off. She remains confused to this day at what she did wrong, but when it comes to The Brick Wall, sometimes you won’t ever know, and most times it’s not actually about you, but about them.

Boundary scripts in response to cutting off

If someone has cut you off, there’s not much you can do because the lines of communication have been closed. Here, it’s about doing what you need to do to process your feelings around the end of the relationship. Be mindful that pursuing The Brick Wall in an attempt to fix things may just compound your hurt and also cross boundaries that they have now put in place by walking away.

Ghosting

Definition

Ghosting occurs when The Brick Wall ceases all contact with someone they’ve been in ongoing contact with or in a relationship with, usually abruptly, with no explanation. In doing so, they violate the ongoing expectation the other person has that contact should continue given the information they have access to.

Ghosting functions to allow The Brick Wall to avoid any confrontations or hard conversations about not wanting further contact with the person being ghosted. It’s an avoidance strategy that can be used out of fear (‘I don’t want conflict’), misguided concern for the other person (‘I don’t want to hurt them; it’s just easier this way’), ignorance (‘I don’t know how to have that conversation to end things’), or blatant selfishness (‘It’s just not working out for me and I can’t be bothered dealing with them anymore’).

Ghosting someone depends on reciprocity: The Brick Wall and the ghostee have been interacting and the ghostee, given everything they know about those interactions, could reasonably expect contact to continue.

Ghosting causes feelings of hurt, rejection, loneliness, confusion and loss of confidence. It can also cause the person being ghosted to isolate themselves in future out of fear that ghosting will occur again.

What does ghosting look like?

Abruptly stopping all forms of communication by:

Not answering calls.

Not replying to texts.

Not replying to emails.

Not replying to social media messages.

Blocking all channels above so that communication cannot be maintained.

Ghosting in real life

Unfortunately, anyone who has participated in online dating likely has a ghosting story. You’re in contact with a potential partner for weeks, maybe even months, and then all of a sudden . . . nothing. It’s a painful and destabilising experience.

Boundary scripts in response to ghosting

If you’ve been ghosted, unfortunately there’s no chance for you to set a boundary because contact with The Brick Wall has ceased. However, you can set a boundary for yourself moving forward by not pursuing The Brick Wall further (and not accepting someone back into your life if they return without an apology and explanation).

Repair incompetence

Definition

Repair incompetence refers to The Brick Wall’s lack of skills to repair ruptures in relationships. You desire your relationship with The Brick Wall to continue, but their inability to repair is problematic in your relationship.

Repair incompetence functions as an avoidance strategy, but it can often be unintentional because The Brick Wall doesn’t have the necessary skills for communicating more effectively. It leads to you feeling frustrated and resentful, hurt and hopeless. The weight of carrying full responsibility for all repair efforts in your relationship with The Brick Wall is heavy and contributes to an endless cycle of problems arising and being swept under the carpet because The Brick Wall is unable or unwilling to apologise, make amends and work on reconnection. Instead, they ignore what’s happened and expect you to continue on as you both were prior to the issue occurring.

What does repair incompetence look like?

Retreating or withdrawing whenever issues are being discussed.

Sweeping issues under the carpet.

Never apologising or making amends.

Claiming they ‘don’t care’ or ‘it doesn’t matter’ when you try and address issues.

A belief that healthy relationships should never have conflict.

Being passive-aggressive instead of acknowledging that there’s an issue.

Repair incompetence in real life

Harris followed in his father’s footsteps to become a plumber. He left school at the age of 15 to start his apprenticeship with his father. During that time, Harris’s father was emotionally abusive, demanding such unrealistic standards of his son that Harris became severely depressed. His father failed to acknowledge any wrongdoing, even when confronted by Harris’s mother. Through sheer will and determination, Harris finished his apprenticeship and immediately left his father’s business to work on his own. Their relationship was fractured for a time, until they both shifted into a superficially comfortable relationship. Harris worked on his healing with me for a couple of years. During that time, he elected to confront his father. His father’s response was, ‘Haven’t you gotten over that by now? I helped you get to where you are so it can’t have been that bad. Let’s let bygones be bygones.’ Ouch. Harris wasn’t going to eliminate his father from his life, but his repair incompetence is a wound Harris will carry for a long time.

Boundary scripts in response to repair incompetence

When setting boundaries for repair incompetence, it can be a process of modelling to The Brick Wall how it’s done. That doesn’t guarantee that they will learn the necessary skills, but it can help them have an opportunity to do so if they have any level of willingness available.

Showing you’ve been hurt:

‘I understand where you are coming from, and I’d value your understanding of why this makes me uncomfortable.’

‘I love you, and I feel hurt by your actions.’

‘I noticed that the situation you were in was difficult for you and I am feeling disappointed because of the impact it had on me.’

‘You didn’t intend for this to be uncomfortable for me, I know that, and I notice that I am responding with struggle because of previous experiences.’

‘I hear that this isn’t a big deal for you, and that you would react differently if you were in my shoes, and I need you to understand that it feels big to me because of where I am at right now.’

Demonstrating how to manage disagreement:

‘I am not seeking agreement from you.’

‘We see/remember/experience things differently.’

‘I understand your perspective and can see why/how you feel/interpret/experience things because of it.’

‘You are right.’

‘I can’t offer a deeper explanation on this because I don’t feel like I have all the information.’

‘Thank you for sharing your opinion.’

Managing tension:

‘Could we take a break and return to this conversation when we are both feeling calm?’

‘Could we change the topic before we become overwhelmed?’

Exercise

Identify if the difficult person in your life is using any of the avoidant behaviours and which archetype they match most accurately. Use the boundary scripts to support your practise setting boundaries with them.

Summary

Avoidant behaviours include:

Behaviours primarily belonging to The Subtle Manipulator: breaching confidence, guilt-tripping, passive-aggression and triangulation.

Behaviours primarily belonging to The Narcissist: entitlement, exclusion, gaslighting and narcissism.

Behaviours primarily belonging to The Brick Wall: cutting off, ghosting and repair incompetence.

6

Fearful behaviours

The Swindler behaviours

Weaponised honesty

Definition

Respectful honesty is admirable in relationships when it is communicated with kindness and consideration for the person receiving it. However, honesty in this sense refers to The Swindler’s tendency to use the truth as a weapon. The goal is usually to disarm or destabilise the target, often in retaliation for The Swindler feeling hurt or vulnerable within themselves. Weaponised honesty causes the target to feel wounded, often accompanied by embarrassment or shame for their perceived flaws The Swindler pointed out when they were ‘just being honest’.

If weaponised honesty is repeated in a relationship, it causes a power imbalance (because the target is always trying to avoid making mistakes to avoid being called out) and eventually, a breakdown of trust.

What does weaponised honesty look like?

Confronting their target with an unfiltered, but truthful barb, followed by a statement along the lines of, ‘I’m just being honest’, ‘I just tell it how it is’, or ‘There’s no point in being upset because I’m just telling the truth’.

Pointing out the target’s flaw(s) as an insult, especially flaws that they are unable to change.

The statement occurs at a point in the interaction when The Swindler is losing their sense of control and wants to restore their power in the relationship.

The Swindler feels exposed for their own behaviour and launches into a defensive attack that uses weaponised honesty to deflect away from themselves.

Weaponised honesty in real life

A friend of mine, who I’ll call Louisa, worked on a creative project for close to a year with a friend of hers, who I’ll call Darren. Louisa put her heart and soul into this project because she valued Darren as both a friend and fellow creative. Darren posted his end-of-year reflections online about not wanting to repeat projects that ‘sucked my soul’. Concerned that his reference might have been to their project, Louisa reached out to him. ‘Yes, it was about our project, Louisa. It’s not personal, it’s just a fact: working with you burnt me out.’

It’s hard to see a way that this comment wouldn’t be personal, and Louisa interpreted it as such. Despite her willingness to talk through both their experiences, and to empathise with and process Darren’s feelings, Darren distanced himself and their friendship has not been the same since.

Boundary scripts in response to weaponised honesty

‘Your “honesty” is hurtful. I won’t continue this conversation if it includes attempts to insult me.’

‘That statement was hurtful, and it feels like things are getting heated here. I am going to take a break and let’s come back to this discussion when we are calmer and committed to communicating respectfully.’

Inconsistency

Definition

Inconsistency refers to The Swindler’s tendency to say one thing and do another (or vice versa). They are masters of verbal and behavioural mixed messages. The Swindler uses inconsistency to avoid commitment or responsibility, or as a power play for control, where the person being swindled is constantly second-guessing their availability, meaning or where they stand.

Inconsistency causes the swindled person to experience feelings of confusion, frustration, anger and resentment. Because the goal posts keep moving, there’s an eventual breakdown in trust.

What does inconsistency look like?

Saying one thing and doing another.

Stories, excuses or justifications that don’t add up (e.g. promising to call at a certain time and then claiming that their ‘phone didn’t have service’).

Hot and cold relational dynamics.

On-and-off communication dynamics.

Interacting on their terms only.

Inability to commit.

Vague or no follow through.

Not leading by example.

Claiming a boundary is important, but not enforcing it with anyone except you.

Ambiguous expectations or actions and then becoming upset when it’s not exactly how they wanted it.

Going back on their word.

Inconsistency in real life

I learned how destabilising inconsistency can be in my second ever job. I was 15 and worked at a souvenir shop owned by a woman who was chronically and chillingly inconsistent. Some days we wouldn’t see her at all and there were no issues. Other days she would breeze in with a smile on her face, seemingly happy to see us and pleased with what we were doing in the shop. And on random days in between, she was unpredictably horrid. She yelled at me in front of customers for having wet hair (my hair was not wet, it had mousse in it), then sidled up to me sweetly at a co-worker’s wedding the following week. When I pointed out that the lock to the storeroom was broken, she rolled her eyes and sneered that I was ‘useless because you are blonde’. And yet, at my next shift she called to check on sales and said congratulations for my exams being over. The result was me fearing her and never being able to trust anything positive that she said.

Boundary scripts in response to inconsistency

Receiving inconsistency is destabilising. It’s important to be clear for yourself on what your boundaries are before you communicate them so that you don’t inadvertently contribute to the inconsistency by setting a boundary and then not following through.

‘You said X yesterday and today it seems you are saying Y. Can you help me understand what you mean?’

‘Your contribution to our relationship is inconsistent. I’d like to be with someone who is able to nurture a partnership consistently, so I need to step away from this now.’

Weaponised joking

Definition

I am Australian and a strong thread in the fabric of our culture is humour. Having a joke with someone, when that joke leads to humour that is shared, is a bonding experience. It brings us closer together. However, ‘joking’ by The Swindler refers to the use of humour as a weapon. The Swindler claims to be ‘joking’ to deflect from the insult they just landed upon the recipient.

Weaponised joking is an avoidance strategy. It functions to help The Swindler avoid taking responsibility for their aggressive behaviour by claiming it to be an innocent joke. The Swindler’s ‘humour’ is different from a joke that is unwittingly hurtful. If someone was genuinely joking without understanding the harm their words have, they will usually express remorse and apologise.

For the target, joking causes feelings of isolation, rejection, hurt, upset, anger and resentment. When weaponised humour is used repeatedly, it causes a breakdown in trust.

What does weaponised joking look like?

Hurtful comments framed as humour:

o ‘I was just joking. Why do you have to take everything so seriously?’

o ‘No offence, but . . . LOL.’

Accuses the person of not having a sense of humour when they react negatively to the ‘joke’.

Using LOL, LMAO or similar emojis in a barbed message, then claiming that the abbreviations or emojis ‘prove’ that the joke is valid.

Weaponised joking in real life

I come from a family who uses humour as a shared language. That language is both self-deprecating and good-natured ribbing . . . until it’s not. Sometimes, the ribbing can go too far, which introduces a complexity if someone gets hurt because, ‘You know we’re just joking! Don’t be so sensitive.’

The lines between what is funny and what is hurtful can become blurred. There’s not always an easy way to know where the line is and when it’s been crossed. However, the difference between a difficult person and decent person is that the decent person genuinely cares about harm from their humour and will seek to correct the mistake. The Swindler, on the other hand, will blame the target for their reaction.

Boundary scripts in response to weaponised joking

‘It might feel liberating to say you are joking, but that felt more like a jab than a joke.’

‘When you told that joke, I felt belittled. Please don’t do it again.’

‘Your “jokes” don’t feel like jokes to me. They hurt. Please be mindful of your words so that they don’t irreparably harm our relationship.’

‘I hear that you were not trying to hurt my feelings. What may be a joke to you doesn’t feel funny to me. Can you please refrain from saying those things to me in the future?’

Lying

Definition

Lying refers to behaviour that is intentionally dishonest, false or deceptive. It functions to deny a truth that may cause conflict, to protect The Swindler from looking bad, to avoid a reality that The Swindler doesn’t want to face, or otherwise cover up something that would cause problems for The Swindler.

Lying causes a breakdown in trust, and relationships to crumble. The Swindler can become so reliant on lying as a defensive strategy that it becomes the basis of their way of being to make themselves look better, obtain advantage or maintain control over someone else.

What does lying look like?

Outright dishonesty.

Being two-faced; that is, acting one way in front of someone and another way behind their back, sweet in public, venomous in private.

Being inauthentic (concealing your true self from someone). Bear in mind that some people are sometimes forced to conceal who they really are for their own safety (e.g. trans and gender-fluid people). This is not them being difficult. It’s a reflection on social intolerance of personal authenticity, and it’s unacceptable.

Deception via omission. This is where someone doesn’t outright lie, but they don’t tell you the entire truth.

Lying in real life

I have treated countless partners who are recovering from infidelity in their relationship, but a client who stands out is a woman who I will call Maisy. Maisy had just discovered that her husband, Alistair, had rekindled an affair he was having with his co-worker . . . an affair he had promised Maisy was over. Complicating the situation was that the co-worker had given birth to Alistair’s child, who was now 18 months old. Maisy wasn’t just discovering a second season of infidelity, but a second family that her husband was now maintaining. I’m not sure how long Alistair thought he could get away with it, but if there was ever a charge for maximum Swindler behaviour, this was it.

Boundary scripts in response to lying

‘Kissing someone else while you are in a relationship with me is a deal-breaker. I can’t continue in this relationship with you.’

‘I am incredibly hurt to think that you broke my trust. I need some space to re-evaluate this relationship.’

‘Your dishonesty has hurt me badly. I want to find a way to work through this and forgive you, but I am going to need your commitment to [insert specific actions] to rebuild the trust between us.’

Undermining

Definition

Undermining refers to The Swindler’s tendency to lessen the effectiveness, power or ability of someone else, often by influencing another person’s beliefs about them. Undermining functions to make The Swindler, who feels inferior, to feel better about themselves, often because they feel jealous or threatened by the person who is being undermined.

The person being undermined can experience anxiety, depression, anger, a sense of helplessness and loss of control. Undermining can often be a subtle strategy that accompanies a wider pattern of bullying.

What does undermining look like?

Convincing others that The Swindler’s opinion of the person being undermined is right.

Criticism without suggestion to improve (especially in front of others).

Taking credit that doesn’t belong to The Swindler.

Attributing blame to someone else.

Withholding information.

Sabotaging someone else’s efforts.

Being two-faced.

Undermining in real life

A friend of mine, who I’ll call Brea, worked in a corporate organisation in the marketing department. She was finding her feet at the time, and had her heart set on working her way up the corporate ladder. Her opportunity arrived in the form of a large project. She pitched for it to rave reviews from peers and management. Brea ended up running and successfully delivering the project. Six months later, her direct supervisor advertised a job internally, the role for which was modelled on Brea’s project. She applied for the job but was denied an interview because the supervisor found enough reasons to hire his mate. If that wasn’t enough, he then approached Brea to train said mate in the requirements of such a role.

Boundary scripts in response to undermining

‘Your criticism undermines me and negatively impacts our relationship. Please be mindful of the way you speak to and about me.’

‘Can we backtrack a little here. Joe is speaking to an idea I initially offered around this, and I’d appreciate being included in the conversation about it moving forward.’

The Swindler may go out of their way to deny that they are undermining you (and therefore reject any boundaries you attempt to set). In this case, set practical boundaries by reducing your time around this person, informing your manager of the situation, not sharing vulnerable information with The Swindler, and ensuring you are appropriately credited for your work.

The Aggressor behaviours

Aggression

Definition

Aggressive communication refers to action The Aggressor takes to violate the rights, needs and values of others. The Aggressor expresses themselves and advocates for their own needs in ways that are forceful, hostile and intimidating. (Note: When this behaviour escalates to physical and/or sexual abuse, it’s no longer a difficult aggressive person, but a dangerous person.) The Aggressor will ignore, neglect or simply walk right on through boundaries. The Aggressor will deny intent or fail to understand that perception of aggression belongs to the receiver.

The Aggressor uses their intimidating behaviour to defend against an injured ego or to gain power and control. They experience a release for their anger while obtaining satisfaction at bringing others into line and/or doling out punishment for perceived slights.

Aggression can cause:

Fear (flight response)

Reactive aggression (fight response)

Stress

Subservience (fawn response)

Anxiety (anticipation of more aggression in the future)

PTSD (sustained trauma response)

Shut down (freeze response).

What does aggression look like?

Provocation and then blaming the victim for their reactions.

Verbal lashing.

Putting others down, especially with derogatory language.

Persistent and hurtful criticism.

Name-calling.

Actual or threatened violence (dangerous person).

Yelling.

Standing over someone.

Tense, angry facial expression.

Menacing tone.

Aggression towards objects.

Reckless behaviours.

Aggression in real life

Paul was a veteran of the conflict in East Timor. He was seeing me to treat PTSD. Our sessions began reactively, as they so often do for incredibly capable and intelligent men who are convinced they should be able to cope on their own. In Paul’s case, it had reached the point where he wasn’t able to leave the house without ‘issues’. Paul had visited the pharmacy to collect a prescription. His wife, Claire, was with him, because entering shopping centres triggered his anxiety.

Upon leaving, Paul was already ‘amped up’. He stated that their car was cut off in the carpark by a ute driven by a ‘young hooligan’. Paul proceeded to tail this ute to ‘teach him the difference between right and wrong’, eventually forcing the other driver to pull over. Against Claire’s pleading to ‘leave it alone’, Paul yelled in the driver’s face about how reckless he was and kicked the rear tyre as he returned to his own car.

While Paul felt he was doing other drivers on the road a favour by ‘pulling this kid into line’, Claire was scared, embarrassed and increasingly unsure if she could comfortably leave the house with her husband.

Boundary scripts in response to aggression

‘It makes me feel [insert how it makes you feel] when you talk to me this way. Please don’t speak to me like this.’

‘I don’t like the way you said that. It feels hurtful. While I support you expressing your feelings, please do so by being mindful of your tone and the words you use.’

‘I can’t continue this conversation if your voice is raised. If you are unable to lower your voice, I’ll need to leave.’

‘Standing over me in that way feels uncomfortable for me. I’m going to leave now, and we can continue this conversation when you have calmed down.’

‘Please don’t call me names. It’s mean and hurts me. I want us to be able to discuss this respectfully. If you can’t do that, this conversation will need to end.’

Bullying

Definition

Bullying is any behaviour that seeks to harm, intimidate or coerce someone who is perceived as vulnerable. Bullying behaviour can be overt (e.g. see Aggression, page 199) or covert (e.g. see Exclusion, page 173).

Bullying functions to increase The Aggressor’s sense of power, control and superiority (usually born from a deep sense of inferiority). It also functions to highlight The Aggressor’s authority over the ‘in group’ and the victim’s inferiority as part of the ‘out group’.

Bullying causes the victim to experience feelings of sadness, loneliness, worthlessness, depression and anxiety, reduced work or study performance, increased absenteeism (from work or school), and contributes to an academic or workplace culture that is psychologically unsafe.

What does bullying look like?

Cruelty (and cruelty passed off as humour).

Name-calling.

Teasing.

