Life during "difficult times" isn't always as painful as we imagine.

The pain you may feel is actually the shock of your priorities shifting — and the higher the priorities you must shift around, the more painful it gets to shift them.

In declining to embrace the word “recession,” Mr. Bush said that many Americans were just beginning to receive their tax rebate checks as part of an $168 billion stimulus program, and that it would be some time before the effects of those checks on the economy were clear.

Is President Bush is turning a corner into some new realization about the nation? Could he really be starting to “feel your pain”?

Pressed again on whether the United States might be in a recession, Mr. Bush replied: “You know, the average person doesn’t really care what we call it. The average person wants to know whether or not we know that they’re paying higher gasoline prices, and that they’re worried about staying in their homes, and I do understand that.”

Here’s what I want to see: A president that sees the difficulties set before us as opportunities to achieve great things, to accomplish difficult deeds, and thereby achieve honor. The current prez? He doesn’t think this way, not even remotely.

The stage is beginning to be set for a new dawn in this country. And the clamoring naysayers and pessimistics must be drowned out by a beam of optimism. We don’t really have a choice, so we’d better accept our challenges and deal with them.

Many people — myself included — are harassed by an array of relatively small medical irritants. The general public in western societies, however, enjoys such a high level of base comfort that an interesting dynamic occurs whenever medical problems arise. We become myopic: we see small medical problems as big ones, and we over-react.

On the flipside of over-reacting to medical issues, there’s the danger of under-reacting. What are the dangers of this? Sometimes a small medical problem grows and spirals out of control, accumulating into something much worse. Need an example? Meet Huang Chunsai, a Chinese man who survived a record tumour surgery. The tumors afflicting him since he was a boy presumably must have started out relatively small and grown slowly, slowly enough to not impel medical action. Or, more likely, his family was too poor to afford it. But as the years went by, the tumor grew and grew to the point where he had problems walking and was too embarrassed to leave his house.

Is there a moral to this story? I think there are several, but here’s one: Medical burdens must be watched very carefully and respected for what they are — Chances for a medicinal problem to fly out of control and become literally and metaphysically a huge burden, as it was for Huang Chunsai.

Small medical burdens, such as those Ms Chunsai’s started out as being, can accumulate over time and must be periodically eliminated, just as river bed silt must be dredged from the delta of a busy river.

But, is there beauty in Mr Chunsai and his plight? If so, where is it and how can we appreciate this?

The Trend of Upward Difficulty

Yea, these headlines are a little pessimistic. But if the trends we see today continue into next week, next year, next decade, we're in for rough times, difficult times. What can we do now to proactively dampen the power of these problems? How can we see the low tide, evacuate the shore, and prepare—before the tsunami strikes?

But on the flip-side, there is hidden value to the problems that will arise. The obstacles we'll face will be incredible opportunities for growth and rare chances to display a strength of character of awe-inspiring depth. These moments will be history-making, decade-defining times. If difficulties like these are theoretically valuable, what lessons can we learn from them? Will we use these obstacles? Or will they use us? Who among us will be there to leap up to the cockpit, grab the tiller, and steer?

Difficulties Are Valuable

You might wonder what I think of our current president (considering I run a website like this one), how he, his family, and his staff, have reacted to the difficulties they’ve faced.

The difficulties of this administration have been great, but they have also been diamonds in the rough. The obstacles these men and women have faced were incredible opportunities for growth and rare chances to display a strength of character of awe-inspiring depth. Did they taken advantage of these opportunities? Did they grow and adapt and become role-models for the rest of the nation? No. They’ve let these opportunities fall by the wayside and have successfully done only this: look greedy and incompetent.

These days it just seems like we American Voters just can’t catch a break, can we?

Yeah, I’ll admit it. I’m a biblio-voyeur. I’m nosy when it comes to what books and magazines people read on the subways. Well, there sat a woman reading quietly on the train, and I immediately noted that she seemed much more involved in her book than most readers seem to be, so I peered down to see what she was reading, and, sure enough, it was the paperback version of “Working With You Is Killing Me.”

