TRANSCRIPT
I would like to explore the subject of how to deal with jerks. Bad people, nasty people, aggressive people, violating people, people who are rude, people who are offensive, people who are harmful. How to deal with them? Well, I think the primary, simplest, most effective way to deal with people who are jerks is to avoid them. To keep out of their way such that they don’t even know that I exist. When I see them coming, avoid them. When I hear their voices, get out of their way so they don’t even see me. If I can have my preference, to the degree that I can, I would rather not have to interact with them at all. So that is my first strategy. My first line of defense in dealing with jerks is to avoid them. To not get into relationships with them, to not be friends with them, to certainly not get into romantic relationships with them. And if they happen to be my family of origin and they really remain jerks, to avoid them. To get out of their way. I don’t want to have to think about them, see them, talk with them, deal with them, argue with them, be ruined by them, get attacked by them, get muddied by them.
I remember once hearing my grandmother say, “Don’t wrestle with pigs; they get you all muddy and they love it.” Later on, I heard a more sophisticated version of this: “Don’t argue with idiots; they’ll drag you down to their level and then they will beat you with experience.” So both of these phrases back up what I’m saying: that if you can avoid jerks, you win. You don’t get muddy, you don’t get in fights, you don’t get entangled.
What I’ve seen also for myself, learned through hard, painful experience starting in my family system, but even once I was more out of my family system and I was out in the world, I did a fair amount of not avoiding jerks. I interacted with them. I was even friends with some. And what I learned is that their jerkhood rubs off on me. Their nasty behavior rubs off on me. And being raised in my family by parents who, to some degree or other, were jerks, I became kind of a jerk. And it’s really sad.
So another whole other part of this is how does one deal with the jerk inside one’s own self? A lot of the videos on this channel talk about that, about healing trauma in order to become a true self. And the true self isn’t a jerk. So that’s part one.
Part Two
Now I’d like to get into part two. Well, sometimes you have to interact with them. I’ve had a lot of jobs where you just can’t avoid dealing with rude and obnoxious people. Stupid bosses, people who tell you what to do and they don’t know what they’re talking about, people who act out nasty stuff. Sometimes you’re living in situations where there’s obnoxious, rude people. Sometimes you end up in families where that’s just how it is.
For me, the second strategy I use is to figure out how to get along with them. How to minimize the amount of garbage that they put on me. In effect, if they’re raining, I’m holding an umbrella, but I don’t want to let them know that. A lot of times, it’s just like figuring out ways to coexist with them without having their poison getting on me. It’s like if I can’t avoid them and I have to live with them, how can I coexist with them peacefully? Sometimes it’s gently working things out. Sometimes it’s like figuring out what their bad sides are, maybe even being a little quiet, living in some camouflage, not giving them too much of a target so they will attack me.
But another thing is, if I have to live with jerks in this way, if I have to work with jerks in this way, the whole while I’m trying to minimize their negative effect on me, trying to disengage with them, trying to bring it down, keep things calm, even, I’m sorry to say, to appease them sometimes. The whole idea with this strategy, the second strategy, is that it’s time-limited. The ultimate goal of this strategy is not to make them better people, because that by and large doesn’t work. Not to reform them, rather to figure out how I can get myself out of this situation. Where I can break away from my jerky family of origin, when I can get away from bosses or co-workers who are jerks. If I’m in a relationship or a friendship of some sort with a jerk, how to gradually ease myself out of this. To minimize the amount of mud and dirt that gets on me. How to not let them sting me with poison, the poison that they have, so that I become sick and like them.
The whole idea being to figure out how to go back to the first strategy: to completely avoid them, to remove them from my life. So that’s the second strategy.