Microaggressions (everyday, insidious interactions – can be intentional or unintentional – that communicate negative bias to another person who is usually from a marginalised group; a particularly common form of racism, e.g. ‘But where are you really from?’, asked to a person of Asian appearance born in Australia).

Threats.

Physical and psychological intimidation.

Exclusion.

Bullying in real life

I went to high school with a girl who I’ll call Anne. Anne was intelligent, beautiful, kind and one of the funniest people I’ve ever met. We were in grade 10 when Madison joined our school. Madison quickly formed a group of girls around her who were collectively deemed ‘cool’, and Anne became their target. Madison called Anne every name under the sun. She teased her about the brand of her clothes. She teased her about wearing second-hand school uniforms. She turned other people against Anne, spreading rumours and gossip about Anne wherever she could. If anyone, like myself, dared speak up for Anne, we were immediately bullied as well. Madison caused Anne to become so anxious that she wound up changing schools. The bullying was done in front of students but never in front of teachers. Although the teachers knew about it, there was never any effective action taken. Anne’s self-esteem was negatively affected well into adulthood as a result of the experience. It still breaks my heart to this day.

Boundary scripts in response to bullying

If someone in your life is bullying you, it can often be the case that your attempts to set boundaries with them will antagonise them further. If you try these scripts and the situation escalates, or this person has repeatedly bullied you, please take action to protect yourself and place distance between the two of you, if not remove them from your life.

‘I don’t deserve to be spoken to this way.’

‘Your behaviour is unacceptable.’

‘If you continue behaving in this way, I will report it to Human Resources.’

Revenge

Definition

The Aggressor uses revenge to hurt or harm someone in retaliation for harm they perceive was caused to them. The Aggressor may also seek revenge on behalf of someone else, even when that person hasn’t asked them to do so. Revenge functions to restore The Aggressor’s sense of justice, but it should be noted that this is not a healthy conflict management strategy. The Aggressor uses revenge to achieve a temporary sense of release and satisfaction.

Victims of revenge suffer harm. If the revenge is perceived as unjustified, it can cause a cycle of escalating punishment between The Aggressor and the aggrieved party.

What does revenge look like?

Any intentional act to cause harm in response to perceived injury that can be large (damage to property) or petty (grudge-holding, withholding of forgiveness).

Revenge in real life

A couple I knew of were engaged in a longstanding cycle of revenge cheating. Rowan had kissed another man while drunk one night. Quinn took his revenge a step further and slept with another man. Rowan felt betrayed because his infidelity was ‘only a kiss’ and went ahead and slept with another man. And on the cycle went. After their rage turned to exhaustion and then indifference, they eventually broke up.

Boundary scripts in response to revenge

For everyone involved, revenge is a very unhealthy coping strategy. If this is occurring in your relationship with The Aggressor, please consider stepping back from that relationship. The boundaries that are going to support you in the long-term are ones that don’t require you to have to find a way to be around someone determined to ensure they cause you as much hurt as possible because they are hurting.

Trolling

Definition

A troll is a person who behaves recklessly online. The Aggressor sits behind their keyboard, spouting antagonistic, threatening and hurtful text with no regard for other people’s feelings. The Aggressor trolls for personal entertainment, attention-seeking, revenge, boredom and sadistic satisfaction.

Victims of trolling can experience anxiety, depression, low self-esteem, suicidal ideation and social withdrawal.

What does trolling look like?

Deliberately antagonising people online.

Commenting inflammatory or hurtful remarks.

Choosing to behave in the most offensive way possible to gain a reaction.

Trolling in real life

There have been numerous cases around the world of people who have become so distressed from systematic and unrelenting trolling that they have taken their lives. It’s a lethal issue.

Boundary scripts in response to trolling

The most effective response to trolling is to refuse to engage and to block them. If you become overwhelmed, please ensure you seek both personal and professional support.

The Controller behaviours

Control

Definition

The Controller exerts influence over another person to force submission and/or dependency.

Coercive control (control at dangerous levels perpetrated by dangerous people) goes even further to deprive someone of access to their support system and resources (especially money) and can include threats of violence and sexual abuse.

The Controller uses control to quell their insecurities and deep sense of inferiority. They can use their power over someone else to manage their fear of abandonment (‘People always leave so the only way to have them stay is to make them’), and/or manage their feelings of worthlessness (‘I don’t deserve you therefore I need to make sure I keep you’).

Difficult people who lean towards narcissism often make their attempts to control others look charming to both their victim and the people in their immediate environment. An alpha male appears to be ‘protective’ and ‘romantic’ by insisting that his girlfriend dresses in a certain way and avoids certain venues, except he’s actually being possessive, sexist and domineering. She may idealise The Controller, believing he sets these rules out of care and safety because she is ‘chosen’ or ‘special’. The result is a deterioration in her empowerment and a brain-washing effect that she requires someone else to play this role in her life (this pattern is also seen in many cults).

In victims, controlling behaviour causes submission out of fear, depression, anxiety, long-term trauma and feelings of helplessness and powerlessness (which can lead to beliefs that escaping the situation is impossible).

What does control look like?

Insisting on things being a certain way and being the authority on any decision that needs to be made.

Breaching or removing access to privacy.

Micromanaging others.

Monitoring another person’s whereabouts, activities, social media, etc.

Isolating someone from their support system.

Jealousy and possessiveness.

Gaslighting (see page 175).

Power plays (e.g. offering help, money or approval that is conditional on what the person then owes to them).

Control in real life

Ravi was seeing me around once a month to proactively manage his stress. He had a fly-in, fly-out management role for a large company that afforded him a great salary, but which came with a high level of pressure.

Ravi was married to Meera. For the first year or so of our time together, Ravi spoke about Meera in glowing terms. But he began complaining about Meera’s tendency to spend money on clothes, her weight changing and his belief that she wasn’t working enough hours in her job. Ravi was a little surprised when I challenged him on his behaviour, pointing out that to even think about putting restrictions or rules on Meera’s weight, work hours and how she spent her own money was controlling. As we explored further, it was clear that there was a link between how much Ravi perceived that he couldn’t control in his job and how much he tried to exert control at home to compensate. However, Ravi failed to see how his behaviour was controlling. Meera grew tired of his rigidity and eventually left their relationship. Sometimes, even when you’ve communicated your boundaries, it doesn’t guarantee that the difficult person’s behaviour will change.

Boundary scripts in response to control

‘Please don’t tell me what to do. I would like to make my own decisions around this.’

‘I trust myself to do what’s right for me. Therefore, I’d like you to respect my decisions around this.’

‘It’s not up to you to decide how I live my life. Please give me space to do as I see fit.’

‘I know that you are coming from a place of care for me, but it feels intrusive when you want to know where I am all the time. If our relationship is to be successful, then it must be based on trust.’

Unrealistic expectations

Definition

Expectations are beliefs we hold about what should happen. They can be helpful relational tools when they are explicitly communicated and agreed to. However, The Controller tends to use them as implicit assumptions about how things should be.

The Controller uses their expectations as rules in their interactions with others. They struggle to offer others grace and the height of their expectations means their fall to disappointment is quick.

For The Controller, unrealistic expectations function as a defence against fears that they will be abandoned, let down or hurt again. And, as you can probably guess, they don’t work, and in fact the result is usually the opposite of what The Controller is looking for: testing others pushes them away, and unattainable expectations will always go unmet so The Controller stays ‘right’ about people being disappointing.

People around The Controller who receive their unrealistic expectations can experience feelings of confusion, frustration, anger and resentment, which can all ultimately lead to disconnection and the breakdown of the relationship.

What does unrealistic expectations look like?

The Controller getting upset when they perceive that other people don’t care about them as much as they think they should.

The Controller becoming resentful when they perceive someone isn’t making enough effort towards them.

Expecting instant availability.

Expecting unboundaried support (emotional, practical, financial or otherwise).

Unrealistic expectations in real life

Sofia had very little to do with her father, Don, for most of her childhood. In early adulthood, she reconnected with him. Despite inviting him to numerous significant events, Don refused to attend, hurting her deeply.

Sofia had a small baptism for her child, attended only by her, her husband and the godparents of their child. Don found out and was livid, refusing to speak to her.

His expectations were arbitrary and inappropriate given his previous behaviour. While he expected to be able to refuse invitations and hurt Sofia without any consequences, he also expected to be prioritised and offered invitations, punishing Sofia when she didn’t play by his unspoken rules.

Boundary scripts in response to unrealistic expectations

‘I’d love for us both to be on the same page with what we expect of each other.’

‘I hear that you’d like support right now, but I am struggling myself. I can’t offer you assistance today.’

‘Your expectations of me don’t match what I am capable of giving you right now. Can we talk about this a little more so that we can arrive at an agreement?’

‘I’d really like to find common ground with you so that things can flow between us. Can we explore what our expectations are?’

Questioning

Definition

Questioning occurs when someone has expressed a boundary and The Controller questions them about their position (immediately or later). This behaviour functions to give The Controller an advantage by destabilising the person’s boundary, feelings or opinion to get what they want.

People being questioned by The Controller can experience feelings of self-doubt, frustration, anger, disrespect and being unheard. It can lead to conflict or the person being questioned to acquiesce and feel disempowered as a result.

What does questioning look like?

Asking if you really mean what you say.

Asking if you need a second opinion.

Giving unsolicited advice.

Refusing to believe your answer.

Trying to change your answer.

Attempting to wear you down so you give in.

Questioning in real life

When Bennett was first born, I communicated to family and friends that we intended to keep his face off of social media for as long as possible. This boundary didn’t go down all that well with a few close family members who were very proud of the new addition and wanted to show him off. I received a few passive-aggressive remarks at the time, but ignored them because I was a little distracted working out how to care for a baby. A couple of months later, a family member changed her profile picture to a photo of Bennett. Another family member immediately followed suit. When I saw it, I stepped in to confront both people. From the first person, I received a response that went something along the lines of, ‘Aren’t you over that by now? He’s so cute that I thought you’d realise how over the top you’re being.’ The second person claimed ignorance because they were ‘taking my lead from [first person]’. I reiterated the boundary. The photos were removed, to much additional grumbling. At every family occasion, I was again questioned about the boundary . . . for years. It’s only in the last couple of years that they now check with me that his face is obscured enough before they post, or assume that images can be sent to their friends privately or not at all. The problem with people who lean towards controlling behaviour is that they may not understand, or blatantly disagree, with your boundaries. If I didn’t stand firm, this boundary would have been violated many times after the first instance.

Boundary scripts in response to questioning

‘My answer is still no. Nothing has changed for me around that. I will let you know if it does.’

‘I’ve already given my answer and it is no. Please respect the decision I have already made.’

‘I know my answer isn’t what you are looking for, but it’s still no.’

‘You repeatedly questioning me is starting to make me feel uncomfortable. Please respect my answer.’

‘I’ve told you my position. I need you to stop asking.’

‘I’m not seeking your approval or opinion about my feelings/preferences/deal-breakers. I am not in doubt about how I feel. I am simply informing you of how I feel.’

Testing

Definition

Testing behaviours occur when The Controller continually pushes you to assess if they can trust you. It satisfies The Controller’s chronic feelings of unworthiness. However, because unworthiness is not stable when it’s externalised, the testing only intensifies because there is no limit to The Controller’s inner void.

The person being tested experiences confusion, pressure, frustration, anger, resentment and, ultimately, a loss of trust, disconnection and relationship breakdown.

What does testing look like?

Setting you tasks to prove your love to them.

Placing expectations on you that, if not met, are interpreted as signs that you don’t really love them (or can’t be trusted).

‘If you really loved me, you would . . .’

Testing in real life

Steele was in a relationship with Tahlia, who he believed was out of his league. Unfortunately, Tahlia also had chronic feelings of unworthiness and sought out Steele’s affections to validate her sense of being enough. Tahlia’s compensation for feelings of unworthiness was to test Steele. Steele’s compensation was to fawn (see page 133). She had Steele drop friends, buy a new car, change his job and upgrade his style of dressing to prove that he loved her. Additionally, Steele spent thousands of dollars on gifts for her. It was never enough.

It came to a head when Steele proposed. Tahlia complained that the half-carat diamond ring he chose was too small, and Steele’s family finally stepped in to intervene by taking Steele aside to communicate their concerns with how he was being treated. Steele ended the relationship shortly after.

Boundary scripts in response to testing

‘I love you for exactly who you are and I am not going to lend you money again.’

‘If my actions haven’t so far demonstrated my feelings for you, then it’s not what I do that’s the problem. How you feel about yourself is stopping you from seeing how important you are to me.’

‘It saddens me that you continue to disbelieve how much I care about you. I am not going to continue [insert whatever you have been doing] to prove it.’

Exercise

Identify if the difficult person in your life is using any of the fearful behaviours and which archetype they match most accurately. Use the boundary scripts to support your practice of setting boundaries with them.

Summary

Fearful behaviours include:

Behaviours primarily belonging to The Swindler: honesty, inconsistency, joking, lying and undermining.

Behaviours primarily belonging to The Aggressor: aggression, bullying, revenge and trolling.

Behaviours primarily belonging to The Controller: control, expectations, questioning and testing.

PART 3

BOUNDARY BASICS

7

How you react

Your thoughts and feelings are not the only factors at play when you’re interacting with a difficult person and attempting to set boundaries with them. Your feelings and your behaviour are the outward expression of what is happening in your brain and body.

Your capacity to set effective and consistent boundaries with the difficult person in your life expands when you understand what’s happening in your present-moment experience. Let me explain.

Automatic survival

If the messages you received as a child, or the relational experiences in your adolescence and adulthood indicated that your boundaries were not valid or respected, and/or resulted in you being punished in some way for attempting to uphold them, then setting boundaries as an adult may activate the fear centre in your brain. You’ll experience this as a rush of emotion, an inability to think clearly or concentrate, and a drive to remove yourself from the situation, or confront the source of your emotion. You may even become immobilised, unsure of what to do next. This is our survival instinct, referred to as the fight/flight/freeze response.

If your brain launches into survival mode every time you want to say no, ask for space, shift your energy elsewhere, or stand up for your rights, then setting boundaries is not just a casual part of your interpersonal world. Instead, it triggers warnings in your brain that you are under threat – even if the threat is imagined (i.e. the risk of making someone unhappy feels overwhelming vs rounding the corner to see a hungry sabre-toothed tiger).

The fear centre in your brain, the limbic system in science-speak, is responsible for keeping you safe. It does this by impulsively triggering a series of physiological, psychological and emotional changes to prepare you to cope with danger. Your heart will race, your nostrils will flare, your blood pressure rises, your concentration narrows and you feel very alert, among a whole host of other anticipatory biological functions. We’ll call it your impulsive brain. Your impulsive brain doesn’t have time to consult with the part of your brain responsible for rationalising – in science-speak, the left prefrontal cortex. We’ll call this your logical brain. Your logical brain is responsible for rational thinking, problem-solving, planning, mindful decision-making and filtering your actions to make sure they’re socially appropriate.

In the face of real or perceived threat, your impulsive brain reacts in milliseconds to push you towards safety by lashing out (‘fighting’), running away or avoiding the situation (‘fleeing’), or by suspending all action and staying put and/or shutting down (‘freezing’). Your logical brain doesn’t get a say in how you respond when your impulsive brain takes over . . . it’s not helpful to mentally debate whether you should step back from the road when a car is about to run you over. You just need to move, now.

A difficult person is difficult in no small part because of the feelings they leave you with, especially when they create those feelings by frightening you or pushing you beyond your interpersonal comfort zone (e.g. constantly trying to engage you in arguments when you dislike conflict). Even if you know this person well and have seen their difficult patterns many times before, you won’t always be able to stop your overloaded impulsive brain from setting off alarms and activating a survival response. The response occurs outside of your awareness, causing you to operate on autopilot, in one of three action tendencies:

Fight

You enter into conflict. The anger feels hot and might be a surface-level emotional response to an underlying feeling of fear or terror. You erupt, yell, throw things, slam doors and/or try to exert control over the other person. You seethe at perceived injustice. You fight for what you believe is rightfully yours against someone who is doing the same (fighting fire with fire) or being railroaded by your behaviour. If this is a common experience for you, it’s likely you’ve developed a behavioural adaptation that drives you to attack before you can be attacked. It’s based on an expectation that you are not safe, and restoring safety requires you to get in first before you are in a position where you have to defend yourself.

What does fight look like?

Lashing out verbally or physically.

Guarding yourself too closely.

Gritting your teeth and smiling through your resentment until your boundaries are crossed one too many times, at which point that resentment detonates and you lash out.

Ignoring others’ rights to ensure your own are not neglected.

Raising your voice to force your point of view onto someone else or dominate them into doing what you want them to do.

The problem with a chronic fight response, especially with a difficult person whose conflict strategy is also to fight, is that you both anticipate tension, causing things to escalate quickly. I once treated Nate, a FIFO worker in his thirties. Nate was in a middle management role at a mine site. He had grown up with a gruff, domineering father who was apparently ‘either angry or asleep’. Nate wasn’t close to his dad, ‘because Dad didn’t let anyone get close’. Nate’s job was fast-paced and highly stressful. Anger was also his go-to emotion ‘because that’s how I get things done’. While his abrasive way of being had so far been effective in the workplace, it was a different story at home. Nate’s wife of four years, Sakura, felt she was a verbal punching bag. For the first few years of their marriage, Sakura had tried her best to be empathetic and patient. She blamed Nate’s behaviour on work stress, and assumed he would get better at coping as time went on. Despite her urging Nate to improve his behaviour, nothing had changed and Sakura was at the end of her tether. They were now in a cycle of quick escalation with limited repair in between arguments.

Setting healthy boundaries when your fear system is overwhelmed is unlikely, because you are responding from the parts of you that are hurting, rather than from the parts of you that are calm and clear. The one-upmanship can feel exhausting. Even if you are not a person who feels confident in arguments or intense interpersonal situations, being around a difficult person for long enough, whose primary interpersonal force is anger, can influence you to behave in ways that escalate specifically with this person because you’ve reached the end of your rope.

Sakura told me she didn’t ‘recognise myself anymore’. She didn’t want to fight with Nate, but at the first sign of his anger, Sakura would also become dysregulated and unable to behave in ways that were consistent with who she wanted to be. Nate’s difficult behaviour and Sakura’s reactionary overwhelm prevented both of them from connecting.

Flight

You avoid the conflict. You feel overwhelmingly scared or anxious. Your mind is constantly worrying, presenting you with a never-ending list of scenarios for you to overthink. Wherever you can, you avoid situations with the difficult person that make you feel worse, and if conflict arises you withdraw immediately, leaving the building or the room or changing the topic of conversation. Like a fight response, fleeing occurs when the fear system is overwhelmed.

What does flight look like?

Avoiding speaking up in case there is conflict.

Leaving the situation as soon as tension arises.

Not responding to a text or email if it feels confronting.

Ignoring transgressions when someone crosses your boundaries – even to your own detriment, because it feels too anxiety-inducing to address.

Avoidance might be your primary mode of coping with a difficult person if it ‘works’. That is, you achieve the goal of not making things worse with this person by removing yourself from the situation. They might be someone you cannot (or are unwilling to) remove from your life altogether, but you cope by doing your best not to cross paths regularly. Or it could be someone that you live with, and you’ve learned the art of walking on eggshells and then fleeing when required. While this can be emotionally protective in the moment, it’s not necessarily effective in the long-term because the difficult person’s behaviour goes unaddressed. Boundaries are never set. The cycle of eggshell-walking continues indefinitely, leading you to experience emotional exhaustion, interpersonal burnout and a deep sense of being out of integrity with yourself.

Freeze

You shut down. You don’t add to the conflict, but you don’t leave either. You might experience this as a feeling of brain fog or being zoned out. You struggle to make decisions and feel unable to shift from this emotional state. As a result, you feel tethered to the spot. You rarely take overt action, instead preferring to stay silent. You often clam up because you can’t think of a response in the moment. In fact, you may struggle to think of much at all outside of how immobilised you feel. As your logical brain comes back online later, it’s common to feel frustrated that you didn’t communicate at the time what you now wished you had said.