I thought to myself, hmh! I know a thing or two about this book. I looked at her again, and I could see she was reading voraciously—Whoa!—and that she was weally diving into it, and that she had just started it.

Normally when strangers are reading, I leave them alone, but since I knew this book back-to-front, I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to bother her about it, so I begged her pardon and asked if I could interrupt her to ask a few questions.

“Excuse me, but I’m familiar with this book and an acquaintance of the authors, and I’m curious, where did you see this book? I mean, how did you find out about it?”

She immediately smiled at me in an un-NewYorkery way and said “Oh, from these,” and she pointed toward the overhead subway car advertisements.”I saw the ad and, you know, it kinda just grabbed me. This title, it’s just so—you know, it’s perfect.”

“Wow, “ I nodded, “it does do that.” I told her I liked this book a lot right off the bat too.

“You know,” she said, “I went to three different bookstores before I found it. It’s out of stock everywhere.”

“You went to three different stores to get this book?”

“Yeah, I went all over the place—to a Borders in Westchester, and two Barnes & Nobles, but I found it. The clerk said I was the third person to ask about it that day.”

This amazed me. There aren’t many books these days that impel readers to travel so far out of their way to find a book.

“It really got me,” she continued, “ you know, the stuff about bad bosses. Ugh, I have the worst boss, total micro-manager. It’s awful.”

“Sorry. Yeah, I know the type. Well,” pointing at the book, “I hope you enjoy it. I found it to be an extremely useful thing to read.”

I handed her my business card and told her if she liked this book, she might also like my website, and we shook hands and parted ways.

Kind of random, eh? But that’s New York for ya!

What This Means

This interaction answers a question that I’ve been wondering about for a little while: Do books still matter? And if so, how much, what with Hollywood, the internet, MTV, massive multiplayer online games, and the sixty bazillion cable channels available to distract us. Don’t we have enough stimulation?

I have come to believe that—far beyond the shadow of any doubt—books still retain an incredible magnitude of cultural, social, and intellectual power. That power may be overshadowed by the enormous appeal of all these other available options, but I can’t think of many other $10 purchases that a person would go such lengths to get. This nice woman behaved as though this book was more than a book, as though she was buying a complex computer system, or seeking a good medical surgeon—that’s the level of mental exertion she put into finding this book. What does this mean? That some books, many books, are still an incredible value, even for ten bucks, and that customers are willing to go to incredible distances to buy the ones that help them overcome difficulties, and that they remain the central delivery system for complex conceptual tools that readers lack and crave.

Take that, cable companies!

ROB Tekserve Pro-Video-Post. This is Rob.

CUSTOMER Yeah, umm, I bought a, umm, Lacie, umm, umm, DVD burner yesterday and, umm, iDVD don’t see it.

Okay, deep breath. I have to brace this guy right off the bat for the reality that he might be in for more trouble than he actually sees right now.

ROB Oh, iDVD needs to be a relatively current version to “see” Firewire external DVD burners. An older version won’t see them. Is your version older than two or three years?

CUSTOMER Oh. Okay I got it, umm, hooked up by USB.

ROB Hmmm. Try plugging in with a Firewire cable.

I knew at this point that he wasn’t out of the woods yet. So I continued…

ROB Keep in mind though, that you might have other obstacles to overcome. Yeah, you might still have to buy a new version of iLife.

CUSTOMER Oh really? Damn!

ROB And that means you might have to buy the new operating system too, for that to work. What operating system do you have?

CUSTOMER But, I told the girl I spoke to that yesterday, man! Yo! They scammin’ me. Why they gotta do that?

ROB Sir, I’m only trying to tell you —

CUSTOMER I buy all my stuff from Tekserve, man. I expect better service that this.

ROB Well, we try to protect our customers as best we can. I’m only trying to advise you to expect other obstacles. I’m trying to—

CUSTOMER And now you’re givin’ me this!

