How to Respond to The Person Who Irritates You?
Do you find yourself bristling around a certain person? Maybe you work with someone who irks you. Perhaps a family member irritates you. Or someone who is on a committee with you gets under your skin.
There’s a tension between you, so that you’re uneasy around this person. You sense she or he isn’t on your team, or you find it hard to be on theirs.
It occurs in more intimate relationships too. We don’t bring some issues up because we know they are a minefield. Or our partner does a particular thing that irritates us. Or she or he adopts a tone of voice and we find ourselves tensing.
It’s a strange phenomenon, but a person who bothers us also holds a fascination for us. We experience both attraction and repulsion.
We can’t get our mind off the person. We’re caught in what my friend Sebastian Moore calls an “ecstasy of disliking.”
We think to ourselves, “This person’s a jerk!” We are convinced we are in the right and they are wrong. We want to set them straight.
In our head, we imagine an argument with them—which of course we win because they aren’t there.
It’s like a Chinese finger stall. The more we try to pull out of it, the tighter we’re stuck.
When this sort of thing happens to us, we tend to seek allies—and it’s never difficult to find friends who will agree the person is an ass.
Once we have a consensus that the other is at fault, our preoccupation with the person curiously intensifies. We may think the person’s a moron and try to forget them, but they keep popping up in our thoughts.
Now we are irritated with ourselves for letting them get to us. “Why should that so-and-so bother me?” we ask.
But the more we tell ourselves how impossible they are, the more we find our attention glued to them.
The way out of a Chinese finger stall is to relax and move our fingers toward each other, so that the webbing expands and loosens.
Similarly, if there is to be resolution of a quarrel, someone must break the ice and move toward the other in a friendly state of mind. To end a quarrel, we can’t wait for the other party to thaw out. We must act unilaterally, make the first move.
When we remain centered instead of reacting, we are able to see to the person’s core and recognize there a beautiful human being like ourselves. This enables us to take steps that might bring us together.
When we are calm, it encourages the other to imitate our comfortableness with ourselves. Our centeredness invites those who are beside themselves to once again become centered also.
As we saw with Gandhi, this approach can release people from a Chinese finger stall not only in interpersonal relationships, but also in international relationships.
This approach, so little tried, is so powerful that, practiced by a single man, it drove the British occupation from India.
What if you and I were centered like this?
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About the Author:
David Robert Ord is author of Your Forgotten Self Mirrored in Jesus the Christ and the audio book Lessons in Loving–A Journey into the Heart, both from Namaste Publishing, publishers of Eckhart Tolle and other transformational authors. He writes The Compassionate Eye daily, together with his daily author blog The Sunday Blog, at www.namastepublishing.com
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