What does freeze look like?

Shutting down emotionally (feelings of numbness).

Staying silent even when something is important to you.

Not responding when asked for an opinion or reply.

Not being able to decide whether you need to take action.

Not being able to decide if a boundary has been crossed.

Like the flight response, the freeze response can feel like it ‘works’. At least you don’t make things worse, right? The problem with this survival response being used chronically is that nothing changes. Boundaries are not set. Your needs and rights are not spoken for. The difficult person continues to control you and their needs and wants remain dominant. And your self-trust melts away over time because you are unable to rely on yourself to show up . . . for yourself.

Learned survival

The previous responses are unplanned. They feel like they happen automatically, largely because they’re fuelled by our impulsive brain’s desire to restore safety. You don’t stop to analyse whether you’ll run away, fight or freeze today. When your impulsive brain is at the wheel, you do what feels most protective in the present moment.

There’s a fourth coping response, which is less an automatic survival instinct in the moment and more of a behavioural adaptation learned and perfected over time. If you’ve been around this difficult person for a while, you may have developed coping strategies designed to appease them. These strategies fall under the category of fawning. We’ve spoken about fawning in regards to The Plasticine (see page 133), but fawning is also a self-protection strategy for people who are not difficult.

Reactive fawning

When fawning, the goal is to do whatever is necessary to placate the difficult person. You tend to rely on others to take the lead so that you can shapeshift into who and what they want you to be. It can be tempting to justify it as kindness, but bending over backwards for others can quickly morph into doormat territory. Your behaviour is designed to restore comfort in the interaction by keeping the peace. But beyond just being kind, fawning requires you to overlook your rights, needs and values, compromising yourself to ensure that the interpersonal boat is not rocked, and the difficult person is happy (or at least, less uncomfortable).

People who are adept at fawning tend to be exceptionally talented at reading other people’s moods, needs and ways of operating in interactions, which is not a bad thing. They develop superpowers in relationships that allow them to observe and decipher others’ behaviour accurately and diplomatically. If you recognise yourself here, please know that as long as your needs are met and you remain mindful about how you offer your personal resources, fawning behaviours can be a relational strength. As long as compromise exists between two people and there is respectful reciprocity in the relationship, it can be healthy.

However, when used in response to a difficult person, reactive fawning is a coping strategy that shifts from win-win – where everyone’s needs and boundaries are respected – to lose-win, where only the difficult person’s needs are prioritised. It ‘works’ when it prevents the difficult person descending into dysregulation and violating the psychological safety of others around them. But achieving that result requires you to act from a place of disempowerment in the form of self-protection. The more uncomfortable you feel around the difficult person, the better you become at predicting when they’ll be upset, angry or about to make your life harder. In response, you modify your behaviour accordingly. It’s fuelled by a desire to avoid conflict and is often learned in childhood as a way of navigating grown-ups who are psychologically unsafe and offer love on the condition of ‘good’ behaviour. In this case, your worth as a person is tied to helping others, receiving praise and/or gaining approval, rather than believing in your inherent value.

As a fawning adult dealing with a difficult person, you become peacekeeper, problem-solver, placator, diplomat, mediator, negotiator and sometimes buffer between the difficult person and the rest of their world and the people in it.

What does reactive fawning look like?

Reverting to people-pleasing.

Saying yes when you want to say no.

Taking responsibility for others’ emotions and actions.

Granting unfiltered access to your personal resources.

Apologising when you have nothing to apologise for.

Ignoring your own feelings to prioritise others. Giving up your opinions or beliefs in favour of taking on how others perceive the world.

Fawning behaviours are common for people who experience significant levels of anxiety, and who identify as highly sensitive. At a cultural level, it’s more commonly seen in women because we are socially conditioned to shrink away from conflict and water down our opinions. Men who stand up for themselves are considered confident, ambitious and assertive (especially in the workplace), while women are labelled angry, bossy, bitchy, hysterical, diva-like, ball-busting or high-maintenance.

The result is a dilemma about how women navigate expressing themselves. To avoid judgement and conflict, fawning behaviours provide a socially acceptable and emotionally protective box. At least she’s ‘easy to work with’, someone that ‘goes with the flow’ and, as many women would have heard, ‘ladylike’.

The challenge is that fawning and assertive communication are often incompatible. You can’t set your boundaries and look after someone else’s needs and feelings at the same time. You can communicate effectively, calmly, politely even, but that doesn’t mean that the other person will respond with nodding smiles and immediate agreement, especially if you know this person has a history of being difficult, and tends to smother the environment and people in it with their discomfort until they achieve domination and supremacy of their needs.

Self-protection can hinder boundary-setting

When setting boundaries with a difficult person, it’s essential to be aware of the patterns of self-protection that may be triggered within you that may hinder your attempts to set boundaries effectively.

Here are some additional behaviours of self-protection that you might recognise. For each behaviour, we’ll explore how it’s defined, what it looks like, real life examples, some self-talk scripts that you can use to help change your patterns of behaviour and boundary scripts to use in response to someone who is resisting your attempts at change. For ease of reference when you want to return to specific behaviours, here is where you’ll find each:

Self-protection behaviours

Avoidance

Boundaryless

Over-responsibility

Passive behaviour

Avoidance

Definition

Every human engages in avoidance, but what I’m referring to here is avoidance that occurs so pervasively that it makes setting boundaries with a difficult person near impossible, because the minute discomfort arises in your interactions with them, you’re out of there.

The role of avoidance in all areas of our life is to minimise discomfort. And guess what? It works (temporarily)! However, if this approach is used as a primary coping strategy, ongoing problems in the relationship are never solved. Healthy relationships are not problem-free relationships; they are relationships where problems are accepted as part of the natural course of humans who live their lives close to one another, which are addressed and solved to serve the growth of both people.

Sometimes avoidance is useful and healthy. Taking a break from an interaction or conversation allows you to process intense feelings using self-regulation strategies and to cope with unpleasant memories if you’ve been triggered. But the healthiness of both of these responses also depends on you returning to the conversation if your relationship with that person is to continue. Avoidance becomes unhealthy if you use it:

as a way to avoid speaking up for yourself,

to avoid calling out others when they cross your boundaries,

to avoid making decisions about how much access to you this person is granted based on their behaviour and whether they can demonstrate you are psychologically safe with them.

Avoidance causes feelings of disconnection, invalidation, confusion, frustration and abandonment – of yourself and with yourself.

What does avoidance look like?

Tolerating the difficult person not changing the behaviours they said they would change.

Refusing to call out the difficult person to take accountability.

Disengaging from any conflict, often at the very first sign that conflict is building.

Making excuses for the difficult person’s behaviour rather than acknowledging their behaviour as hurtful and problematic for your relationship with them.

Leaving the situation, refusing to address what happened, and allowing the issue to be swept under the carpet.

Shutting down in front of the difficult person (often can’t be helped because of our survival response), but then failing to return to the issue to set boundaries effectively.

Silent treatment.

Withdrawing.

Passive-aggressively complaining, sighing or asserting ‘I’m fine’, instead of just having the conversation that needs to be had.

Avoidance in real life

Sonya had an unremarkable childhood but was an anxious kid who didn’t ever reach a point where she felt confident within herself. Despite finishing school and studying at TAFE, a relationship break-up in her early twenties was particularly defining for Sonya’s use of avoidance as a coping strategy. She internalised the breakup as being her fault, deciding that it was evidence that she was not good enough. What followed was a string of short-lived relationships with men who treated Sonya poorly. Men who used her for sex but were emotionally unavailable. Men who used her for accommodation and food, but were unable to commit to her in any other way. Men who were unable to commit to her at all. Sonya was so convinced of her inadequacy that setting boundaries and insisting on her needs being counted didn’t feel like an option for her. She would shut down, make excuses for their behaviour and, ultimately, hope that things would improve without ever standing up for herself, until each of these men left to find another toy to play with.

Her life began shrinking in upon itself. She told me that she started to assume everyone would leave her, or want something from her that she couldn’t provide or that would make her feel awful about herself.

I wish I could tell you that Sonya’s experiences in her twenties evolved into her believing she deserved more. Instead, Sonya met a man who treated her relatively well, but her desperation to belong to someone in order to prove her worthiness meant she sank into this relationship as a chameleon does to a new colour in its environment. She became what she believed she needed to be to fulfil the ideal partner for this man. Is she happy? Honestly, I’m not sure. It’s hard to tell when someone loses their identity in the process of holographically shaping themselves to fit someone else.

Scripts for avoidance

These boundary scripts might be useful if you’re trying to change patterns of avoidance, and others are resisting this change because your avoidance has previously benefitted them:

‘It’s important to me that we resolve this issue. I understand you need a break now. Could we come back to this later today?’

‘Being part of an equal relationship is important to me. Can we meet in the middle so that both of our needs are considered here?’

‘I’m practising speaking up for my needs and I’d be grateful if you could support me in doing so.’

Boundaryless

Definition

Boundaryless behaviour is overly permissive behaviour. You allow others to lead with their needs and preferences and, as a result, it can feel like you are being walked over. However, what is actually happening is that your needs aren’t being accounted for because when asked for input, you don’t provide it or you defer to the other person. It’s a form of self-protection with avoidance at its core and the goal being to dodge anticipated conflict or confrontation.

What does boundaryless look like?

Refusing to state your opinion when asked.

Allowing others to get away with behaviour you don’t like.

Refusing to state your needs and wants when asked.

Not calling others out on behaviour that is clearly unacceptable.

Staying quiet about your rights and values because you don’t want to appear unkind or potentially upset someone else.

Boundaryless in real life

I went to university with a woman, who I will call Laura. Laura was softly spoken and kind. She was there for me a couple of times when I couldn’t attend lectures, allowing me to borrow her study notes.

I didn’t know Laura outside of university, but from what I could gather from seeing her lack of interaction in class, she wasn’t one to speak unless it was absolutely necessary. I didn’t think anything of it until we were placed in a group project together with two other students. We divided up the workload and made plans to meet to complete the project. At said meeting, I questioned where the fourth person in our group was. Laura explained to me that he had emailed her and said he couldn’t make it. Apparently, he’d outright asked (and expected, from the tone of his email), Laura to do his share of the project for him. I was aghast to learn that Laura had agreed.

When I spoke about the clear injustice here and mentioned I’d be happy to let our tutor know about the situation, Laura swore me to secrecy. She didn’t ‘want a confrontation’ and claimed that she ‘really doesn’t mind’. I never told the tutor out of loyalty to Laura, but I still feel frustrated on her behalf when I think about this.

Scripts for boundaryless

People who use boundaryless behaviour as a form of self-protection generally do so because boundaries feel so threatening to them that saying the words to communicate their needs feels almost impossible. If you can relate to this, simply practising a couple of boundary scripts will likely be unhelpful for you, because the foundations of your boundaries are a little rickety. Please don’t panic, though. Chapters 8, 9 and 10 are exactly what you need to know where to start and, ultimately, strengthen your boundary-setting skills.

Over-responsibility

Definition

Over-responsibility occurs when you feel or take responsibility for things over which you have no control (especially relating to other people’s experiences). It arises for people who have learned that their own needs and feelings are threats, and that they are only safe when they ensure that others (especially the difficult person in their life) are happy. People who use over-responsibility as a self-protection mechanism were often rewarded for being ‘the responsible one’ in childhood.

Over-responsibility acts as a cushion to help you avoid setting boundaries, engaging in conflict, feelings of (unnecessary, and therefore, unfixable) guilt, upsetting others, relationships that are power-imbalanced, having to rely on others, loss of approval and letting someone else down (especially someone perceived to be in authority). Over-responsibility also functions to avoid taking responsibility for your own needs because you are too busy looking after others.

Like all forms of self-protection, over-responsibility appears to work, and it’s generally viewed as socially generous and culturally admirable. However, in the long-term, over-responsibility is exhausting. It will rob you of time and energy, space to take care of yourself and pursue your own goals, and connection to your own identity and path in life. It adds to your mental load and can result in burnout, anxiety and depression.

What does over-responsibility look like?

Doing things for others that they are more than capable of doing for themselves and that are not your responsibility (this can play out as you parenting other adults).

Taking responsibility for mistakes not of your doing and apologising for things you don’t need to apologise for.

Taking responsibility for other people’s feelings and doing what you can to ‘fix’ their emotional experience when they are feeling anything negative.

A history of taking responsibility for the actions and reactions or feelings of adults when you were a child (especially parents).

Only feeling comfortable if you feel in control of a situation.

Doing things for others so they don’t have to learn it for themselves, so they don’t withdraw their approval of you, to keep the peace, and to maintain a belief that you’re needed. This means that you often end up in a caretaker/peacemaker/negotiator role.

Living into beliefs that you are the only person you can rely on, people won’t love you anymore if you set boundaries, you must always be the responsible one, and you can’t possibly disappoint others.

Denying your own needs (sometimes coupled with martyr behaviour, where you reject acknowledgement or support for your needs because it feels comfortable for you to be in The Responsible One role).

Being unable to relax unless you believe ‘everything is done’.

Feelings of guilt for something going wrong that you are convinced you should have foreseen.

Intense self-criticism.

Over-responsibility in real life

Elliott and Hugo had been together for eight years by the time Elliott came to see me for treatment of anxiety. He was in his early forties and felt overwhelmed with work-related stress and carrying the majority of the household chores and life administration in his relationship with Hugo. He justified this because Hugo worked longer hours than Elliott. However, it came to light that Hugo was made redundant 12 months prior and their respective loads remained imbalanced.

Elliott explained that when he and Hugo first started dating, Hugo was a heavy drug user. Hugo credited Elliott with helping him ‘get clean and sober’, and Elliott agreed that Hugo wouldn’t have recovered without his support.

Upon being made redundant, Hugo was awarded a financial package designed to provide him with time to search for alternative employment. Instead of embarking on a quest for new employment, Hugo lapsed into a pattern of sleeping in, gaming for the majority of his waking hours, and making excuses for the delay in starting his next chapter.

When I questioned Elliott about his feelings around this, and suggested that the imbalances in their relationship could be adding to his anxiety, Elliott made excuses for Hugo’s excuses. Although not obvious to Elliott, a pattern was clear to me: Elliott was so comfortable in the caretaker role that he failed to realise that it was precisely this over-responsibility that was causing him significant stress.

Scripts for over-responsibility

These boundary scripts might be useful if you’re trying to change patterns of being overly responsible, and others are resisting this change because it has previously benefitted them:

‘I believe in you to work this out for yourself.’

‘I’m not available to support you with this right now, but I know you’ve got it in you to do what needs to be done.’

‘I know I’ve helped you make decisions in the past. I don’t have the energy to be there for you this time, and I know that you can trust yourself to work through your feelings around this.’

These self-talk scripts might be useful if you’re readying yourself to change patterns of being overly responsible:

‘I am not obligated to fix other people’s feelings.’

‘By being the solution to other people’s problems, I am stopping them from learning for themselves.’

‘I can support others without taking responsibility for their happiness.’

Passive behaviour

Definition

Passive communication is a submissive style of communication. If passive communicators experience hurt feelings, unmet needs or their boundaries being crossed, they tend not to respond overtly so as to avoid conflict or confrontation. This often occurs outside of their awareness.

Although they have a high tolerance for poor behaviour from others, passive communicators do have a limit. Once they reach that limit, they’re prone to explosive outbursts that can often be disproportionate to the triggering incident. After the outburst, they commonly experience shame, guilt, disappointment in themselves, and confusion about their feelings and reactions (leading them to default to passive communication once again).

What does passive behaviour look like?

Avoidance of expressing your opinions or feelings.

Avoidance of protecting your rights.

Avoidance of setting boundaries.

Overlooking your own needs in favour of someone else’s.

Quiet, unassuming, submissive behaviours.

Once your tolerance limit is reached, the resentment that has been simmering under the surface can erupt.

Passive behaviour in real life

When I first met my wife, Nyssa, her default communication style was passive. When I asked what she’d prefer to eat, or where she’d prefer to go or what she’d prefer to do, her answer was usually, ‘I don’t mind, what do you prefer?’.

It’s often the case that we are on our ‘best behaviour’ at the beginning of relationships, but I noticed that this passivity wasn’t just because she was trying to be flexible in a new relationship. It played out in her work relationships as well. She was in a band run by a guy in his sixties. He was a little bitter and cynical and took advantage of Nyssa’s eagerness to have a consistent job playing music. It started by him insisting she rehearse excessively, and make herself available for free gigs on the grounds of ‘exposure’. And then it escalated to him refusing to pay her the money she was owed for paid gigs and instead asking her to wait for payment, or accept payment in the form of instruments he had lying around until his cashflow was restored. She put up with it for over a year before her resentment spilled over and she left the band. She was never paid what was owed to her.

Scripts for passive behaviour

These boundary scripts might be useful if you’re trying to change patterns of being passive, and others are resisting this change because your passivity has previously benefitted them:

‘Please respect my rights here.’

‘I am entitled to be paid for work I have completed. If you’re unable to make that payment, I am unavailable for future work, and will be contacting [relevant authority] to ensure my entitlements are met.’

These self-talk scripts might be useful if you’re readying yourself to change patterns of being passive:

‘My rights, needs and desires count.’

‘I have the right to speak up for my needs.’

‘I do not have to tolerate unacceptable behaviour.’

‘Setting boundaries is the language of self-worth. I value myself and commit to setting boundaries to reflect that value.’

Service interruption

Setting boundaries with the difficult person in your life is not just a matter of learning communication strategies to strengthen your resolve and defend your boundaries (we’ll cover this in Chapter 9). It’s also about understanding that boundaries feel arduous because they are intimately connected to our biology. Your brain and body cannot be separated from your behaviour. You are not broken. Your nervous system is doing a wonderful job of protecting you.

How? Let me explain.

We start with the amygdalae, a pair of almond-shaped structures in the middle of the brain, one located in each hemisphere. Together, the amygdalae act as alarms in the brain. They are constantly scanning the environment for potential threats to safety. When a trigger is discovered, a biological SOS sequence begins.

In terms of relative size and strength, your impulsive brain is very influential over your behaviour because of its age. Its neural connections mature in the first few years of life (see the implications for little ones whose parents and grown-ups are not psychologically safe?). Having your childhood needs met helps the neural wiring in your impulsive brain to mature to be appropriately reactive. Without your childhood needs being met, your impulsive brain is wired to be overzealous, reacting to relatively small triggers with mayday signals.

Your impulsive brain needs to communicate with your logical brain if a considered plan of action is to be available. The advanced thought processes of your logical brain influence you to take effective, tempered action. Sounds easy, right? It is, unless your fear system is a little hyperactive because of the way you were raised, the trauma you’ve sustained and/or a difficult person in your life behaving in ways that continuously press your SOS buttons.

Neurotransmitters travel along neural pathways in the brain. Think of these neural pathways like a network of fibre-optic cables that carry text messages from source to receiver. When you are in an interaction with a difficult person that has set off your alarms, that text message from the impulsive brain to the logical brain isn’t sent by the most efficient route. The service is interrupted. The cables become tangled, and the tangle worsens the longer you are around this person. This tangle is not just metaphorical. The neurotransmitters become stuck in a knot of neural pathways known as a neural loop – twisted bunches of connected neurons attached to habits or well-worn behaviours.

At this point, your responses are led by your impulsive brain, not by your logical brain, because your logical brain hasn’t received the message that its input is required. You launch into the repertoire of self-protection behaviours attached to your usual method of coping: lashing out, throwing a tantrum, yelling, prolonged crying, shaking, worrying, leaving, shutting down, zoning out, peacekeeping, placating.

These patterns are important for rare and dangerous situations. But they are not meant to be used for long-term ways of being. Even though it feels like the ‘right’ or even the only response available to you with this difficult person, a prolonged state of SOS-mode brings a host of additional challenges for the person doing the surviving. We need a method of getting the text message through to your logical brain when the difficult person triggers you – and this is exactly what we’ll talk about in Chapter 9.