ROB Don’t raise your voice, sir.

CUSTOMER Why I can’t get no muthah-f#ckin help?

ROB Don’t raise your voice, sir—

CUSTOMER And don’tchoo hang up on me neither.

I wasn’t sure how to react to that one.

CUSTOMER I’ll come down there and wait for yo ass!

A chill went down my spine.

ROB DO NOT threaten me, sir.

CUSTOMER Suck mah di@k, you a faggit. Whatcho name? Umm, Rob? Oh yeah! Rob!

Great. He remembered my name.

ROB That’s right. My name is Rob.

CUSTOMER Suck my di@k, you faggit! You muthah-fu@kin faggit!

—Click—

What can be learned from an interaction like this? This interaction started by this customer being stymied by a seemingly small and innocent technical problem. Presumably, his goal was to make a DVD, but he was thwarted by obstacles to this goal. When I delivered to him the (possible, but not inevitable) bad news, he was swept into a maelstrom of anger.

I later found out that this customer called back in an attempt to talk to the salesperson he’d spoken to yesterday. She wasn’t in yet, luckily, and our receptionist told him this. Upon hearing this the customer hurled insults at our receptionist, calling him a “fucking white-protected faggit.”

Analysis

Note how the customer’s mind flip-flopped. His posturing did a one-eighty. Within the span of thirty seconds, he went from, at first, total submissiveness &mdash with all the uncertain umms &mdash to felonious menacing. You can see the state this man in, as we began our phone call, how close he was to the edge, so easily tippable into rage.

Several difficult customer-types are thrown into the mix here. First, there’s the Crazy Train. That’s an obvious part of this equation. (Umm, cuckoo!) But what may not be so obvious to you is what’s underlying this interaction: the victim mentality. Buried deep inside this man is the Helpless Child. But in this case, it’s not the standard variety of Helpless Child: this is the Rage-aholic Thug Variant, the one that thinks throwing his weight around, threatening people, and insulting them is how to GTD. It didn’t work.

This customer was a truly twisted mutant of different difficult customer types. Really, an interesting case, when you think about it. He was a bundle of all the neuroses of the victimized Helpless Child, mixed together with the insanity of a Crazy Train, and baked into a soufflé of personality disorders, cursewords, and threats, a bundle that’s a little bit too common these days.

Could I have defused this difficult customer? I wonder about this. I don't think I could have because he couldn’t be reasoned with. And furthermore, would this man accept responsibility for his actions, for the fact that he bought something willingly? How could I have defused this situation? I could have bent over backwards and waved my “magic wand,” as we say, to fix his problem. But after what he said what he did? Um, no.

My Reaction

Let me share with you how I reacted. My first instinct was actually to call this guy back and try to find out what the problem actually was, which I never even had a chance to do, and solve it. But after reconsidering this, I decided to take another action: I typed up everything I could remember that’d been spoken, and then showed this transcript to anyone else I thought might interact with this guy, should he come into the store. Transcribing the conversation helped to me cool off a lot, which reminds me: What does WWYIKM say? It says “Unhook with a business tool.” When I transcribed the conversation, I was executing an excellent form of by-the-numbers unhooking procedure. It made me feel a lot better.

In terms of celebrating this difficulty, well, it was a learning experience. I learned that my coworkers were very kind and supportive about being threatened, and that there wasn’t much I could've done to mitigate this situation from going out of control the way it did. So, my friends were all behind me — after all, this could have happened to any one of us. And management has summarily “fired” this customer, told him to never shop at Tekserve again. But what else can I learn? I guess I can be proud I didn’t freak out too badly. I’m ambivalent about not responding to this guy with more anger, more insults in response, but this really isn’t my style at all and probably not a good idea anyway.