Part Three
And then there is the third strategy, the extreme strategy. And that is how to deal with jerks when they’re poisoning me, they’re stinging me, they’re attacking me, they’re in my face, and there is no avoiding them. They are violating me, and I cannot calm this situation down. And that is the extreme strategy. That’s the red button. And that is fight back. That’s have boundaries. That’s put them in their place. That’s shut them up. That’s shut them down. That’s when the bully is punching me in the face and I punch him in the face harder. That’s the fighting back, to the degree that I can repel this jerk beyond my borders. And that is the right of every human being. When someone violates you, you’re allowed to kick them out. And if you can’t get them to get out of your boundaries in gentle ways, in strategic and maneuverable ways, you can kick them out forcibly.
Now, the reason that I don’t like to use this strategy unless it’s 100% warranted and there’s no way I can escape it is that it causes me a lot of stress. It causes me a lot of pain. I don’t like it. I don’t like to have to kick someone out who’s violating me. But I can think of so many cases where I’ve had to do it. I think of living in a neighborhood with bullies where I couldn’t avoid them, when I couldn’t pacify them, when I couldn’t get along with them, and they were mean to me. They tripped me, they’d push me, they’d pull my pants down, punch me in the face even. And I had to learn how to fight back. Had to learn how to put up my fists. Had to learn how to be tough and stand up for myself. And I’m glad I did it because then I was able to repel the jerks and teach them I am not someone who you can target.
I couldn’t do that so easily with my family of origin. I was too dependent on them, too dependent on my parents for way, way, way too long. Childhood was a long time. I couldn’t escape them. But eventually, I did start confronting my parents. It started in my late 20s, certainly went into my 30s, where I started saying, “I don’t need you anymore, and that game is not okay anymore.” And I started practicing the fine art of confrontation of jerks.
However, early on, I would say I didn’t practice the fine art. I practiced the very messy and confusing art of defending myself in very confusing ways. A lot of times, it just made more problems for me. And I realized, you know, I’m confronting them to practice what it’s like to say what I always wished I could have said but was never allowed to say because they would have rejected me and abandoned me even more. But when I’m saying it now, they just become nastier. I’m just engaging more with jerks, and this is not good for me. This is poisoning me.
But even then, there was something good about that because I really got to see in an adult conscious way who my original historical violators were and how nasty they were. I got to see who my parents really were in their deeper, ugly characters when I confronted them as an adult. That is what I gained. They didn’t change at all. It didn’t make my relationship with them better. In fact, it made me feel horrible in a lot of different ways. But I got to see this is who they are, and this is who they always were. That’s what I gained by.
Really confronting them, but in a lot of ways, it just poisoned me. I said things sometimes that I regretted, did actions sometimes that I regretted, if only because they really harmed me. I put myself more in harm’s way. So, I guess I bring up as one of the dangers of practicing the third strategy of actually actively confronting a jerk.
Well, I want to say one final thing that I think sometimes, because I’ve experienced it myself, we can confuse strategies two and three. Because sometimes early on, I practiced confrontation or levels of aggression that weren’t really warranted, and it should have been better to use strategy two. I think of times where people were teasing me or being jerks, and I didn’t need to press the nuclear option. Instead, I should have just been calmer and been more appeasing and kind of slipped away.
But sometimes I was a little too vulnerable. Sometimes I was dealing with my own memories of my traumas. Sometimes I was acting out my rage against what my father had done to me by pressing the nuclear option. And I’ve seen some people who are much more quick to go to strategy three, to press the nuclear button, to expel someone, to confront them and ruin them quickly when really they don’t have to do it. Sometimes it’s an excuse to act out their rage.
So that’s why I’m kind of a little hesitant. And I’d say percentage-wise, 80 percent of the time when I’m dealing with jerks, I can use strategy one and avoid them. And probably about 19.99 percent of the time, I can use strategy two to appease them with the intention of getting back to strategy one. And point zero one percent of the time, I go to strategy three. But it’s always nice to know that if necessary, in those extremely rare cases where I really have to confront a jerk and repel them, get them out, neutralize them, I have that as a strategy.