Mirrors of pain

The Theory of Hebbian Learning, also known as Hebb’s Law, states that when a brain cell persistently activates beside another brain cell, the connections between the two cells become stronger. This relationship is often phrased as ‘neurons that fire together, wire together’. What we do over and over again becomes a familiar pathway of connected neurons in our brain, continually strengthening to keep us repeating that behaviour. The patterns of your relationship with the difficult person in your life are wired into your brain as a neural sequence of predictability. The difficult person does this, and so you do that.

These patterns are reinforced by mirror neurons. Mirror neurons are brain cells that respond as if we are performing the same action when observing someone else perform that action. If I watch you pick up a pencil, mirror neurons fire in my brain to replicate that action, even though I am not actually picking up a pencil. It’s been suggested that this occurs emotionally as well. If the difficult person in your life becomes dysregulated, the mirror neurons in your brain activate emotional centres that mirror that dysregulation. In response, you ‘catch’ the emotional spillage and respond with your own dysregulated behaviour. Their pain becomes your pain and the pass-the-parcel repetition that ensues creates a habit between the two of you and your brains. Both of you anticipate that this is how your relational patterns go. It’s just what you do together.

Sympathetic nervous system

The autonomic nervous system comprises two parts. The first part is your sympathetic nervous system – the system responsible for the fight/flight/freeze response described earlier. The long-term effect of sympathetic nervous system activation when you’re dealing with a difficult person is that you lose connection to what it feels like to be relaxed. Being in a heightened state of stress actually begins to feel more comfortable, and therefore, preferable to you.

Parasympathetic nervous system

The second part of the autonomic nervous system is the parasympathetic nervous system, which is responsible for restoring the body back to a state of calm. This is the system we hope will activate after setting boundaries with a difficult person. If you’re reading this, shrugging that yours seems to have quietly quit (I know, I really am a comedian), stay with me because I’m going to show you how to reconnect with your parasympathetic nervous system via emotional self-regulation in the next chapter.

Classical conditioning

In psychological terms, classical conditioning refers to an instinctive response to a known stimulus. For example, let’s say you hear a noise in the dark and feel scared. While you’re in the dark, you’re also being exposed to a bed and a wardrobe. The bed and the wardrobe then become associated with the scary noise, leading you to experience a conditioned response to seeing these objects even without the noise present.

This is the type of conditioning you might have heard of in reference to the father of modern behaviour psychology, Ivan Pavlov. Pavlov famously discovered that dogs would salivate in anticipation of their food, and upon pairing the presentation of their food with the ringing of a bell, the dogs would eventually salivate when the bell was sounded, even when no was food present.

In interactions with difficult people, the same process can occur. The menacing look on the difficult person’s face provokes a fear response, even though the look itself doesn’t actually harm you. The fear occurs because the look prefaces other negative behaviours from this person that you know to have painful consequences for you. The sound of your father’s car pulling into the driveway provokes physiological arousal because no one knows what kind of mood he’ll be in and the chaos that could be coming. Your husband comes home and takes off his tie. While he behaves appropriately at work, the loosening of his tie indicates a loosening of his behaviour. The tie itself is not harmful but you experience a conditioned response to it because it indicates the street angel is about to transform into a dysregulated house devil.

Classical conditioning also occurs for traumatised individuals. Even though you are no longer unsafe, the re-experiencing of traumatic memories provokes a pattern of responding in you as if you are unsafe in the present moment. The memory is the bell that triggers your fear response, even though the actual event has long passed. The replay is in your mind, but your brain/body and behavioural response is akin to the event happening again.

Chaotic coding

If you were raised in an environment that is psychologically unsafe, then your emotional and neural development becomes negatively sensitised. Many years of growth in a suboptimal environment creates an adult with a hyperactive nervous system for whom reactivity, dysregulation, chronic hyperarousal, attack, shutdown and/or deference to others feels normal.

Trauma also causes physiological and psychological changes that can result in prolonged dysregulation of the nervous system. For clarity, let me explain the difference between how the brain processes a regular memory, versus how the brain processes a traumatic memory.

Regular memories, like the memory of you reading this book right now, are stored in a structure in the brain called the hippocampus. Imagine the hippocampus as a filing cabinet that systematically holds memories and then helps us retrieve them and use language to describe them in a way that makes sense.

In comparison to your memory of reading this book, traumatic memories are not coded and filed in the same way. At the time of the trauma, your body and brain are flooded with stress hormones that change the way your brain processes and converts the experience to a memory. Traumatic memories do not activate the hippocampus and do not get stored as coherent stories that we can then retrieve and retell with a beginning, middle and end.

For example, imagine there’s a metaphorical booklet of memories that details the sequence of actions you took when your dog was unwell and needed veterinary care. The booklet is filed away neatly in a category in the filing cabinet of your brain. You can retrieve this information when necessary and apply it at a future time when your dog shows the same symptoms. In comparison, traumatic memories don’t make it to the filing cabinet. They are coded differently, leaving them strewn on the floor, pages everywhere. Here, they are easily tripped over and haphazardly triggered. This is why trauma survivors struggle to retell their stories coherently and re-experience the memories in an involuntary way. They, quite literally, do not have access to the filing cabinet for those memories, only misordered pages and paragraphs that they can find on the floor.

Whether your experience is of a difficult person who raised you, or a difficult person who has traumatised you (or both), what remains is prolonged activation of your nervous system: a brain that switches too quickly and easily into SOS-mode and a body that’s more comfortable in a state of hyperactivation rather than relaxing. Amped up is familiar, and therefore safer. Inner and outer peace is unfamiliar, and therefore unsafe. Setting boundaries requires you to feel calm and think clearly. That’s very hard to do when you’re operating with chaotic neural and nervous system coding.

Operant conditioning

What we do also shapes who and how we are. We learn our ways of being by responding to the consequences we achieve. This is known in psychological terms as operant conditioning. We are little organisms ‘operating’ on our environment to get more of what we want, or less of what we don’t want.

Human behaviour generally has two purposes: to get you into something or out of something. We do this via three variables, known as operatives:

Antecedents: the stimulus that triggers a behaviour (e.g. the difficult person).

Behaviours: the actions you take or don’t take to manage the difficult person.

Consequences: what happens as a result of your behaviour (whether you get more of what you want or less of what you don’t want. That is, did it work? Did the difficult person become easier to manage or did their negative impact on you lessen or cease?).

Life is a sequence of antecedents, behaviours (tiny decisions in response to the antecedents), and consequences that reinforce whether we repeat those behaviours. This is occurring not just for you, but for the difficult person in your life, too.

Consequences are critical. They can be positive, negative or neutral, which then determines the success of the behaviour (did the behaviour achieve less pain or more pain?) and the probability of you repeating that behaviour. The more successful the behaviour was in creating an outcome that feels favourable, dictates how likely you’ll be to repeat that behaviour. If you are behaving in a way that feels illogical when you are around the difficult person, look for the pay-off it’s providing you.

Shaping happens in two ways: the antecedent stays the same, but you shape the response, or you shape the antecedent by controlling the response (this is hard to do in a relationship). The difficult person is repeating patterns that they are being reinforced for. You are repeating patterns that you are being reinforced for. But sometimes, the patterns are causing damage to one person for the benefit of another.

In terms of the ancestral loads that we carry, our genes also bear information about behaviours that were successful for our familial predecessors. This information drives our survival instincts, which have been so effective for our species that they continue to occur for us automatically today, rather than as conscious choices.

How quickly we learn to repeat successful behaviours depends on what my friend and colleague psychologist Dr Craig Wright refers to as ‘safety significance’. If you touch a hotplate and burn your hand, the learning is instantaneous because the risk to safety is high. However, if you come home late and your partner gives you the silent treatment for a day, it might take a few more learning trials to change your behaviour (if you change it at all), because silent treatment is more subtle in its threat to emotional safety. If your partner yells at you and threatens to divorce you because you spent a significant amount of money without telling them, your safety around spending money is withdrawn. You quickly learn to hide your behaviour, or expect to be punished for it.

In summary, your coping strategies are ‘effective’ even if you can’t identify exactly why. These strategies offer you less of what you don’t want and/or more of what you do want. That doesn’t mean they are healthy, though. Drinking a bottle of wine every night might bring you less anxiety and more relaxation in the moment, but it’s not so great for the quality of your health and your life as a whole, and it doesn’t solve the problem of your partner taking their stress out on you by becoming dysregulated when cashflow is tight.

Changing your ways

What do we do about it? Like everything we desire to change in our lives, it starts with awareness. Once you are aware of your triggers and responses, then you can move on to learning new skills to enable you to gain mastery over them.

The caveat here is that we can’t squash our instincts towards behaviours that are protective. If those behaviours are unworkable in the long-term, or pushing us further away from who we want to be, we change them by finding replacement behaviours that serve the same purpose, but with less maladaptive effects (e.g. wine is replaced by a walk – same relaxation effects, happier liver, space from partner).

But please don’t think you need to overhaul everything at once. Starting small is helpful to avoid overwhelming your impulsive brain. Prove to yourself that a tiny action is both doable and effective, then expand your repertoire to continue building on those new ways of being.

The beauty of neurons firing and then wiring together is that the creation of neural pathways that reinforce behaviours that aren’t helping us is the same as those that support behaviours that do help us. Neural plasticity allows you to learn to play piano when you’ve never touched an instrument before, just as it allows you to learn to set boundaries with the difficult person in your life when you’ve previously allowed this person unfiltered access to you. Sure, the piano won’t get angry with you if you struggle to turn your thumb under and hold your wrists aloft, but in the chapters that follow I’m going to show you how to manage reactions in a way that promotes your alignment with who you want to be.

Change takes a little effort. Neurotransmitters don’t love unfamiliar pathways. It takes time and practise (think months, not days) before new brain wiring strengthens to become the default pathway. The neural pathways associated with your current patterns of responding don’t disappear because you decide you want to do something differently. During this time, it’s easy to fall back into old habits because the new ways of responding are still developing. Relapsing doesn’t mean you are doing it wrong. Be gentle on yourself. Tiny actions taken consistently count for so much.

Exercise

Answer the following questions in your mind, in discussion with a trusted friend or in your journal:

When your impulsive brain takes over, notice how you tend to respond. Is it more automatic for you to fight, flee, freeze or fawn? And how do you respond to the difficult person in your life? Is this the same as your natural instincts, or different?

What is the ‘bell’ that you associate with the difficult person in your life? It could be raised voices, the way a piece of cutlery is dropped on a plate, a side eye, a sharp intake of breath. In other words, it could be anything that causes you to anticipate difficult behaviour to come.

What are you doing in response to this person and what is it achieving? Is there a behaviour or set of behaviours you can replace it with that will be healthier for your emotional and physical well-being and more successful for your sense of empowerment?

Summary

We instinctually respond to threatening experiences in one of three ways: fight, flight or freeze.

In addition to these automatic responses, some people learn to modify their behaviour to appease someone else. This is called fawning.

When our impulsive brain takes over, it’s difficult to bring our logical brain back online because the messages become stuck in neural loops that cause us to habitually respond in the same way.

Dealing with a difficult person can influence us to become difficult in return because we catch their pain.

We are not designed to withstand prolonged activation of our nervous system. It disconnects us from the capacity to access and enjoy a state of relaxation.

Trauma is coded differently to regular memories.

Our responses to difficult people can be classically or operantly conditioned.

It’s entirely possible to change how you behave with the difficult person in your life, with a little effort, practise and patience.

8

How you feel

The difficult person in your life is not your fault. They may try to convince you that you are the issue, you are defective, and if only you fixed yourself, there wouldn’t be a problem in the first place. It’s not true. Difficult people aren’t picky about who they target. As long as there is a benefit for them, they’ll manipulate, divide, undermine, intimidate, play the victim or do whatever they have to do to obtain advantage.

You didn’t ask them to behave like this. But how you respond is your responsibility. How you respond to yourself when you are hurting is your responsibility. Blaming the difficult person in your life for how you receive them is giving away your power to someone who is not you.

The issue is that they have created wounds that you now carry. There are bruises and/or burnout from your interactions with them that make them inherently unsafe for you. It’s now a question of how you extricate them from your life, or if you can’t avoid them, how you put boundaries in place to protect yourself. It means you need tools to manage any fears you hold about future interactions.

A difficult person will rarely accept boundaries without reacting negatively. They may walk all over you and your boundaries, intimidating, frightening and railroading you into their way of thinking in the process. They may ignore you and your boundaries altogether, not giving you so much as an acknowledgement that you have needs, rights, preferences and resources that you have choices over. They may manipulate you into thinking your boundaries are not necessary, overkill, rude, selfish and a sign that you are the problem. They may decompensate by falling to pieces and dragging you into a hole of self-loathing and dysregulation with them.

These are the ways that you feel punished for daring to set boundaries in the first place. It seems easier to just leave the door open. This is how difficult people achieve advantage over others. It’s how they come to expect that boundaries do not apply to them. It’s how they continue moving through the world using attack and control as forms of self-protection.

There are also ways that you can unintentionally enable a difficult person’s behaviour: walking on eggshells, shapeshifting into what they need you to be (even when that means betraying your authentic self), ignoring your own needs and rights to avoid their discomfort, and relying on hope after hope that eventually they’ll realise the negative impact of their behaviour and change.

Dear reader, you are reading this book, but are they? You are working on yourself by going to therapy or raising your awareness and practising new ways of being, but are they? You are trying to participate in healthier relationships, but are they? There’s only so long you can walk on the outskirts of your own life to make someone else’s life easier before you recognise that doing so will always make you compromise yourself.

You are not a consequence manager

It is not your responsibility to manage the consequences of other people’s actions. I know, I know . . . with difficult people it really feels like it is. You want to apologise for your parent’s rudeness. Stepping in to lend your friend money to pay their phone bill when their addiction has relapsed feels like the ‘right’ thing to do. Picking up the slack for your incompetent co-worker saves your whole team from copping flak from the boss. Making excuses for your partner’s third affair feels like the only option to managing the shame.

However, these actions prevent you from protecting yourself. They rob you of the time and energy you could be spending on healthy relationships with people who love and respect you without also draining and exhausting you.

The kindest thing you can do in recognising someone else’s insecure attachment style, maladaptive interpersonal coping strategies, prohibitive defence mechanisms and emotional dysregulation is to offer them compassion and empathy, but leave the responsibility for managing their load with them, especially if their behaviour is hurting you or others around you. Choosing not to perpetuate the cycles of harm by enabling them is an act of kindness to them and to yourself. You are modelling the emotional boundaries and psychological safety they need to develop for themselves.

Arrested emotional development leads to unbalanced reciprocity, and relationships must have a level of reciprocity to be healthy. You are not here to be everything for someone who is offering you nothing in return, or to be the go-to person for someone who you can’t go to, or to be the solution to dissatisfaction that someone created by their own doing.

As a child is not capable of responding in kind, so it may be for this person. Mind your expectations and set boundaries accordingly.

Don’t buy real estate in Resentmentville

You can’t and won’t please everyone. Trying to do so will break your spirit and lead you straight to a little town I call Resentmentville. Give beyond the limits of your giving tanks and you’ll end up in the ’Ville.

Intentionally and repeatedly offering yourself beyond the limits of your giving tanks pushes you into over-responsibility (see page 235) and martyrdom (see page 145). Part of setting healthy boundaries is deciding who you are willing to let down and who has the right to make you feel guilty. Giving others power over your emotions is akin to giving them power over your entire life. Don’t betray yourself so thoroughly that you buy real estate in the ’Ville and live there permanently. This is not a practice run at your life. Your future self is depending on you to take that statement seriously.

Emotion equals energy

All emotions have action tendencies associated with them (anger drives us to fight, disgust drives us to recoil, fear drives us to flee, etc.). From an evolutionary perspective, we are drawn to one another as social beings, a species whose chances of survival are far greater when we stick together.

When dealing with a difficult person, though, the interactions you have with them will create strong feelings that promote disconnection. If you can’t easily remove this person from your life, or you don’t want to, then a push-pull struggle begins.

The feelings are big and holding them is heavy. I know it hurts. It chokes. It stings. It would be much easier if you could turn your feelings off. But it’s precisely this non-acceptance of uncomfortable feelings that will keep you stuck. Fighting with feelings keeps your energy in the feeling (and charges the difficult person’s battery while you’re at it). It gives the feelings an active role in your daily decisions. If your objective is to defeat the feeling, get over it or to move on while it stays in the past, then you are effectively inducing your own paralysis (because I don’t know anyone who has experienced a difficult person and felt nothing around them).

There is another way.

You have the option to take the feeling with you. You have the choice to accept it, acknowledging its significance in shaping what life looks like right now and the changes you might need to make because of the messages that this feeling offers you.

Just as no one mountain defines an entire country, this difficult person might be present in the landscape of your life, but they don’t need to define it. Instead, you can learn to navigate the landscape as it exists now. To see the beauty in its barren, harsh, destroyed places. To move forward with self-preservation in mind.

The key to coping with someone who can’t cope is understanding that the only thing you have direct control over is yourself. You don’t have control over your past, how others treat you or how they react to your boundaries. You don’t have control over what others choose to do with their lives, how they might judge you, or the internal and private experiences you have when facing them. You only have control over how you respond to other people’s behaviour, how you speak to yourself, the beliefs you hold, your self-regulation skills and taking action to set boundaries to protect your inner peace. Controlling what you can control and accepting what you can’t is part of the boundary itself (and may inform exactly where you place the boundary between you and this person).

Unlearning what you’ve always done

Your boundaries work, except with this person. You feel empowered and clear, except with this person. You’ve changed the way you do things in your relationships, except with this person. Boundaries with difficult people often require unlearning because they don’t see things the way you and I do. You can’t expect to do what you’ve always done, or what’s worked with other non-difficult people, and see it work with this person.

Part of the unlearning process is to understand that you are not wrong or selfish for refusing to engage or enable their behaviour any longer. Attempting to manage other people’s feelings, reactions and behaviour doesn’t help them, it helps you to feel safe and in control. You can hold space for them and their feelings without taking on the responsibility for finding or being the solution. You are not their saviour, even if they ask to be rescued. You are not their emotional punching bag, even if they apologise later. You are not required to continue nodding empathically while they continue using coping strategies that harm you both. To free yourself from this cycle, we need to address the feely stuff.

F is for . . .

You don’t need to be a difficult person to experience difficult feelings. We all have emotional discomfort. But being around a difficult person may intensify those feelings because their mismanaged discomfort becomes discomfort for everyone around them.

For self-preservation, emotional boundaries are indispensable to:

avoid taking responsibility for feelings that are not yours,

avoid stepping into problem-solving mode for a problem that doesn’t belong to you,

remove yourself from the person and situation if their dysregulation becomes so intense as to violate your psychological safety.

For clear and resolute emotional boundaries, we need to have the capacity and skills to interpret our own feelings in a way that empowers us and to respond to those feelings with self-regulation. Essentially, this task is where you learn to integrate your feelings: to be able to experience them without being cut off from them and to bear witness to them in others without joining in their dysregulation.

Some reminders I’d like to offer you as we move through feeling our feelings are:

Feeling your feelings fully is essential before you can put those feelings aside.

Emotional pain doesn’t get easier, but you become better at managing and responding to it.

Not everyone will feel the same as you do about the same things.

Not everyone will love, set boundaries and manage their needs in the same way you do. That doesn’t invalidate your needs (or theirs).

Not everyone will love you in the same way you love them. That doesn’t invalidate how either of you express love, but it does mean that you need to decide if their love language is enough for you.

Let’s explore some of the most common feelings you might experience around a difficult person as well as those you experience after you interact with them. This emotional information must be interpreted mindfully, given that feelings are not always a factual representation of reality. I encourage you to listen to your feelings while also considering the load you carry and your relationship with yourself, and how both influence how you interpret and respond to your feelings.

A sign of psychological safety is feeling secure around someone else. It’s easier to interpret your feelings accurately and with a sense of empowerment around someone who is psychologically safe for you. A sign that psychological safety is missing is feeling self-doubt, insecure and reactive. It’s easier to lapse into interpreting your feelings inaccurately and from a disempowering point of view when faced with someone who is psychologically unsafe for you.