Other Factors

I never got to find out several things: (1) What this guy was, in fact, attempting to accomplish: Burn a video DVD? Back up data? I’ll never know. How do I feel about that? Not too bad. (2) What version of iDVD software did he have? Nope, don’t give a crap now. The saddest part of this interaction is that his software was probably up-to-date and he only needed to plug in the Firewire cable to get going. Instead, all he succeeded in doing was getting blacklisted at a store he likes and getting two-hundred, friendly, Mac-savvy people to hate his guts.

— L.P. Jacks

We suffer from a variety of difficulties in life today, but the trickiest difficulty is also the simplest — other people. It seems the clever technology we’ve invented over the past ten-thousand years doesn’t stop other people from irritating us, particularly those who you sit next to in your office for forty hours a week. Aside from the health of you and your family, what factor of daily life could possibly be as important as the people surrounding you at work, many of whom drive you insane? Not one can supercede this paramount factor. At work, it’s crucial you collaborate with other people successfully, yet we possess little technology directly aiding us in doing so psychologically.

About a year ago, I came across a new development in this issue — a book called Working With You is Killing Me: Freeing Yourself From Emotional Traps At Work (or WWYIKM) which you can learn more about here.

Its authors, business strategist Kathi Elster and psychologist Katherine Crowley, wrote it to present many of the personal dynamics which cause you to go crazy. They identify several different profile types of crazy-makers commonly found in our workplaces, and this book could easily have been named Handling Difficult People. WWYIKM covers a timeless topic and was helpful enough for me to share with you now my thoughts on it.

What This Book Accomplishes: It Presents a New and Useful Metaphor

WWYIKM identifies a social dynamic everyone feels at one time or another: being so upset, furious, and enraged you can’t even think. To identify this wretched situation and its various manifestations, Elster and Crowley present a metaphor of extreme utility:

• being hooked

The metaphor of “being hooked” forms the meat of the book. This is the engine around which they build a complex and thorough coping system. The techniques and tools presented by the authors spring forth in bold relief after identifying this phenomena.

Being Hooked

Far and away the most important idea proposed within WWYIKM is the metaphor of “the hook.” This metaphor contains the image of another person actually hooking you with a big fishing hook and dragging you around. When you become “hooked” by someone, it means you’ve dropped your guard and become unhinged. This image tells you you’ve lost control of yourself.

The mere mention of this phenomena of hooking is helpful. It articulates this universal sensation — somebody driving you nuts — in a language which poetically rings true. I am an aficionado of metaphors, and from this nice one stems my effusive admiration for their work. To me, Elster and Crowley’s acts of inventing and presenting this new and powerful metaphor is a huge achievement. Once the metaphor for hooking is available, we can articulate ways to unhook. How do you unhook yourself? WWYIKM presents details of four steps for this:

1. Unhook physically
2. Unhook mentally
3. Unhook verbally
4. Unhook with a business tool

Elster and Crowley are very thorough in explaining the different methods of unhooking from difficult situations. But when situations get really bad and you emotionally go beyond the point where the basic unhooking techniques function, you’ve entered another worse stage of distress — the ledge.

The Ledge

When you repeatedly become hooked by the various hookers in your workplace, you may enter a deeper state of distress which Elster and Crowley call “the Ledge.” (Note: this metaphor isn’t discussed in WWYIKM. I attended a lively book reading they did at a nearby Barnes & Noble during which they prominently mentioned “the ledge” metaphor. This, too, fascinates me.)

The metaphor contains the image where you actually stand on the window ledge of a high building or the ledge of a cliff, ready to commit suicide. What an incredible image! Here’s how it works: An event triggers you to become furious and upset so you cease to function properly and go “on the ledge.” This ledge identifies a state of deep emotional distress where, metaphorically speaking, you become suicidal. Then if you can defuse the difficulty, you may talk yourself “off the ledge” or bring yourself “down from the ledge,” where you return to normal, back to your state of functioning properly.

WWYIKM lays down a well-rounded system for how to prevent being hooked in the first place, what actions you can take when you get hooked, and how to talk yourself off the ledge.

WWYIKM Covers a Broad Area

Elster and Crowley’s book covers an incredible expanse of territory. It highlights the importance of boundaries. It discusses how we define them and how to use them as protection at work. Also discussed are critical descriptions of the various difficult types of people, or archetypes. In this area, Elster and Crowley are very thorough and present a complete round-up of the different difficult characters you’ll encounter on your travels.

Of particular importance in WWYIKM are the interpersonal zones of difficulty. When dealing with difficult people, you’ll undoubtedly encounter a complex fogbank of issues. To clarify and organize these issues, WWYIKM identifies five primary zones:

1. You. These are your personal issues within you. This zone applies to how you assume roles at work and how these roles cast you into positions which cause you difficulty by hooking you.
2. Your Peers. These are issues within your peers which affect you. This zone applies to how others assume roles at work and how your co-workers cast themselves into positions and create difficulties for you. One interesting aspect of this zone is how the power dynamics between you and your peer is symmetrical.
3. Your Boss. This zone applies to the relationship between you and your boss and how its power dynamic is often of striking asymmetry. You could be fired on the spot! Your boss can hook you by assuming a role which causes you an incredible amount of difficulty. This role may tap into your personal issues and feed off the role you assume while at work.
4. Your Employees. This zone applies to the people who work for you and how you relate to them. They are not your peers, they are in positions of power under you, and for whom you play an important and dominant role in their daily lives.
5. Your Company. This zone applies to the overall culture of the business you work in.

Below is a graphic I created to conceptualize the minefield of difficulties which can arise around you. Quite a minefield, these ubiquitous perils, mmm?

The Five Zones of Interpersonal Difficulties
In the Business World

WWYIKM Offers a Coherent Coping System of Extreme Utility

WWIKYM builds upon the interpersonal zones and creates several fascinating systems:

• A set of archetypes for each zone: WWYIKM identifies and explains the details about each archetype.
• A system for how to cope with various difficult archetype at each zone: You might’ve inadvertently assumed one of the archetypes at work, and the authors present a variety of ways how you can defuse the archetypically difficult co-workers.
• A procedure with which to deal with each difficult archetype: (a) Detect, (b) Detach, (c) Depersonalize, (d) Deal.

In short, WWYIKM delivers a complete framework for dealing gracefully with difficult people.

Other Goodies

This book presents several other useful tools. My favorites are two questionnaires presented at the end of the book: the Personal Inventory and Workplace Appraisal questionnaires. These allow you to assess the culture of the company you work for, and they blew my mind. After looking at them closely, they make a lot of sense and are so obvious I’m amazed no one else thought of it before. Another huge achievement.

In Conclusion

When I see them, I look very carefully at books which deal so directly with difficulties, as WWYIKM does. The topic of difficulty is highly competitive and many authors and thinkers have entered the fray, and I have read many books on it. That said, I’d also like to tell you how special this book is.

WWYIK is a work of thought without flaw — a very rare diamond — and I was immediately fascinated with it. I tracked its sales performance on Amazon’s Sales Rank and watched it sell briskly from the very start, and at one point early on, it enjoyed a high rank in Amazon’s business bestsellers section: the mid-fifties — an astonishing performance. Today, depending upon what day of the week you look, WWYIKM sits between the comfortable mid ten-thousands all the way down to the two-hundred thousands. Why it seems to have fallen out of favor remains to me inexplicable.

But allow me to change gears. Think about our technological culture for a moment, and note the myriad of handy doohickeys we use. Sure, we enjoy a smorgasbord of telecommunication technology, but:

• Do we possess technology that keeps us calm ourselves in the face of difficult people? Nope.
• Does telecommunication technology allow new avenues for us unhook or bring us off the ledge? Well, yeah, it does — the telephone, fax, email, VoIP, text messages, and video-conferencing can potentially all be good unhooking tools. But unless you know you actually need to unhook, how could these tools help protect you and what good can they do? Not much.
• I say we suffer from a distinct lack of tools for dealing with difficult people. Does our telecommunication technology resolve this deficiency? Not specifically, no. Does technology complicate it? Yes. It certainly does make dealing with difficult people more complex. The issue at hand here is: these technologies were not explicitly designed to help you unhook, although you can use them for this. I believe technology doesn’t aid us in dealing with difficult people. Generally, it just gets in the way. You have to do it not digitally but analogly.