Overwhelming feelings that are left unchecked lead us into reacting from the wounded parts of ourselves. This can occur for both you and the difficult person with whom you are interacting. The tables that follow demonstrate the most common ways these patterns play out to disempower you, and how you can then reinterpret those same feelings from the perspective of your authentic, boundaried self.

Feelings expressed via attack

This table demonstrates feeling interpretations for people in a state of emotional overwhelm who tend to cope by attacking first. It explains the lens through which they are perceiving their experience and how they might then express their feelings in response.

When I feel . . .

Wounded interpretation

Dysregulated expression

Doubt feelings

Confused, bewildered or uncertain.

I’ve lost control and I must gain it back.

Intimidating others until a sense of control is restored.

Self-doubting or insecure.

I can’t ever show vulnerability, or I’ll look weak. Weakness is unacceptable.

Forcing my opinions on others to prove I am right.

Fear feelings

Fear, panic or terror.

People are out to get me.

Escalation and anger towards the person who is perceived as threatening.

Unsettled, anxious or a sense of dread.

Imperfection is weakness.

Undermining others to steal their credit or make themselves look better in comparison.

Paranoid or vigilant.

I cannot trust anyone except myself.

Taking action to win at all costs to restore a sense of power.

Shame feelings

Shame, humiliation or embarrassment.

Public imperfection is unacceptable.

Lashing out.

Guilt or regret.

This isn’t my fault. The other person made me do it.

Gaslighting to manipulate the other person into believing they are at fault and regain power in this situation.

Anger feelings

Anger.

The world owes me what I need to be comfortable.

Lashing out until comfort is restored.

Frustration, resentment or bitterness.

There is not enough to go around so I must take what is mine.

Taking what is perceived as theirs even if it’s at the expense of others.

Rage or hatred.

Enemies are to be expected in the war of life.

Fuelling the war.

Isolation feelings

Isolated or lonely.

Winners must go it alone. Other people aren’t worth my energy. I don’t need them anyway.

Guarding self so that others don’t get close or punishing others for not being present to support their goals (even if it’s at the expense of that person’s goals).

Rejected.

Rejecting me means there is something defective about you.

Shaming, humiliating and criticising the source of the rejection.

Numb.

Feeling nothing is the safest form of comfort.

Behaving in any way that suits, given numbness protects them from empathic data about another’s experience.

Jealous.

Someone has something that I should have, too (or have instead of them).

Plotting to obtain or undermine and then obtain (especially in the form of a power grab).

Depression feelings

Depression.

Life isn’t giving me what I want and deserve.

Taking it out on other people. If I feel down, everyone else must, too.

Hopeless, defeated, resigned or despairing.

I am a victim and there’s nothing that can be done to improve my situation.

Blaming everyone else.

Grief.

How dare this person leave me.

People must give me dispensation because I have been abandoned.

Self-loathing.

If other people were better towards me, I wouldn’t be in this state.

Attacking or criticising others.

Disempowered feelings

Coerced, powerless, helpless or submissive.

I have lost power that should belong to me.

Manipulating, intimidating or attacking to restore a sense of control and power.

Undermined.

How dare someone attempt to block credit that belongs to me.

Undermining in retaliation or seeking revenge.

Vulnerable or weak.

Someone has taken control that belongs to me.

Taking action to intimidate until control is restored in their favour.

Feelings expressed via submission

This table demonstrates feeling interpretations for people in a state of emotional overwhelm who tend to cope by first submitting (fleeing, freezing or fawning). It explains the lens through which they are perceiving their experience and how they might then express their feelings in response.

When I feel . . .

Wounded interpretation

Dysregulated expression

Doubt feelings

Confused or bewildered.

I am the problem.

Taking action to fix self or the situation.

Uncertain or unsure.

I must predict how to make this person happy in order to be okay.

Scrambling to meet the other person’s needs.

Self-doubting or insecure.

I am not okay as a person. Everything I do is wrong.

Scrambling to fix self.

Fear feelings

Fear, panic or terror.

Something bad is about to happen. I need to run.

Avoidance.

Unsettled, anxious or a sense of dread.

I am the problem. I am defective. I will inevitably do something wrong.

Flapping.

Paranoid or vigilant.

Who have I or will I upset?

Panicking about meeting everyone else’s needs so that they don’t upset anyone.

Immobilised.

I can’t do anything in case I do the wrong thing.

Taking no action but ruminating on what they might end up doing wrong, what they have done wrong in the past and who is possibly upset with them.

Shame feelings

Shame, humiliation or embarrassment.

I am defective. There is something wrong with me.

Shrinking.

Guilt.

I have done something wrong.

Attempting to fix mistakes, even those that don’t belong to them and even those they haven’t yet made.

Regret.

Mistakes I’ve made in the past prove I am broken, and no one will love me.

Attempting to fix self or shrinking away from people.

Anger feelings

Anger.

I’ve messed up again (anger is turned inward at self).

Attempting to fix self.

Frustration, resentment or bitterness.

If only I wasn’t born like this.

Disempowered or playing the victim.

Rage or hatred.

I am the problem.

Pointing inwardly at self because turning it towards another person has no effect.

Isolation feelings

Isolated or lonely.

I deserve to be alone.

Attempting to make others happy in the hope of being included.

Rejection.

I am unlovable.

Attempting to make others happy to atone for being unlovable.

Numb.

It’s not safe to be connected to my present experience.

Dissociation.

Jealous.

Proof that other people are more deserving than me.

Reminding self of lack of worth.

Depression feelings

Depression.

I am the problem.

Self-loathing.

Hopeless, defeated, resigned or despairing.

I have no agency and I deserve this.

Stuck in a victim cycle.

Grief.

I wasn’t enough for the lost person.

Grief is compounded because they focus on what they should have been for the person.

Self-loathing.

I am the problem.

Ruminating on unworthiness.

Disempowered feelings

Coerced, powerless, helpless or submissive.

I have no agency.

I must submit because I have no power and will never have any power.

Undermined.

If I was worthy this wouldn’t have happened.

Allowing themselves to be taken advantage of.

Vulnerable or weak.

Assumption that this is proof of unworthiness.

Natural state when operating in relationships.

Feelings expressed via your authentic self

This table demonstrates feeling interpretations for people connecting with their conscious, authentic self, allowing them to get unstuck from a narrative that is unworkable and respond in an empowered way.

When I feel . . .

It means . . .

I acknowledge this feeling and honour it by:

Doubt feelings

Confused, bewildered, uncertain or unsure.

I am receiving mixed messages.

Clarifying the situation or setting a boundary that I’ll no longer engage until clarification can be provided.

Self-doubting or insecure.

I am forgetting my strengths.

Remembering my power.

Fear feelings

Fear, panic or terror.

This person is (or seems) threatening.

Grounding myself and taking action to protect myself and my space.

Unsettled, anxious or a sense of dread.

There is something about this person that doesn’t feel safe or can’t be relied upon to be predictable.

Listening to my intuition and interacting mindfully until more information can be gathered.

Paranoid or vigilant.

This situation or person is psychologically unsafe.

Setting boundaries for self-protection.

Immobilised.

I am forgetting my sense of agency.

Remembering my power and setting boundaries.

Shame feelings

Shame, humiliation or embarrassment.

I am rejecting a part of myself or allowing someone else to determine my worth.

Returning to my worth and setting boundaries around it for protection from others.

Guilt.

Either I have a legitimate mistake to correct or I’m dishonouring my own needs in favour of someone else’s.

An apology or respecting myself as just as worthy of priority as others.

Regret.

I’ve learned difficult lessons in the face of this person’s behaviour.

Using these lessons to guide me in my interactions with them moving forward.

Anger feelings

Anger.

A boundary of mine has been crossed.

Reasserting that boundary.

Frustration, resentment or bitterness.

I am allowing this person access to my personal resources in a way that is out of alignment for me.

Setting boundaries.

Rage or hatred.

My boundaries have been irrevocably crossed.

Taking back my power to set fixed boundaries moving forward.

Isolation feelings

Isolated or lonely.

I am forgetting that I don’t have to cope alone.

Asking for help.

Rejection.

I am tying my worth to someone else’s acceptance of me.

Knowing that my acceptance of me is the only thing that matters.

Numb.

I am responding from a place of self-protection.

Setting boundaries so I am safe enough to reconnect with myself and my experience.

Jealous.

I am making this person’s opportunities/success/resources mean there is less available for me.

Returning to my worthiness and my place on my own path.

Depression feelings

Depression.

This sadness indicates I care deeply.

Commemorating the thing I care about.

Hopeless, defeated, resigned or despairing.

I am forgetting my agency.

Returning to my power and refusing to be a victim of this person.

Grief.

Something or someone precious is lost to me.

Allowing myself the space to mourn the loss of this person or relationship.

Self-loathing.

I am disconnected from my worth.

Returning to enough.

Disempowered feelings

Coerced, powerless, helpless or submissive.

I am forgetting that I have a choice.

Returning to my power and agency to set boundaries.

Undermined.

Someone is taking credit from me.

Standing up for myself and setting boundaries.

Vulnerable or weak.

I am forgetting my strengths.

Remembering that no one else can take away my strengths.

Exercise

As your emotional discomfort shows up, check in. What is your initial interpretation and response? What is the action tendency? Do you feel a drive to attack or submit? How could your interpretation be influencing that drive? Practise re-interpreting your feelings through the lens of who you want to be.

Summary

You didn’t ask for this person to be difficult, but it is your responsibility to manage how you respond.

You are not here to manage the consequences of other people’s poor choices.

Don’t buy real estate in Resentmentville.

Emotions drive us to take action. Mind where you are sending that energy.

Setting boundaries with this person might require you to unlearn what has worked with other people.

Making room for your feelings and being mindful of how you interpret them strengthens your capacity to set and defend your boundaries from a place of calmness and clarity.

9

How you self-regulate

We all experience states of dysregulation from time to time. When we are presented with a collision of unfortunate circumstances and life stressors, we can all devolve into emotional reactivity that’s outside the normal range of our behaviour. For difficult people, though, this isn’t usually a state-based experience, but rather a way of moving through the world that has become ingrained. Their inability to regulate strong emotions can result in acts of emotional violence towards themselves and others (dangerous people extend this to physical violence). Self-regulation saves relationships (and lives).

No one can set boundaries effectively if their logical brain has gone offline and their impulsive brain has taken over. It’s entirely normal to feel anxious and not be able to speak your mind around the difficult person when you are unlearning boundary patterns that have kept you disempowered. But please don’t expect yourself to be able to do anything differently, unless you start with downregulating your SOS-response.

Accepting your experience

Emotional regulation starts with acceptance, Specifically, it is based on accepting that:

Uncomfortable feelings are a normal part of the human experience.

Strategies to cope with those feelings are not used with the goal to change or turn off the feelings.

There is no such thing as good or bad emotions.

Emotions are always transient and will pass.

Difficult people who experience emotional dysregulation often struggle with emotional literacy and competence. They have never been taught strategies to manage their feelings without making their feelings someone else’s problem (or they have been taught those strategies, but are unwilling to use them). As a result, they experience internal and external chaos that includes intense feelings that bubble over onto others, impulsiveness, relationship dysfunction and interpersonal turbulence, attempts to avoid or numb their feelings, poor problem-solving, and challenges with repairing ruptures in relationships (or all-out refusal to attempt repair).

The stress continuum

If only there was a way to avoid emotional discomfort altogether . . . except that we need it. Strong emotions keep us safe, guide us forward and help us perform. In fact, up to a point, stress helps us draw the best from ourselves, while being too calm compromises our performance. The Goldilocks formula is that stress somewhere in the middle of our continuum of functioning is useful.

Now, this is all great, until you have to deal with a difficult person over a long period of time. Short-term bursts of adrenaline and cortisol are helpful for coping but, as we’ve seen, too much too often causes us to shut down or be so accustomed to a state of hyperarousal that you can no longer relax. If you’ve been around this difficult person long enough, you might find that you’ve adjusted to a ‘normal’ that other people don’t recognise. Your normal level of stress would push others over the edge. Because humans are masters of adaptation, you may fail to recognise the burnout that follows or how vigorously your system has to fight to withstand the ongoing stress of being around this person.

We always grow by beginning with awareness of where we are at now. Your current stress levels are the start line for taking your power back.

Treat yourself like a toddler

Children become dysregulated . . . often in response to the mildest of inconveniences – as they should because their little brains are learning the world, and the world is challenging and induces big feelings. As adults, we experience exactly the same feelings, the only difference is that the wiring in our brain has matured so we can respond without throwing ourselves on the floor. That is the case unless you were inadvertently taught unhelpful ways of responding to your feelings because your grown-ups lacked those skills for themselves, or you’ve experienced trauma that has shattered your assumptions of trust, goodness and safety.

Parents who can regulate themselves model these skills for their children. How? Not by having lengthy discussions about feelings followed by a round of flash cards with emojis representing different emotions. That’s emotional literacy, not self-regulation. Literacy is important, but it’s useless without regulation. Children learn to respond to their feelings effectively by watching their grown-ups do exactly that. They watch us breathe through it. They watch us take a break from the situation for a couple of minutes and return when we’ve calmed down. They watch us stay with them through the big feelings, without joining them in the distress or yelling back at them. They hear us validate their feelings. They see us drink a glass of water instead of throwing a Paw Patrol figurine across the room. And eventually, they begin to co-regulate, mimicking our behaviour to emotional intensity when responding to themselves. Emotional literacy is taught explicitly. Parents demonstrating time and again how to manage discomfort effectively is absorbed by children implicitly.

Of course, this is also how children learn how not to manage their feelings. Dysregulation in parents can easily be repeated by the adult child of those parents because it’s an impossible ask for a child to learn to create a state of calm in the face of caregivers who model chaos. This is how chaos – or fighting, fleeing, freezing or fawning – becomes all you know to do.

The way we parent toddlers can teach us a lot about how we can be effective in our adult relationships. Yelling, smacking, throwing things, silent treatment, rejection of physical affection and name-calling are not parenting strategies, they are reactions. Some people use them as a release when they are pushed beyond their emotional limits. Not reacting takes planning, practise and effort. Reacting automatically does not.

How do we become better parents? By parenting ourselves. By choosing to be psychologically safe for ourselves rather than perpetuating further harm. Not by putting perfectionistic pressure on ourselves to never again react ineffectively to our feelings. You will mess it up. I mess it up sometimes, too. We all do. However, your journey will be quicker and easier the more compassionate you can be with yourself as your unlearning and relearning progresses.

Charge your battery

Think of your mind and body as you would a battery. At full charge, your logical brain is ready and available for weighing up your options and acting in line with your values. When your battery is at half charge, you still have access to your logical brain, but the drives of your impulsive brain are becoming louder. At empty, your logical brain is now offline. Your impulsive brain has taken control and you are responding on autopilot.

Charging your battery optimises your brain and body for reasoning and self-regulation. Every time you eat a nutritious meal, drink some water, go for a walk, do something creative, find some time to just be, explore new places and participate in things that bring you joy, you are charging your battery.

Loving each other on empty batteries inevitably occurs sometimes in all relational systems. However, the more we take responsibility for charging our individual batteries, the more effective we are in our safe relationships, the more psychologically safe we become for ourselves, and the better we become at setting boundaries with people who are not psychologically safe for us.

Don’t be the difficult person

If emotional regulation has been or is a challenge for you, please don’t despair. If you were a child that wasn’t nurtured in an environment of psychological safety, you might find that feeling calm doesn’t feel intuitively safe. Children who were raised in chaos become adults who feel uncomfortable when things are peaceful. A dysregulated nervous system can make you resentful of your sensitivity. The solution is to heal your nervous system, not numb your sensitivity. You are not too sensitive; you are just dysregulated.

If you were raised by grown-ups who did not regulate themselves, it’s up to supplementary family members or caregivers and educators to pass on these skills. And because it’s not the role of these people to teach you emotional management, any skills you pick up from them are likely only by chance. Your emotional learning in this case depends on extended family and friends and educators who can regulate themselves and are willing to offer you the same learning space.

And what if there were no supplementary adults to compensate for what was missing in your world? You land in adulthood unable to tolerate any kind of emotional distress without it feeling big and unwieldy. Unhealthy relationship patterns ensue and you risk becoming the difficult person.

Say it again with me: it’s not your fault but it is your responsibility. You can learn self-regulation skills as adult and they can, and will change your experience of your relationships and your capacity to set boundaries for the better. Don’t get me wrong: this is not about fixing you so the difficult person can get away with whatever they want. Instead, it’s about helping you develop resilience in the face of a person who is unlikely to change (or who hasn’t shown signs of improvement in your dealings with them).

Without further ado, join me on a pathway for regulating your discomfort.

Self-regulation process

This process acknowledges that most uncomfortable feelings are accompanied by unhelpful thoughts, and most unhelpful thoughts and uncomfortable feelings occur alongside unpleasant physical sensations. Self-regulation addresses each part of your whole experience.

Label it

Give the feeling a name. Is it anxiety or guilt? Is it sadness or lack of motivation? Is it anger or rejection? Be as specific as you can possibly be. Naming the feeling helps create a relationship with it where you can accept it as part of your present-moment experience, without being so overwhelmed by it because it’s become your identity. ‘I am anxious’ is different to ‘I notice that I am feeling anxiety’.

Interrupt the storyline

If your self-talk is fear-based, critical or harsh and demanding, that’s entirely understandable. Children of difficult people rarely grow up with self-talk that is supportive and kind. Repeating what was told to you as a child to your adult self for years – maybe decades – takes time and practise to unravel. It’s normal if this feels foreign and superficial at first. Part of learning self-regulation, including responding to your mind effectively, is building trust in yourself to be the person you needed when you were younger. The more you speak to yourself respectfully and with encouragement, the more natural it will become. Notice the story you are running in your head that appears to be causing the emotional discomfort. Is this story helping you to be who you want to be, or is it criticising you and damaging your spirit? Interrupt that storyline with one that supports your boundaries. It might sound like this:

Story: ‘I am a loser who can’t stand up for myself.’

Reframe: ‘I am having a hard time right now. My feelings are valid.’

Story: ‘Everyone walks all over me because I’m a doormat.’

Reframe: ‘I’ve learned ways of coping that help me read other people’s feelings. I can also give myself the same gift.’

Story: ‘If someone is angry with me, I can’t cope.’

Reframe: ‘If someone is angry with me, it feels uncomfortable, but I can trust myself to cope by using the skills I’ve learned.’

Story: ‘I can’t set boundaries.’

Reframe: ‘I am learning to set boundaries.’

Story: ‘I am not safe.’

Reframe: ‘I can take action to keep myself safe.’

Story: ‘My needs, feelings and desires are not important if someone else is unhappy.’

Reframe: ‘Other people’s feelings are their responsibility.’

Step out of the reaction

When self-regulation is new for you, it’s common to notice that your default reaction to intense feelings is to disconnect from the present moment. This might look like spiralling into overthinking, overreacting dramatically or freezing and losing touch with your body. Step out of the reaction and back into the present moment by connecting with your senses via self-safe hypnosis (or, like me, you can just call it 4-3-2-1). You can do this out loud with someone else (really helpful if your emotions are intense and the person is someone you trust who understands where you are at), or in your head if you are by yourself. To increase the effectiveness of this tool, choose different answers each time. When reflecting on things you can feel, focus on the sensation of touch rather than internal sensations. This helps you focus outwardly, rather than inadvertently intensifying bodily symptoms of anxiety or anger (e.g. fast heart rate or churning stomach).

Name four things I can see.

Name four things I can hear.

Name four things I can feel.

Name three things I can see.

Name three things I can hear.

Name three things I can feel.

Name two things I can see.

Name two things I can hear.

Name two things I can feel.

Name one thing I can see.

Name one thing I can hear.

Name one thing I can feel.

Downregulate your body

Square breathing: Calm your nervous system by controlling your breathing for a minute or two. Breathe from your diaphragm using this square breathing technique:

Hold your breath for three seconds.