There is a gaping void in technology for helping us interact with troublemakers; We lack tools to handle difficult people. This is why WWYIKM becomes so important. Elster and Crowley take us a huge step forward by tackling what technology ignores. Their book is as close as I’ve ever seen to a manual on how to handle difficult people. And this book presents a coherent coping system of extreme utility.

BONUS ROUND

A few extra questions occurred to me which I pose to you for intellectual stimulation:

• Is it possible to apply the metaphors of being hooked and Elster and Crowley’s techniques toward entities larger than corporations, i.e. on a cultural level?
• Would they work on specific ethnicities?
• Would they work at the level of nations?
• How would a center for international-affairs benefit from these ideas?

Something to think about anyway.

I have held a few long-term grudges before, and this question interested me, so I decided to give it some thought. What I came up with is an easy system for framing these quirky fixations that afflict us, sometimes a little bit, sometimes a lot. I begin with a rundown of the cast of characters in a grudge situation; then I flesh out the general, all-purpose components of generic grudges; and finally I wind down with some ways you can put your old grudges to bed and, better yet, to good use.

The Cast Members

• The PERPETRATOR. He who causes the grudge.
• The CRIME. The act by the Perpetrator who induces the grudge. The crime may range in severity from petty crime (slights, insults, and misdemeanors) all the way up to larger crime (felonies and man-slaughter). This crime must remain be unpunished for any grudge to form, and it must cause a sense of injustice in the Victim.
• The VICTIM. He who carries the grudge.
• The GRUDGE. The Victim’s reaction to the crime. The grudge appears metaphorically similar to “emotional baggage.” These emotional bags may appear to other people as “personal issues.”

What Ingredients Are Required, Within Victims, for a Grudge to Occur?

In grudge situations, all Victims share the same general ingredients, or characteristics. A Victim must have several key attributes for a grudge to form and be retained over time. The Victim must:

• Have a very good memory of the crime.
• Have a heightened sense of indignation.
• Be energetic.
• Accommodate his grudge within his identity and actively defend it from forces of grudge-erosion.

1. The Victim must have a very good memory of the crime.
Having a good memory of the crime is, bar none, the most important attribute. People lucky enough to possess good memories are ironically the most predisposed to forming grudges.

Along with possessing a good memory of the crime, the Victim must also regularly recall it and its Perpetrator. He must recall them by three methods: by intentionally reminding himself of the crime; by placing triggers that regularly remind him of the crime; or by being around objects or events that trigger memory of the crime.

If a person is forgetful, he is not likely become a Victim. Grudges simply don’t function without the Victim vividly recalling the crime. If the Victim’s recall of the crime becomes infrequent or vague, his grasp upon the grudge weakens, and the grudge withers away. Without visualizing the crime, the Victim forgets why he carried it in the first place. He loosens his grip upon the grudge; he forgets the crime, forgives the Perpetrator, and the grudge drops away. However, possessing a good memory of the crime and recalling frequently isn’t enough…

2. The Victim must have a heightened sense of indignation.
He must be enraged by injustice. This predisposes the Victim to hold grudges. Indignation is critical to the phenomena of grudges: the stronger the indignation, the longer the grudge lasts.

A dynamic exists between a Victim’s indignation and his identity. They are umbilically joined together. So if a crime affects a potential Victim’s identity, a grudge forms and he officially becomes a Victim. The grudge feasts upon the connection between identity and indignation, and it garners lasting strength against indignation by perpetually threatening the Victim’s identity. Whenever this connection is present, it makes it unlikely the indignant person will ever be grudge-free.