Inhale for three seconds.

Hold your breath for three seconds.

Exhale for three seconds.

Repeat this process until you notice your symptoms of anxiety have reduced.

Increase to four seconds if you feel comfortable to do so.

Drink water: Just the act of interrupting your nervous system by pouring and drinking a glass of water can be enough to downregulate your anxiety or anger and help you to feel more grounded. Making a tiny decision like this does more than hydrate your body. It calls in your logical brain and brings it back online.

Pleasant scents: An effective way to bypass the nervous system is through the sense of smell. Light your favourite candle. Put on your favourite perfume or cologne. Savour the smells of freshly cut lawn or bitumen just after it rains. Notice the positive effects on your mood.

Ground yourself in nature: Step outside and into nature. Forest-bathing and ‘vitamin-sea’ are popular because nature offers tremendous calming effects. Has your impulsive brain taken over? Go outside.

Take a short break from the situation: Taking a short break and returning when you feel calmer is especially helpful if conflict escalates. Once you feel tension rising beyond the point of concentrating or speaking calmly, take a break, but commit to returning when you’ve both composed yourselves to resolve the situation.

Go for a walk: Motion shifts emotion! Help the feeling move through you and out of you by moving your body. It doesn’t have to be anything strenuous (although high-intensity exercise is great for inducing feel-good endorphins). A simple walk works.

Keep the feeling company

Sometimes, you don’t need to do anything with your felt experience other than to sit with yourself through it. How exactly do you do that when your brain is suggesting you do anything but? Try checking in with the feeling by asking it questions:

Ask the feeling what message it’s trying to tell you: Is it trying to tell you your boundaries are being crossed? That you have needs and those needs are going ignored? That this is not who you want to be or how you want to act right now? Something else?

Ask the feeling if it wants to be expressed, and if it does, how?: Do you need to say it out loud to someone you trust? Do you need to speak up to the person who has hurt you? Do you need to write down how you are feeling? Punch a pillow? Yell under water? Something else?

Ask the feeling what it needs: Does it need to be acknowledged? Validated? Is it asking for some kind of action from you? Something else?

Offer the feeling space: Let go of struggling with the feeling and allow it to simply have room to be present within. It’s allowed to be there (the key is giving it space while understanding that this doesn’t mean you must like the feeling while it’s there).

Ask the feeling if there’s anything else it wants you to know: Engaging with the feeling like this enables you to honour the feeling without entering into a struggle with it.

Seek support from someone safe

Sometimes, feelings can be so overwhelming that grounding ourselves becomes impossible without support from someone else. You’re not doing it incorrectly if you need this (I have done this at times when writing this book was very emotionally uncomfortable!). Go to someone who is psychologically safe, trustworthy and great at supporting you to undo emotional knots.

It’s not a straight line to zen

Building new neural pathways for self-regulation takes time and practise. These are the most common challenges that show up during the learning phase:

I was too upset to remember to use the techniques.

When your impulsive brain takes over, it’s difficult to remember that you have techniques available to you, especially if those techniques are new in your world. It helps to write the techniques down and post them up somewhere you’ll see them regularly. This prompts you to practise them and embed them in your memory for when you need them.

I used the techniques but still felt distressed.

I know it can be difficult to accept, but the aim of these techniques is to interrupt your nervous system and bring your logical brain back online. That doesn’t mean that the emotional discomfort will disappear. It’s not a straight line to zen (unfortunately!). It simply means that you can think more clearly to respond to the situation at hand. It’s okay to feel anxious, or angry, or guilty, or embarrassed, or anything else that shows up when you are setting or defending your boundaries (even though it’s unpleasant, I know). What these techniques do is regulate the discomfort so that it’s not so intense that you become overwhelmed and unable to function with clarity.

These techniques don’t make setting boundaries feel comfortable.

I know – it’s frustrating for me, too. I wish there was a magical formula I could offer you that did make everything to do with boundaries feel comfortable. When you are transforming your boundaries, you are stepping outside your comfort zone. And for that kind of growth, a little bit of discomfort is worth it, I promise.

I used the techniques and felt calmer, but I also felt exhausted.

It’s common to feel tired after your fear system has revved up intensively. Holding that kind of tension creates fatigue. Give yourself a chance to rest and regroup. Empowering boundaries don’t need to, and won’t be, built in a day. One step at a time.

These techniques didn’t make the difficult person in my life behave better.

It disappoints me, too, that the effort we put into improving ourselves is just that – effort within us. While some precious people might respond in kind, both appreciative and inspired by our attempts to be psychologically safe for ourselves and others, many people won’t. They won’t notice, won’t care and likely won’t connect the dots between your new behaviours and their old behaviours. Do it anyway. Your boundaries protect and preserve your energy especially from the people who are showing you who they are.

Exercise

Practise each of the above tools to regulate your uncomfortable feelings. Try each of them to discover which techniques work most effectively for you, and then practise those time and again until they become second nature when you feel overwhelmed or are interacting with a difficult person.

Summary

Self-regulation begins with accepting your feelings rather than fighting to change them or get rid of them.

We need emotional discomfort. An optimum amount of stress actually improves our performance.

Re-parent yourself as if you are a toddler in order to turn your emotional literacy into skills of self-regulation.

Charge your batteries. Interacting with flat batteries leads to dysregulation.

Be mindful of inadvertently becoming the difficult person.

Methods of self-regulation:

Label the feeling.

Interrupt the storyline.

Step out of the reaction.

Downregulate your body.

Keep the feeling company.

Seek support from someone safe.

Everyone struggles with self-regulation when they are learning or relearning it. Go gently.

10

How to set boundaries

Transforming how you use boundaries is emotional and challenging work that occurs in the context of your brain doing its best to avoid change. As you practise setting boundaries with the difficult person in your life, you’ll make bigger strides of progress if you are mindful of how you treat yourself.

Your attachment style with your parents includes the influence of whether they tended to connect with you, or disconnect from you, in times of stress. This doesn’t just become the relational template upon which you model all future relationships, but the template upon which you build your relationship with yourself.

When it comes to setting boundaries with the difficult person or people in your life, the first compassionate connection you need to create is with yourself. This opens up opportunity to validate yourself for how hard you are trying. It honours the parts of you that are learning to respond differently although imperfectly, and the parts of you that keep showing up trying to do things better.

If you meet yourself and the ways you’ve learned to survive with condemnation, you will descend into a shame spiral that provokes the use of old habits and behaviours. When the language and attitude you offer yourself says that you are defective, broken and need fixing, there is nowhere to go. Just as we can habitually guard ourselves from getting close to others because the risk of being hurt is intolerable, we can also build a wall made of shame with ourselves.

I observed this pattern in Saoirse when she started therapy for depression. She was in a difficult relationship with Cian and determined to make better choices for her future. Saoirse was raised by emotionally incompetent parents who failed to teach her how to regulate her distress. Because they didn’t model effective management of their own emotions, they inadvertently taught her to love herself conditionally. Saoirse was punished and rewarded based on whether she was a ‘good’ girl. Having negative feelings fell outside the bounds of being ‘good’. As a result, she grew up to believe that making mistakes was unacceptable. People who treated her badly were all she deserved. If only she could get her shit together, then she might be able to work on liking herself. It’s just that, in her mind, there was so much not to like.

During our time together, we worked first on Saoirse’s relationship with herself, and then on her boundaries. As she started to be more compassionate with herself and understand how unfair it is to punish herself for the ways she learned to survive, she also began to see the future differently. A stronger relationship with herself empowered Saoirse to see the relationships she has with others in a different way – in a way that recognised her inherent value. Saoirse broke up with Cian.

She was going well . . . until she had a bad day at work, and Cian reached out to ask if he could come over. An hour later, he was on her doorstep presenting her with ‘make up flowers’ and promising he would change. Saoirse took him back ‘in a moment of weakness’.

At our next session, she apologised while offering a litany of things that were wrong with her. I reminded her that she has no reason to apologise to me, and that none of the items on her ‘defect list’ were accurate. As we explored her shame, I asked Saoirse how she felt about her next step. ‘Helpless and hopeless,’ she said. I then asked her to recall how she was feeling right before she broke up with Cian. ‘Like I was capable of changing my life,’ she answered. We explored how the way we speak to ourselves robs us of agency. How punishing ourselves for learning and relearning (and the time it takes) strips us of hope. And how the bridge between where Saoirse was in that moment and where she wanted to be was self-compassion.

If you meet yourself with the language and attitude of compassion, it opens a doorway to move forward. There’s recognition and validation that this is hard. There’s room to fail, improve and try again. Compassion is an invitation to grow.

Shame says: ‘I’m a mess and I’ll never get better.’

Compassion says: ‘I can start where I am with what I have.’

Shame says: ‘My childhood was awful, so I’m destined to be a failure.’

Compassion says: ‘I can be who I needed when I was younger, and create healthy, restorative relationships as an adult.’

Shame says: ‘It was my fault and I’m a bad person.’

Compassion says: ‘It’s unfair to use adult hindsight on my child self. It was never my fault. I am a good person.’

Shame says: ‘The person treating me disrespectfully is giving me what I deserve.’

Compassion says: ‘I am worthy and capable of creating psychologically safe relationships. This person does not have the capacity to be safe for me.’

When you practise cultivating a voice of compassion, notice how it feels in your body in comparison to meeting yourself with shame. This process of inward connection will determine your experience of boundaries with the difficult person in your life. It can limit you or it can transform you, and the power to cultivate compassion is in your hands. Once you’ve connected with yourself, then you can look outwardly.

Creating connection

Game, set, match

Looking for a change in someone else’s behaviour without considering their capacity first is like trying to play a game of tennis by yourself. Some people will never come to the net. Some people will never participate with their whole selves. Some people won’t even pick up a racquet or acknowledge that you’re on the court. No matter how much you might desire to see your relationship with someone improve, if they are not willing to do their part, there is no relationship. There’s only you and the effort you’re expending. Setting boundaries can and does improve many relationships, but the limitations of them will always depend on the other person’s insight, willingness and capacity to respect and meet your efforts equally.

Unexpressed boundaries are not boundaries

Some boundaries are assumed – your physical and sexual boundaries shouldn’t need to be spelled out, even for difficult people (dangerous people are another matter).

Emotional boundaries, on the other hand, need to be articulated and enforced. It can help to think of them as a gift in your relationships – your user manual that others refer to for guidance on how to love and respect you. And before you buy into the myth that boundaries require you to be mean, the way you say them matters.

Less what, more how

Boundaries with difficult people are less about what’s said and more about how you say it. It might be tempting, but lowering yourself to the difficult person’s level of disrespect will only worsen things. You care. I know you do. And it’s true that communicating in a kind, polite and/or calm manner will usually take you further than any other option. You can set your boundaries firmly and be respectful. You can disengage from someone kindly. These things are not mutually exclusive. Here are some suggestions for approaching boundaries with each archetype:

Archetype

Framing

Reminder

The Plasticine

Go gently. The Plasticine is easily overwhelmed and highly sensitive. Use kind language and a calm tone.

The Plasticine needs to be reminded that they are safe to be themselves.

The Victim

Be kind but firm. Be prepared to repeat the boundary when The Victim escalates their distress. Disengage to make your point.

The Victim needs to be reminded that their fulfilment will never be found in others living for them.

The Clinger

Be kind but firm. The Clinger is highly sensitive and easily threatened by boundaries. Be prepared to repeat the boundary and disengage even if The Clinger decompensates.

The Clinger needs to be reminded that their worth is not dependent on anyone else.

The Subtle Manipulator

Be clear and direct. Stand firm in the face of passive-aggression.

The Subtle Manipulator needs to be reminded that fulfilment from equal relationships is always more satisfying than unspoken needs communicated through covert digs.

The Narcissist

Be clear, firm and direct. Be prepared to repeat the boundary, followed by disengaging immediately and permanently if you are not heard and respected.

The Narcissist needs to be reminded that they can be their vulnerable and authentic selves without the bravado bullshit . . . and still be loved.

The Brick Wall

Be kind but firm. Be prepared that The Brick Wall may shut down and your choice is then to allow that or disengage.

The Brick Wall needs to be reminded that vulnerability and emotional closeness are safe with the right people.

The Swindler

Be firm and direct. Be prepared to disengage if repetitions of the boundary are ignored.

The Swindler needs to be reminded that playing games pushes people away and will always lead to an internal void.

The Aggressor

Be clear, direct and firm, without escalating to the level of The Aggressor. Take a support person with you if possible. Make sure you are safe.

The Aggressor needs to be reminded that power does not equal love.

The Controller

Set your boundaries in every area that control is occurring. Be firmly repetitive until you are heard.

The Controller needs to be reminded that love can be safe even when it’s flexible rather than rigid.

Hard truth: there is no magical formula for setting boundaries in a way that always protects others from feeling uncomfortable or upset (especially when we are talking about difficult people). The fact is that you are not responsible for other people’s reactions to your circles of preservation. You could be the Dalai Lama and some people will still react abrasively to the world not going their way (I’m looking at you, wounded children in adult bodies).

Boundaries don’t always have to be verbal. You can express a boundary by changing the form of your contact. Call instead of visiting. Text instead of calling. Email instead of texting. Send a card. Do what feels workable and in line with your values.

Be aware of your own stuff

Communicating your boundaries effectively requires you to be aware of the loads you carry. Before speaking up for yourself, you might have to process that the difficult person has behaved in such a way that you felt:

Process this first using self-regulation skills (see Chapter 9) before you attempt to connect outwardly.

Know the feelings that trigger you so you can step back and regulate yourself before you communicate your boundary. You don’t have to act immediately. Take a few breaths. Have a glass of water. Leave and return when you’re feeling calmer. Do whatever you need to do to tend to your own regulation and well-being – doing so will fortify your reserves for communicating the boundary. Mindfulness is not weakness.

Validate

Next, use validation to support your boundary. While you can’t control receiving validation from the difficult person, you can control offering it. Validation is the most powerful skill we have in creating a connection with another human. Feeling seen, heard and understood does so much to take the sting out of conflict. It includes:

Talking less, listening more.

Using non-defensive body language.

Saying statements such as:

‘Can you tell me more about how you are feeling?’

‘That makes sense.’

‘I hear where you are coming from.’

‘I understand.’

‘That sounds difficult.’

‘I can see how that would be upsetting.’

‘I hear you.’

‘I can only imagine what that felt like for you.’

‘I believe you.’

‘Can you tell me more about that?’

Communicate understanding

Along with validation, create a stronger connection by checking in that you are hearing their message correctly. Ask clarifying questions until you are sure that you are both on the same page (remembering that this doesn’t mean that you agree, it means that you are respecting their perspective). It sounds like this:

‘So, what you’re saying is [insert a summary of what they are saying]. Am I hearing you correctly?’

‘Can I repeat back to you what I’m hearing? I’d like to make sure we are on the same page.’

‘What you’re saying is [insert summary]. That sounds tough for you.’

‘I’m working on seeing this from your perspective. You said [insert summary], right?’

Conveying empathy rounds out validation and understanding as the building blocks on which respectful boundary-setting occurs. Here are some phrases that can help someone feel seen and, therefore, psychologically safe:

‘I see you.’

‘What do you need today?’

‘I don’t agree with what your mind is saying to you, and I understand how that might feel true when you are struggling to see yourself like I see you.’

‘Thank you for telling me how you feel.’

‘It’s okay not to feel okay.’

‘Can I get you a drink or a snack?’

‘How can I support you?’

‘I’m not judging you.’

‘I’m here to listen.’

‘Thank you for sharing your experience with me.’

‘Take all the time you need. I’ll be here when you are ready.’

‘I value you.’

‘I appreciate you.’

‘I can see how hard you are trying.’

‘You can be vulnerable with me. This is a safe space.’

Imagine one of those days. You are out of milk, school uniforms aren’t clean and you and the kids ran out the door rushed and upset. You hit traffic. The kids are late to school, you are late to work. Your boss is passive-aggressive about it and your workday goes from bad to worse with everyone else making their sense of urgency an emergency they expect you to solve. You finally arrive home and it’s a relief to see your partner to vent.

Your partner responds with: ‘Wow. Maybe make sure you are more prepared tomorrow? And if you’d gotten groceries on the weekend like you originally planned, I guess this wouldn’t have happened.’

Notice how this response feels in your body.

Or your partner responds with: ‘That sounds so stressful! You have a lot on your plate, and I admire how well you manage it all. I think you are doing great and I’m here for you to help where I can.’

Notice how the second response feels in your body compared to the first.

See the power of empathy, validation and understanding for creating connection? What’s worse than feeling overwhelmed by your experience is feeling alone with your feelings or being shamed for having those feelings in the first place. These communication techniques don’t mean you agree with the other person’s point of view or feelings. They mean that you are acknowledging that their experience and feelings exist. If you are going to set a boundary with a difficult person, you’ll be more effective if your boundary is delivered with this attitude.

Expressing the boundary assertively

Assertive communication is the healthiest style of communication for effective boundary setting (and relating to others, period). Individuals who are assertive value themselves, their time, their energy, their needs and the needs and personal resources of the people with whom they are communicating. They state their opinions and feelings clearly, and confidently advocate for their rights and needs without disrespecting or violating the rights of others.

Difficult people struggle with this. Being assertive means you advocate for yourself in a way that is firm but kind to the recipient, without giving up your own power (passive), shifting into blaming and threatening (aggressive) or underhandedly expressing anger (passive-aggressive).

Assertive communication uses ‘I statements’. I statements allow you to take responsibility for your feelings, while also respectfully communicating the impact the issue has on you, and what you need to restore the situation to one of mutual respect and fairness. It sounds like this:

Scaling your response

When dealing with a difficult person, you don’t always need to enter the conversation with your boundary muscles flexed. There are other options, depending on what feels most workable to you. They look like this:

Escalate energy in interaction: Flex your boundary muscles if you want to. Confront the person. Call out their behaviour. Raise consequences. But don’t just fight for the sake of it.

Keep energy neutral in interaction: Ask a question. Speak to the personal impact their behaviour is having on you (‘I feel . . .’). Speak to the systemic impact (‘In our family/organisational culture . . .’). Or stay sitting on the fence and don’t take a side.

De-escalate energy in interaction: Walk away. Offer empathy and compassion. Do nothing. Agree.

Reinforce your fences

You communicated your boundaries and the difficult person walked right on through them anyway? Do this next:

Repeat the boundary

Your boundary has been ignored or crossed. Your first empowered choice is to repeat it. Perhaps the person misunderstood you in the first instance.

Stay and enforce consequences

Next, you have the choice to enforce the consequences you set. These consequences may have been part of the boundary you communicated to the other person, or they may have been noted in your own mind as your next steps.

Temporarily withdraw yourself

If your consequences aren’t respected and the boundary continues to be crossed, you have the option to temporarily withdraw yourself.

Withdraw privileges

I’m not just talking about keeping the wi-fi password from your teenager until the housework is done (although I hear this is an effective consequence for adolescents!). Withdrawing privileges also means removing access to your personal resources for other adults who are not respecting your boundaries (e.g. no longer loaning money, reducing the time you are available to assist, adjusting your presence so that the person is required to stand on their own two feet etc.).

Leave permanently

You have the option to leave permanently. It’s important to understand this, especially if your boundaries are disrespected and crossed time and again.

It’s your responsibility

Boundaries are most effective when you make choices that support the life you want to live – no matter how difficult those choices might feel or be. Without taking responsibility for your choices, you risk creating a situation in which you become the victim. This position is one of powerlessness and leaves you vulnerable to projecting your frustration onto others out of misguided blame and resentment.

You are the creator of your life, and your choices must reflect that. This is how you take care of yourself.

It’s far easier to deny that there’s a problem (rather than accept you need to take action to solve that problem), externalise the problem by complaining about it and making excuses for it (rather than owning your choices), and project the problem away from you by blaming the difficult person (instead of taking the power for your decisions back into your own hands). But the result is a feedback loop that erodes your self-trust and paralyses you because nothing changes.