Easy-going or passive people never carry grudge or turn into Victims. People with no indignation don’t respond to the Perpetrator’s crime. A grudge is unlikely to form when a crime fails to threaten the Victim’s identity.

A Perpetrator who is well-acquainted with his Victim’s personality may be able to capitalize on this identity-indignation connection and leverage it into a long-lasting grudge. A sophisticated trouble-maker knows what crime will successfully assault his Victim’s identity, and he executes this crime upon his Victim and exacts heavy damage by creating a custom-tailored grudge with a harmful, lasting effect.

In other words, if the Perpetrator knows his Victim has a heightened sense of indignation, he may be able to “really stick it” to this Victim and create a memorable crime of long-term residual power and fuel what may potentially become in the Victim an ancient grudge.

3. The Victim must be energetic.
The sheer mental exertion needed to maintain a grudge requires sustained endurance. The bigger the crime committed by the Perpetrator, the more energy required from the Victim to carry the grudge. The Victim must be energetic enough to “carry” the emotional burden of his grudge. Some people simply don’t have the mental energy to carry grudges long distances through time. Without this energy, the Victim must “let go” of the grudge, which means he loses grip upon his grudge.

A strange dynamic occurs between the severity of the crime and the energy a Victim exerts in maintaining the grudge. Logically, you might think a little grudge would be easy to carry for long periods of time and a big grudges would be harder and more prone to be dropped early on. But this is not the case. The opposite occurs. A Victim easily drops a little grudge, but he fights tooth-and-nail to maintain a serious one. The greater the crime committed, the more the Victim spends energy in defending the grudge and in feeding it.

4. The Victim must accommodate his grudge within his identity and actively defend it from forces of grudge-erosion.
This requires all three core components: a vivid memory, a heightened sense of indignation, and a storehouse of energy. When any of these factors are absent, no lasting grudge forms because the Victim automatically disallows the grudge from entering into his identity.

Our Metaphors For Grudges

We perceive grudges as burdens. This is indicated by our terms “to carry” and “to hold” a grudge, implying this type of emotional material has mass or weight. This is also indicated by our term “to let go” of grudges. The meaning behind the “weight” of grudges is, the heavier it feels, the harder it is to hold onto.

The act of holding a grudge has a distinct quality of burdening, so that carrying a grudge, maintaining it over long periods does not occur automatically. Victims must intentionally maintained their grudges by refueling their fully-functioning and optimized identity-indignation connection. Otherwise, the grudge loses its strength and the grudge-carrier must “let go” of the grudge, which amounts essentially to giving to the Perpetrator full forgiveness for his crime and “letting him get away with it.” At this point, the Victim “gets over it,” meaning the crime and its ensuing grudge transform into an obstacle he has surmounted and he drops the emotional baggage.

Dropping A Grudge

Why Drop A Grudge?

The main reason to drop a grudge is simply to unburden oneself. Grudges can be feel emotionally very dense, and relieving oneself of a grudge can be a cathartic and spiritually uplifting act. We have many words to describe this state of relief, such as buoyant, upbeat, uplifted, better, lightened.

How To Drop A Grudge

In order to successfully drop the grudge, the Victim must…

• Develop the ability to detach from his vivid memories and stop fixating on the crime
• Decouple his sense of indignation from his identity
• Starve the grudge by limiting the energy he expends on it
• Expel the grudge from his identity and allow it to wither away

These steps force the Victim to re-define himself so the grudge is not built-into his identity; this kills the grudge and unburdens the Victim.

The Use Of A Grudge, The Use Of A Pearl

A grudge is often a burden from which we should relieve ourselves, and unburdening yourself of all your grudges is a very good habit. But before you unburden yourself, understand that a grudge can be very useful. It can provide a powerful incentive to work and accomplish goals. Sometimes the process of coping gracefully with a grudge bears incredible fruit.