Being responsible for your boundaries is the only way you are empowered to determine how you want to live your life. Because the truth is that nothing changes if nothing changes. Nothing changes if we don’t acknowledge our role in keeping ourselves stuck. Nothing changes if we don’t acknowledge the effort needed to create change. Nothing changes if we refuse to accept the discomfort of change. And nothing changes if we stay in denial, hoping and wishing that the difficult person will magically stop being difficult.

Creating connection from a place of authenticity means getting serious about where your responsibility starts and ends. How someone makes you feel isn’t their problem, it’s yours. When they cross your boundaries, that’s their fault, but it’s your job to manage the impact that creates for you. I know this is hard to read, and I don’t write it to be unkind. I write it because your personal power is your freedom. I don’t want you to keep giving away your power to the difficult person in front of you.

Reconnect and try again

When it all looks like it’s about to go pear-shaped, reconnect with yourself and the other person (if possible):

Go inward: You just raised your voice when you didn’t want to? Repair with yourself first. It might sound like this: ‘I’m a good person who’s having a hard time. I can start over.’

Reset: As a conversation becomes heated, the temperature will continue to rise unless there is a conscious interruption. If you notice that the conversation is going in the wrong direction, start over. It’s a powerful conflict management strategy that normalises not getting it right the first time. We can offer each other the chance to start again and reconnect. It might sound like this:

‘Can we start over? I want to hear what you’d like to say. Let’s start again and take turns explaining our point of view this time.’

‘Can we do this over? I don’t like the way I was just talking to you.’

‘I apologise for yelling. This isn’t the way I’d like to talk to you. Can I try again?’

‘That’s not what I wanted to say. Can we rewind and start over?’

Take a break: It’s not always possible to continue the conversation in a healthy way if one or both of you is beginning to feel dysregulated. Take a break and return to the conversation when you calm down. This is not the same as stonewalling or withdrawing, because your intention is to return. It might sound like this: ‘I need some time to calm down and clear my head. Can we take a break for half an hour so that I can be more constructive in my thoughts?’

Take accountability: Accepting responsibility for your part in the conflict takes the sting out of blaming and shaming each other. However, it doesn’t mean that you are at fault or in the wrong. It might sound like this: ‘I’m upset that I responded in this way and took my feelings out on you. I am sorry I raised my voice at you. That is not who I want to be in this conversation.’

Play on the same team: Rather than being in battle with each other, remind yourself that it’s both of you against the problem. Arguing creates a mindset of separation. Reconnection brings you together to face the problem collectively. Changing your tone can be helpful here. It might sound like this: ‘Can we find a way to compromise? It’s okay if we don’t perfectly agree, but I’d like to make sure I understand where you are coming from so that we can solve this together.’

Repair ruptures

Healing relationship ruptures is a valuable skill. If you set a boundary and receive pushback from the other person, it is not a sign that your boundary is invalid or ineffective. It’s a sign that you need to continue communicating with the other person (using the skills in this chapter) to help them understand why the boundary is important to you.

Some people will be committed to misunderstanding you and some people won’t have the skills themselves to respond in healthy ways. But for the people you love, it’s important to know how to persist in times of conflict, to repair the rupture and move on. (Please know that if a difficult person has shown you that they have no intention of changing their ways, repairing ruptures is futile. Protect yourself and move on.) Try these:

Allow yourself to go to bed angry: You might have heard the saying that if you want a long-lasting relationship, you should never go to bed angry. While I applaud the indirect encouragement to reconnect and talk, it’s not quite that simple (and also not necessary!). You can go to bed angry. You can even wake up angry and head off to work the next day while still feeling angry. The key is not to try to repair conflict while you’re still angry. Yes, the goal is to reconnect as quickly as you can, but first your nervous system must downregulate so that you are not fanning the flames of tension because your emotions are still blazing.

Say it differently: The words that come out of your mouth will rarely be Shakespearean when you’re trying to navigate a difficult person. If what you say doesn’t work, try saying it a different way. It might sound like this:

‘I am going to work on how I express this in future.’

‘I am going to try and say this in a better way.’

‘I’d like to work on expressing that differently, so it doesn’t cause pain for you.’

‘I see the confusion that has been caused for you in how I communicated that. Can I start over?’

Apologise meaningfully: You probably won’t be surprised to read that ‘I’m sorry you feel that way’ is not an apology. What you say and how you say it is important here. When you’ve made a mistake and need to apologise, try these steps:

Respect your guilt. It’s showing you where you are out of alignment with your values.

Act on your guilt. Say sorry. Take ownership for the mistake. Acknowledge the hurt you’ve caused. Not sure how to say it? It might sound like this: ‘I’m sorry. I was wrong and [what you did or said] hurt you. I take responsibility for that, and I want to do better in the future.’

Offer amends. Ask what form of amends would feel most meaningful to the other person.

Be specific about how you will make amends: ‘I made a mistake. I am sorry I hurt your feelings. I will make it up to you by [specific action].’

Don’t live in the guilt. Honour the lessons without using hindsight as a weapon against yourself.

Resist using the mistake to define yourself. It’s not a marker of your (lack of) worth.

Accept that you are human: beautifully imperfect and always growing.

If you are on the receiving end of an apology from someone who has hurt you, resist waving away the problem with a trite ‘That’s okay’. Acknowledging their behaviour and their apology is a powerful way to move forward. Try these alternatives:

‘Thank you. I appreciate you saying that.’

‘Your apology means a lot to me.’

‘I hear that you are sorry. I’m going to take some time to think things over and will let you know when I feel ready to talk again.’

‘Thank you for your apology because I have been quite upset about this.’

‘Thank you for saying sorry, it helps me to know that you care.’

‘What you said/did hurt me, but I accept your apology and I forgive you.’

And if you’re not ready to accept the apology, or do not want to accept the apology because the difficult person has gone too far, try these:

‘I appreciate you knowing why I have been upset, but I am concerned this will happen again, because it’s not the first time. So, I am going to take some time away from our relationship.’

‘I appreciate your apology. I am struggling to forgive what happened and I need some time.’

‘Thank you for reaching out. I am going to sleep on this before I respond further.’

‘I understand your point of view, but I am hurt and need some space to re-evaluate our friendship.’

‘Thank you for explaining where you were coming from. I am still working out how I feel about this and need some time.’

‘I appreciate your apology, but I don’t feel like this relationship can be repaired. This is a deal-breaker for me.’

If it’s a rupture that can’t be repaired (or it’s happened too many times to be acceptable), it’s time to move on. As you do, remember these tips:

Resist the urge to take complete responsibility for the relationship breakdown.

Give up believing that they will change. Difficult people can improve, but you’ll know if those signs are missing. Without genuine action towards healing, their empty words are just that.

You will need time to heal (and there is no way to predict exactly how long this will take).

Be mindful of glorifying what you are grieving for. This person wasn’t the perfect partner, family member or friend because they don’t have the capacity or willingness to do their part to meet your needs. A relationship with a difficult person is not reciprocal.

Allow someone whose opinion and perspective you trust, who you know has your best interests at heart, to call you out when you are wallowing beyond what’s useful for emotional processing.

Ongoing practise

It can take practise to feel grounded enough to set boundaries in such a way that they feel at least relatively comfortable. Be mindful that your emotional comfort zone may not be a good indicator of what’s necessary to manage a difficult person. As you are shifting from where you are right now to where you want to be, be prepared for some confusing feelings. When confidence is unfamiliar to you, it can feel like you are behaving arrogantly. You are not. When being passive is what’s familiar to you, stepping into assertiveness can feel like you are behaving aggressively. You are not. When having your needs overlooked feels familiar, standing up for yourself can feel selfish. It’s not.

That being said, it can be tough to sit with receiving a negative reaction to your boundaries. Strong feelings like guilt, shame and anxiety can cause you to believe you’ve done something wrong. Remember that setting boundaries means you are communicating what works and doesn’t work for you. Just as you are allowed to do that, the person receiving the boundary is allowed to have a reaction. All feelings are valid – it’s how those feelings are expressed that matters. However, their negative feelings don’t mean that you are responsible for restoring their comfort, or that they have a right to violate your psychological safety with reactive dysregulation.

Your brain might valiantly fight your efforts to grow because comfort zones don’t usually expand by themselves. Remember to acknowledge your efforts because this stuff is tough! Take a breath and remember how hard you are trying. And then regroup and relentlessly believe in your ongoing potential for what’s possible.

Exercise

Use the discussed communication tools and scripts to practise setting boundaries. You might consider practising with someone you trust first, as you build up your confidence and try on what it feels like to speak the words out loud. Then move on to the difficult person in your life. Remember that you don’t need to be perfect to be effective!

Summary

You’ll always communicate your boundaries more effectively if you take the time to connect with yourself inwardly first.

Use empathy, validation and understanding as the foundations of your outward connection.

Communicate your boundaries assertively (rather than passively, aggressively or passive-aggressively).

Scale your response up or down as needed.

Set consequences, but remember that whatever the outcome, you can only control yourself.

Reconnect and try again if things go pear-shaped.

Repair ruptures (if appropriate).

Don’t expect yourself to be perfect. Give yourself space to practise.

PART 4

MOVING GENTLY AND BRAVELY FORWARD

11

Be gentle with yourself

Thank you for staying with me until the final section of Difficult People. I know the path we’ve walked together through these pages hasn’t necessarily been a still lake on a spring day! I applaud your willingness to stay through it all. The space you are making in your life for these concepts, reminders, strategies and new perspectives will expand your options and empower your choices.

As you move forward, I want to leave you with some reminders for your journey. First, we go within.

Autonomy through authenticity

You will never be truly autonomous in your life if you cannot show up as your authentic self. If you are in a relationship (in whatever form) with someone who fails to accept you as your authentic self, understand what the cost of that is. Do you consent to giving away your power about who you are to someone who is not you? This is about getting comfortable with yourself first, and then understanding that someone else who is not comfortable with who you are is not deserving of a space beside you.

Who you are for yourself

Let who you are for yourself be self-determined. Rebuild your emotional architecture by being psychologically safe for yourself. It doesn’t matter what’s come before now because you can build your future. Remember that self-created psychological safety is your way to inner peace and acts as the foundation for all other psychologically safe relationships in your life. It looks like:

Giving yourself permission to have needs and advocate for them.

Understanding that you have rights and can advocate for them.

Knowing you are worthy simply because you exist.

Identifying, setting and strengthening boundaries so that your needs and rights are recognised and honoured by others.

Cultivating relationships with other people based on mutual respect and willingness to evolve together.

Taking responsibility for regulating your feelings and behaviours.

Goodbye you, hello me

Speaking of psychological safety, every choice you make to be the person you needed when you were younger, is a choice that builds your relationship with yourself. Every skill you learn, and then use to regulate your feelings and validate your experience, is a skill that strengthens the trust you can have in yourself to be a grown-up that represents what you deserved as a child but weren’t given. Sometimes, this means making what might be a difficult choice – a choice to say goodbye to a difficult person in your life and, in doing so, hello to yourself.

As you set boundaries with difficult people who haven’t seen your boundaries before, and release others from your life altogether, it might feel unfamiliar. The process of unlearning old patterns is simultaneously a process of learning who you are without those patterns. You are meeting yourself anew. And from over here, that person is stunning!

Breathe into possibility

What if you don’t know who you are outside of the unhealthy patterns you’ve tread with the difficult person in your life? This is where I invite you to breathe into possibility. You have the chance to redecorate your internal world in colours you love. Try on new ways of being and see how they fit. Keep the ones that feel good and toss the rest. And leave a little room for movement. Your potential needs space to be fully realised in all its glory.

Life after trauma

It exists. I promise.

You can love and create and set boundaries and contribute and grow and be wildly abundant even when the scars you hold may still throb occasionally.

It’s not the scars that define you. It’s what grows from them.

What if I’m the difficult person?

Trauma changes us at a visceral level. And trauma is not an excuse to mistreat others. Both of these realities exist. If trauma has occurred in your past, it is yours to carry and cope with, not lump on someone else’s shoulders and, in doing so, perpetuate that trauma. Sure, being reactive in your relationship might be a symptom of the trauma, but it’s still your responsibility to manage it.

If much of what you’ve read in this book has you thinking that maybe you are a difficult person, please don’t panic. I personally know the pain that can arise when you reflect on things you’ve said and done as a way of coping that have caused harm to others. Please go gently with yourself. The worst thing you can do at this point is to shame, criticise and condemn yourself (doing more of what was done to you is not the pathway to healing).

Remind yourself that truly difficult people generally don’t read books like this and feel bad about themselves in response! You are a great person wrapped up in methods of surviving in a world that can be abrasive, surrounded by people who didn’t treat you the way you deserved. You have a choice to reject the ways you’ve learned to survive in favour of embracing ways that can help you live bravely and meaningfully. Please don’t judge yourself. Forgive what you didn’t know before you knew it and hold tight to what you now know and can therefore do better.

Forgive yourself

If it was that simple, I could invite you to put the loads that you have been carrying down. To just take them off your shoulders and place them onto the ground. But it’s not that simple.

You carry unhealed wounds, the pain of past mistakes, guilt and regret, fear of the future and concern about the here and now. It feels scary to start setting boundaries. It feels scary to do things differently. And all of that is a lot.

You may not be able to drop the load, but forgiving yourself for all of it can change the way you carry it. How? Start by speaking kindly to yourself. Start by seeing how hard you are trying and how much it all means to you. Start by giving yourself space to grow while being so accepting of your humanness that you consistently forgive the parts of you that are imperfect and tend to mess up.

Without self-forgiveness, you remain stuck in the past, allowing other people to control you, a place where you have no power to change or improve. Self-forgiveness releases you in the present moment to do things differently, despite what’s happened in the past. These questions will help you feel your way into self-forgiveness:

Where am I holding myself back from setting boundaries to support the person I want to be because I’m not forgiving myself for something in the past?

Can I do anything to change what happened?

Have I done everything in my power to make amends?

What am I getting out of holding onto this and withholding forgiveness from myself?

How can I use this as an opportunity to strengthen my boundaries and grow?

Practise saying these self-forgiveness statements to yourself:

‘I was a child. It’s not fair to use my adult knowledge against my child self.’

‘It’s not a child’s responsibility to know better than the adults around them.’

‘I release my past and forgive my participation in it.’

‘I trust myself to make present and future decisions informed by the wisdom I’ve learned.’

‘I was doing the best I could with the knowledge and awareness I had at the time.’

‘Using hindsight as a weapon against my younger self only paralyses my present self.’

‘I take responsibility for repairing my mistakes where possible.’

‘I can do better now I know better.’

Be mindful of boundary burnout

If you have been around the healing and personal growth block a few times by now, this topic probably won’t surprise you. Change can be bloody exhausting, especially when that change involves other people (who likely don’t have the same investment in being their best selves as you do).

Take a break from doing the work every now and again. Allow yourself to be, without mentally evaluating if you could have said that more effectively or obsessively self-monitoring if your body language was too meek and mild. I don’t want you to hit a wall and end up with boundary burnout (not actually a thing, but you know what I mean).

You’re allowed to be good enough exactly as you are, and return to improving and growing when you have the inclination and energy for it.

Patterns unravel slowly

Repairing your nervous system and building new neural pathways takes time. During that process, sideways and backwards steps are not only normal, but to be expected. Please go gently when you lapse back into survival patterns that you are trying to overcome. Remember that brains feel safe doing what they’ve always done. It takes patience and practise to replace default coping strategies with empowered ways of being that are new to you. You’re not doing it wrong if it feels clunky to begin with. Stick with it.

Self-trust

While we’re discussing neural pathways and time, your brain needs evidence to believe that a new reality can exist, and can exist for you. Every time you take a tiny step in the direction of healthy boundaries, your brain learns that you can do it. The more steps you take (and repeat), the more confident your brain becomes. This is how self-trust and self-belief are born. But it might not happen immediately. Give yourself time for what you’ve read to sink in and be integrated into your experience. Some people start implementing strategies immediately. Others need to digest and rest first. Move forward gently, and in a way that fits for you.

Others might not change, but you have

Don’t confuse other people’s emotional incompetence, immaturity or regression with a failure on your part, or use it as evidence of your own lack of progress. Where someone else is at, is not a reflection of you or your journey. Your power is over you and that’s where it ends.

There will be those who are determined to make you doubt yourself because your growth is a threat to their stagnation or triggers fears that they will be left behind, or holds up a mirror that they are not available for looking into. Take a breath and regroup. This is not about them; it’s never been about them. This is about you coming home to yourself.

12

Be brave and empowered

Now that we’ve gone gently within, we need to move through the world with brave and empowered boundaries. Here are the reminders I invite you to take with you.

What will they think?

I’ll never tell you to turn your heart off. I’ll never tell you to stop caring, because to stop caring is to become numb. And that’s an unworkable place to be if you are to live bravely, fully and meaningfully. You care because you’re a good human. Just don’t care so much about what other people think that you forget that they are spending much more time thinking about themselves than thinking about you. You will be judged for being the version of you that someone else is invested in, and you will be judged for being the version of you that you desire. The choice is yours, and caring about others doesn’t have to stop you.

You don’t have to be perfect

Your boundaries will never be perfect. Mine are not. Your interpersonal interactions and decisions will never be perfect. Mine are not. While perfection is impossible, consistency is your best friend. Get it right often enough, and the people around you will come to know this is who you are. Get it right often enough and you come to know this is who you are.

Do this for yourself but not by yourself

‘Can’t you just do it for me, Beck?’ This request never ceased to make me laugh in my days of clinical work – not at the person asking, but at the inherently human desire to skip over the hard part to the good part, now, thank you kindly. You know the answer to this, and my clients did, too, and sometimes knowing that your boundaries are dependent on you, and only you, can feel isolating. I want to remind you that you are doing this for yourself, but you don’t need to go it alone. Let a trusted friend or family member know what you’re working on so they can support you. See a therapist for extra guidance and debriefing when you need it. There will be some parts of the path where company makes all the difference.

Consider forgiving them

We spoke about forgiving yourself in Chapter 11. I invite you to also consider forgiving the difficult person (or people) in your life – not for them, but to free up the energy that is spent holding on to what they have or haven’t done.

You don’t have to, of course, and your potential is not necessarily limited if you choose not to. Please know that forgiving them doesn’t excuse their actions or the harm they have caused you. But it will lighten the weight on your shoulders, because forgiveness is not about the load they left you with, but how you’re carrying it. If you can, consider laying it down.

Don’t be a dick

Dear reader, while it’s very unlikely you are a difficult person, we are all messy and fallible in our own ways. There are some habits we can fall into that create disconnection. I’m not saying you do these things intentionally; I’m just saying be mindful of not being a dick. They include:

Putting someone else on a pedestal and then being disappointed when they don’t live up to your expectations by showing themselves to be imperfect.

Living for your partner/children/close family members and then being disappointed when you don’t get that level of attention back from them because they go out and create their own lives.

Refusing to compromise.

Taking the attitude that no one else’s feelings matter but yours. Sure, don’t let your fear of a negative reaction stop you from communicating your boundaries. But this doesn’t entitle you to be a dick and give up on caring about whether you hurt someone else.

Offering ‘no’ as a complete sentence to someone you have a close relationship with. Sure, say it to that person from high school you haven’t spoken to since you graduated who is now trying to recruit you into their multi-level marketing downline. But soften it for anyone you’d like to maintain a relationship with!

Using ‘boundaries’ as an excuse to behave irrationally, unkindly or without care and empathy for others. Self-respect is important, but it’s not more important than respecting others, even if they are being difficult.

Expecting everyone to understand boundaries in the language that you do. Some people need to hear boundaries in much softer language to understand that you are not launching a personal attack (especially if they are sensitive).

Cutting someone off because they question a boundary that you set. Don’t simply ditch crucial communication skills like compromise, negotiation and attempting to arrive at a win-win solution because someone on a podcast or in a self-help book told you that ‘your boundaries are valid!’ . . . even when that person might have been me!

Speaking more than you are listening, or planning what you are going to say next rather than attending to what is being said.

Offering unsolicited advice, especially before someone has finished their sentence.

Paying more attention to your device than to the person trying to talk to you.

Telling someone how they should feel or that they shouldn’t feel the way they do.

Whoops! Okay, you accidentally acted like a dick. You said or did something that wasn’t helpful or aligned with who you want to be. We’ve all been there . . . so, what now? Go gently on yourself and take the chance to start over. It might sound like:

‘I’m not proud of how I reacted just now. Can we start over?’

‘I was projecting and shouldn’t have said that. I’m sorry for directing my anger at you.’

‘I can see that I hurt you. I want to avoid reacting like that in future. Can we talk about it when you are ready?’

‘Can you help me understand where this conversation went wrong? I’m really trying to work on this.’

‘I’m sorry for how I reacted. I can see how that was hurtful. I’m going to work on that.’

Just as you have the right to set and defend your boundaries, so do others. One of the most effective ways to avoid being a dick is to respond supportively when someone sets a boundary with you. It might sound like:

‘I understand.’

‘Thanks for sharing that with me.’

‘I’m really glad you told me this. I won’t do it again.’

‘I appreciate you letting me know and I’ll respect that boundary.’

‘Thanks for telling me. It doesn’t feel entirely workable for both of us, though. Is there a way we could compromise?’

‘Thank you, I’ll be mindful of that in future.’

‘Thank you for modelling the importance of boundaries and for expressing them in such a caring and sensitive way.’

‘Thank you for showing me where your limits are.’

‘It’s really hard to hear and know about this. And I want you to know I respect your needs.’

‘I’m so glad that you are taking such good care of yourself around this.’

‘I know that wasn’t easy for you to share. Thank you for taking that risk with me.’

Don’t put up with dickish behaviour

You are not obligated to have a relationship with another adult if that relationship is unhealthy for you. But let’s say that you’re generous of heart and want to respond in the first instance in a way that doesn’t close the door. You might start by disagreeing politely:

‘I can’t say I agree with that.’

‘I don’t subscribe to that belief.’

‘This isn’t an idea I can support.’

‘That’s a point of view I don’t share.’

‘I hear you. But that’s not how I feel.’

Then you might move to setting a simple boundary:

‘I’ve decided that [insert boundary] is best for me and that is what I will be doing from now on.’

‘If you continue to [insert their behaviour], then I will [insert boundary].’

‘I need to protect/manage/take care of my [insert need], so I am going to [insert boundary].’

‘This is my decision to make.’

‘I don’t want to talk about that.’

‘I’m not comfortable with that.’

‘I need space.’

‘Please ask before touching me.’

Then you could move to setting a boundary with a potential consequence:

‘I expect you to [insert boundary] and if you cannot or will not respect that, then [insert consequence].’

‘I need you to [insert boundary]. If you don’t do this, then [insert consequence].’

‘I’ve asked you not to do [insert behaviour]. I love you very much, but your behaviour is hurting me. If you won’t stop, I’m going to have to leave.’

‘I will not engage with you if you speak to me this way.’

‘If you are going to cancel again, I cannot commit to this anymore.’

‘I don’t need you to understand or agree with me, I’m asking you to respect my boundaries.’

‘I said yes before, but now I am saying no. I am withdrawing my consent.’

‘I hear what you are saying and need to take a break from this conversation right now.’

‘I understand you are upset and if there is more yelling, I will need to take some space.’

And finally, you might choose a particular flavour of boundary to make it clear that you have been acutely hurt or refuse to participate further:

‘Ouch! That comment really hurt me. I didn’t deserve that.’ (Pause and give the person a chance to speak and explain their behaviour. If they don’t apologise, ask them to stop or leave).

‘I know you are hurting right now. But your words and actions are hurting me, too.’

‘I don’t appreciate the comments you make about my body. Please stop doing that.’

‘I appreciate your concern, but this is my decision.’

‘I respect your values and beliefs, but I do not share them.’

‘I will no longer be the go-between person in family arguments.’

‘Commenting on my weight is not appropriate.’

‘Your comments about my lifestyle are hurtful. If you don’t stop, I’ll need to end this conversation.’

‘I expect my partner to be treated with respect or we won’t come over anymore.’

Trust is built, not bought

We learn self-trust by taking action over and over again that builds the evidence in our brains to show that we can trust ourselves. Sometimes, thinking it through feels like action. And for sure, thinking about how you’ll manage setting the boundary is helpful for planning. But there comes a time when thinking something through becomes overthinking, and will get you no further than chewing gum will satiate your hunger. Go gently, but go. The discomfort won’t disappear, but your future self is relying on you to make choices around this difficult person that will be psychologically safe for them.

The same goes for relationships in your life with people who have proved to be untrustworthy. Trust is rebuilt, not bought back. If that person is not demonstrating actions that build trust with you, then no amount of buying your love will compensate. There is no price for trust and the role it plays in psychological safety.

Two-way streets

Relationships must be re-evaluated regularly. Partnerships, friendships and the investment you place in family members must be nurtured and founded on reciprocity, mutual respect and a commitment to space and support for both of you to grow. Check in and assess whether this relationship embraces your authenticity or activates your fear system. Is it based on shared expectations or an imbalance of energy? Is there a rhythm of contribution from each of you as you have the resources available, or is it a one-way street? And based on your answers to these questions, how do you want to move forward?

Silence can be golden, goodbyes can be kind

Remember that saying nothing is always an option. If there are no words that this person will hear, no reason that this person will heed, no willingness this person will show and no change this person will make, then saying nothing is an option, and a pretty good one.

Some people are so knotted up in their ways of being and coping that it’s impossible to access any other version of them. The kindest thing you can do for this person is release them from unhealthy patterns you created together.

Some people are only meant to be in our lives for a season, and going your separate ways when it’s time is how you honour that season. In these instances, freedom for both of you is found in goodbye.

Caveat: Saying nothing when you have the option to say something might leave you with emotional loose ends. While it can feel easier to just cut someone off, please be aware that, over time, you may come to regret that this version of you is the one that you are building the future you upon. Be the person you want to be by offering an ending that is in integrity with your values. Be the person your 80-year-old self wants to look back upon.

Forward focus

Your peace is not worth compromising for their presence. I absolutely understand if removing them from your life altogether is not a choice that feels available to you. The way forward that is right for you is the way forward that you can create today, no matter how tiny that step might seem. Set the boundary despite their reaction. Defend the boundary despite their reaction. Commit to changing your reality even when they are holding steadfastly to an old reality that you are no longer available for.

And finally: a vow for your today self

Today, in this moment, I have shown up. I release all attachment to the outcome and bring openness and willingness to the process of connecting with myself and with the people around me.

I am willing to be uncomfortable for the freedom that my boundaries offer. I am willing to try with everything I have and accept that my efforts will always be beautifully imperfect.

I am here as my authentic and vulnerable self, always growing, always learning, always expanding into who I am becoming.

I vow to be compassionate with myself. To see, hear and understand how much I care, how good my intentions are and how hard I am trying. I release control over other people’s capacity to do the same for me and themselves.

I release the desire to have all the answers before I start. I give permission for my boundaries to be evolving as I am and to unfold in a way that fits for me.

I trust myself to do what needs to be done. I am safe. I am safe to set boundaries. I have time. I have time to build boundaries that support my future self. I am where I need to be. I am where I need to be to participate in creating the relationships and life of my dreams.

Final exercise

Go live your life on your terms, with people who celebrate you in every inch of your brilliant glory. I see you. I’m with you. And I relentlessly believe in your potential.

Acknowledgements

To Nyssa, for showing me what unconditional love means and, most importantly, what it looks like and how it feels.

To Bennett, for choosing me as your life-giver. The cycles of generational pain stop with me, and the loving way forward starts with us.

To Bec, for picking me up off the floor (and for loving me before and after always). For bottles of memories, day-long conversations and never losing one another. My sister.

To Jen, for naming it for what it was (and for loving me before and after always). For staunchly refusing to believe I am anything less than what you see in me. For seeing me. I will climb into your ceiling and spy on you until the day I die. My sister.

To Craig, for putting up with my inability to remember boring psych 101 classes and re-teaching me concepts twenty years after we first learned them. For St Andrews. For being the example of breaking cycles.

To Nilusha, this book wouldn’t be what it is without your light. Thank you for sharing the gift of you with me (in dreams, music, voice, energy and love).

To Erin, for holding me from the moment we met and helping me know what I now can’t unknow. The wind of thousands of years of wisdom was yours before it was mine.

To Tamara, for flicking me articles at a moment’s notice, knowing more about the brain than I ever could, and making me laugh in every single message of parenting confessions. You and Scott and Arthur and Sonny are precious and priceless. Our chosen family.

To Liss, for talking me down off the ledge more times than most would tolerate when I’m a drama queen operating against my design.

To Mum and Dad, for doing the absolute best with what you had available before you, within you and around you.

To Nick, for having my back. Always.

To Ingrid and everyone at Pan Macmillan, for the years of allowing my art to grow as I do, and holding it all so gently while it happens.

To Candi, for screaming about me always and all ways.

To Libby and Bec, for holding my words with such discerning and determined eyes. Without your scaffolding, my writing is only a poor imitation of what it’s capable of being. I was able to write this only because your hands would hold it first.

To Clare and Ben at Curtis Brown, for sending my work far and wide and making sure it’s respected in the process. You don’t have to value my work but you do.

To my team, Leanne, Chloe, Maddy, Brianna and Malisa, I float because you calm the waves. Thank you for holding it all together while I create.

And to Sarah, for the words you wrote that you didn’t know helped me meet parts of myself I didn’t know I needed to meet. For text messages that I keep because they’re written by you. For not ripping rib cages open that aren’t ready for it and for metaphors that include ‘eucalyptic’. For strangers that are friends. You.

Thank you.

References

American Psychiatric Association, Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders, Fifth edition, 2013.

Beitel, M, Ferrer, E & Cecero, JJ, ‘Psychological mindedness and awareness of self and others’, Journal of Clinical Psychology, vol. 61, no. 6, 2005.

Bowlby, J, Attachment and Loss, Basic Books, New York, 1969.

Edmondson, A, ‘Psychological Safety and Learning Behavior in Work Teams’, Administrative Science Quarterly, vol. 44, no. 2, 1999.

Freud, A, The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense, Hogarth Press and Institute of Psycho-Analysis, London, 1937.

Hebb, DO, The Organization of Behavior: A neuropsychological theory, Psychology Press, New York, 2002.

Horney, K, Our Inner Conflicts, WW Norton & Co Inc, New York, 1945.

Janoff-Bulman, R, Shattered Assumptions: Towards a New Psychology of Trauma, Free Press, United States, 1992.

Keysers, C & Gazzola, V, ‘Hebbian learning and predictive mirror neurons for actions, sensations and emotions’, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B Biological Sciences, vol. 369, no. 1644, 2014.

Neal, DT, Wood, W & Quinn, JM, ‘Habits – A Repeat Performance’, Current Directions in Psychological Science, vol. 15, no. 4, 2005.

Roazzi, A, Attili, G & Di Pentima, L et al., ‘Locus of control in maltreated children: the impact of attachment and cumulative trauma’, Psicologia: Reflexão e Crítica, vol. 29, no. 8, 2016.

Wright, Dr C, personal communication with Dr Rebecca Ray, 3 October 2022.

Yerkes, RM & Dodson, JD, ‘The relation of strength of stimulus to rapidity of habit-formation’, Journal of Comparative Neurology and Psychology, vol. 18, no. 5, 1908.

About the author

Dr Rebecca Ray is a clinical psychologist, author and speaker. Over the course of almost two decades of practice, Beck has helped hundreds of big-picture-thinking people, through courses and consultations, live a life that’s fulfilling, unapologetic and free. Her science-backed approach delivers both hard and heart truths with an ethos of self-kindness first, always. Beck’s unique expertise has seen her engage with thousands of people and sets her apart as one of Australia’s most in-demand and authoritative voices in the personal development space.

Beck is the author of Be Happy, The Universe Listens to Brave, The Art of Self-Kindness, Breakthrough, Setting Boundaries, Believe, Small Habits for a Big Life and Good, Great, Perfect. She lives in the soul-fed hills of the Sunshine Coast with the great loves of her life: her wife, Nyssa, son, Bennett, two rescue Irish Setters and one gangly Weimaraner.

Connect with Beck on her social profiles where you’ll find her under @drrebeccaray

Connect with Beck on her social profiles where

you’ll find her under @drrebeccaray

MORE TITLES FROM DR REBECCA RAY

The Universe Listens to Brave

This book of wisdom has been written for you: the ones who seek to live with more courage.

Reach for it when you’re setting an intention, making a big decision, doing the work of healing, grieving, creating or learning to love yourself, and you need reminding to keep choosing brave.

This is your invitation to leap into your most expansive life.

Dr Rebecca Ray is a writer, speaker and clinical psychologist. She invites you to contemplate your true self, in its bravest form: the self that is still asking questions. The self that is seeking wisdom. And the self that’s determined to stay open to the possibilities of a life inspired.

Manifesto for Brave Living

Excerpt from The Universe Listens to Brave.

I see you.

The ones living heart wide open.

Those driven by the path of your spirit.

Believing love wins.

Making room at the table.

Holding hands and space through the process.

You, you trust.

You, you know that you will fall.

And you, you will catch yourself and rise again.

And still, though it hurts, you stay as open as the universe.

I see you.

Graciously allowing fear to be your passenger, while courage drives.

You honour your story: all sacred, all scars.

You are softness and strength. You are persistence and patience. You are healed and still healing.

And you write anew; welcoming beginnings, even if you’re not quite ready.

Your intuition is your guru.

When it’s hard, you stay. And when it’s wrong, you leave.

Sometimes, you make a mess of it.

And still, you forgive yourself as many times as it takes.

You hold it gently.

You’ve learned humanness is not brokenness.

You know the practice is lifelong.

And still, you show up for it.

I see you.

I’m with you.

The Art of Self-Kindness

This book is for you, the one with sensitivity as a super-power, though you’re still learning to offer it to yourself.

You, the first to share a kind word with others even when you’re not gentle on yourself.

You, known for your generosity but who forgets to give to yourself.

This book is in your hands now because it’s time to befriend yourself.

Dr Rebecca Ray invites you into the practice of self-kindness as the bravest of human art forms. Cast aside the bullet-point lists or assembly instructions in favour of self-care that seeks flow over force and progress over prescription. Come on a journey back to yourself through the art of self-kindness.

Manifesto for My Sacred Self

Excerpt from The Art of Self-Kindness.

I see you.

I see how hard you try and how much you give.

In the failures and the frustrations, you find your way through.

For the times I haven’t been what you need, I’m sorry.

I hear you. I feel you. I honour you.

I know your intentions and your efforts.

I see your strengths and your imperfections,

I know your wisdom and your learnings.

There have been failures and regrets. And there are parts of you that are bruised from carrying the weight of it. There are things you’re still working on forgiving. I know.

I see the parts of you that are scared and the parts of you that are brave.

I see the parts of you that are healed and the parts that are still healing.

I see you practising and growing. I see it all, and I accept it all, without conditions, expectations, or judgement. I accept every part of you exactly as you are in this moment. You are entirely enough.

I honour the parts of you that are hurting and the parts that want to hide away, and I see you showing up anyway.

I honour your goals and dreams – the ones you’ve realised, the ones you grieve for, the ones you’re working on, and the ones you don’t yet know you have.

You are so loved by others.

I see you and I honour you.

Setting Boundaries

Setting Boundaries is not just about saying ‘no’. It is about pursuing the things that set our soul on fire, loving deeply without losing ourselves, and better resisting the demands and expectations of others.

Dr Rebecca Ray, Australian clinical psychologist and author, shows how boundaries are the key to many of the emotional and practical difficulties we encounter in daily life.

Many of us, raised to be people-pleasers, find ourselves giving in to draining colleagues, friends, partners and relatives.

In Setting Boundaries, Dr Ray shares science-based advice and tools to help you set clear, intentional boundaries and become your most loving, fulfilled and authentic self.

Accessible, inspiring and deeply practical, Setting Boundaries ignites us to rethink our relationships, reclaim our lives and protect our mental health and wellbeing.

Excerpt from Setting Boundaries.

Small Habits for a Big Life

Change is not about grand statements and sweeping gestures. It is about chipping away, a bit at a time, at the habits that hold us back.

In Small Habits for a Big Life, Dr Rebecca Ray breaks down the process for her reader. She explains how we can override the part of the brain that seeks pleasure and comfort (ice cream and wine) and activate the parts that tolerate some discomfort for the sake of long-term goals (an hour of study instead of an hour of TV).

Small Habits for a Big Life clears the way for readers to embark on their own path to change and provides exactly the right amount of support along the way.

Excerpt from Small Habits for a Big Life.

The cycle of self-sabotage

First, we experience a trigger. The trigger is always some form of discomfort. It might be painful thoughts, such as, ‘I can’t be bothered to go to the gym. I’m too tired. I’ve already had such a busy day. I just don’t have the energy.’ Painful thoughts are accompanied by uncomfortable feelings. The feelings that accompany these thoughts about the gym might be fatigue, reluctance, overwhelm or defeat. If our awareness is low then we respond automatically, and you can probably already guess that the automatic response is avoidance. Instead of going to the gym, we think to ourselves, ‘I’ll go tomorrow.’ And we release ourselves from the commitment and lie on the couch instead. Good old procrastination – the most common and seductive self-sabotage strategy. We don’t have to push through the discomfort and, more importantly, we convince ourselves that we are absolutely committed to going to the gym tomorrow. To facing and moving through the discomfort, to doing the thing that is consistent with our values – tomorrow. And this seduction feels good. It feels like relief.

And in our brains, the relief is so powerful as a contrast to our discomfort at the idea of going to the gym that it stands out as important and worth repeating. Our brains reward the avoidance of discomfort by releasing a neurochemical called dopamine. Dopamine motivates us to repeat a behaviour by rewarding us with the feeling of positive satisfaction.

This is how self-sabotage becomes an unhelpful habit that we repeat unconsciously. Our brain marks the relief of avoiding discomfort with dopamine, which motivates us to continue avoiding the thing in the future. In other words, it’s not you; it’s your biology.

Where self-sabotage has become a habit, this relief is only temporary.

Because we don’t end up going to the gym tomorrow. Or the next day. Or the day after that. Instead, we become stuck on an avoidance roundabout. This avoidance roundabout stops us from facing and moving through discomfort in order to do the hard-but-important things that fit with who we want to be and what we want to stand for. And so, we feel guilty and out of alignment and criticise or punish ourselves, which creates more discomfort, which then causes us to repeat our avoidance. And the cycle of self-sabotage continues.

The more we repeat an unhelpful habit, the more it can become ingrained as our sense of identity. Continuing the example of self-sabotage around health, your identity might become someone who is unfit or unhealthy. From this, you’re then more likely to live into behavioural and psychological scripts that fit this identity, repeating patterns and behaviours that reaffirm who you believe yourself to be. In other words, if you start to believe that you are someone who is unfit and unhealthy, you’re more likely to behave in ways that support this belief, like not maintaining your hydration and choosing take-away meals over home-cooked options, even when it’s not consistent with who you really want to be.

The good news is that when we act in a way that is in alignment with our values, the dopamine response is even stronger. I’m going to show you how to use your biology to your advantage – to have your brain rewarding values-directed action which will then encourage you to repeat behaviour that supports you. By making a few small but consistent changes, you can transform unhelpful habits into actions towards a bigger, better life.

Pan Macmillan acknowledges the Traditional Custodians of country throughout Australia and their connections to lands, waters and communities. We pay our respect to Elders past and present and extend that respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples today. We honour more than sixty thousand years of storytelling, art and culture.

Some of the people in this book have had their names changed to protect their identities.

First published 2023 in Macmillan by Pan Macmillan Australia Pty Limited

1 Market Street, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia, 2000

Copyright © Rebecca Ray 2023

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