How Oysters Transform Their Irritants Into Pearls

When talking about profiting from a grudge, we must discuss the oyster for a moment. Oysters evolved an ability to transform their irritants into pearls, known as pearlization. An oyster reacts to an irritant, generally a parasite it cannot purge, by encasing the intruder in a protective material called mother-of-pearl, which incarcerates the parasite and renders it inert, and thereby forms a pearl. A pearl is an imprisoned parasite, and the process of pearlization is the oyster’s coping tool. This is how the oyster copes with irritants. An oyster cannot produce a pearl unless it suffers an irritant, an affliction.

What the irritant is to the oyster, grudges are to human beings. Grudges can initiate the beginning of something beautiful. I mentioned above how to expel a grudge, but the question is: How does a human being pearlize a grudge?

How to Pearlize a Grudge

Grudges are powerful instructors. They are opportunities for a Victim to learn about himself, and it’s important a Victim extracts the lesson contained in a grudge before he purges it from his identity and gets over it. A Victim ought not to waste a painfully juicy grudge by ignoring it, suppressing it, or purging it too early. He needs to relish the grudge for a while, in order to pearlize it. Through this process, a grudge can transform into a difficulty not to be denigrated but celebrated.

So how does a Victim alter his reaction toward his grudge in a healthy direction so that he, like the Oyster, imprisons his irritant and transforms it into a pearl? In order to successfully pearlize a grudge, the Victim must match the oyster. He must…

• Imprison the memory of the crime by emotionally detaching from it, retaining it, and not fixating on it.
• Reverse his sense of indignation by becoming grateful to the Perpetrator for providing the crime and by learning the lesson it brings. This is extremely hard to do because this so deeply threatens the Victim’s identity.
• Reflect on the grudge and be vigilant about applying the lessons it carries. The quicker he applies these lessons, the quicker he pearlizes his grudge into a pearl.
• Wear his pearl proudly as a badge of strength and grace.

IN CONCLUSION, think of difficulties in life as opportunities for meaning and growth. I hope this system gives you a useful set of tools to examine your grudges, enables you to think in a versatile way about the many difficulties that afflict you, and helps you in how you deal with troublesome people.

I wondered about it when my wife told me about a lecture/workshop named exactly this — “Enjoying Difficult People” — to be taught by Dian Killian PhD from Center for Nonviolent Communcation at the 92nd St Y. Naturally, the topic for this class seemed very interesting to me.

Well, I checked it out and found that it was interesting. The length of the class was only two hours, and consequently Dr. Killian could only touch upon the innermost core ideas of her topic, which in general were about non-violent communication, but she had several specific techniques for every-day communication that she wanted to impart upon us.

I would summarize these techniques as this: When you find yourself with a difficult person, it is possible for you to enjoy your experience, however you must be curious about several things — about yourself, this person, and how you react to the difficult situation.

She said you must do three things:

1. Identify the sensation that indicates you are, in fact, in the presence of a difficult person. What is actually happening? What, for example, would be the facts and actions that a hand-held video camcorder would record in this situation? I noted that possessing the ability to think in terms of these sensations would require a great deal presence and clarity from you; furthermore, I would uncategorically characterize such a mental attribute as being not at all common to possess.
2. Identify your feelings about this sensation. In other words: How do you respond to these sensations while interacting with a difficult person?
3. Identify your needs, or, identify what you seek within this situation. The instructor stressed that you must: (a) Connect with this difficult person, even if you don’t want to, by acknowledging their experience of their predicament and (b) Request that they articulate precisely what they wish to achieve, in the form of a “concret, positive and doable request.”

These three acts of identification will force you to reframe your experience of difficult people, to the point where it is possible for you to actually enjoy them while you learn about yourself.

Two final points then come to the fore. First is: Every difficult person is actually a disguised opportunity to learn about yourself. The second corresponding issue then springs forth from the first: You must be willing to learn about yourself and enjoy difficult people for the lessons they bring you. Are you? I think, for most people, this is the greater difficulty. It is the clincher.

I would add that Dr. Killian’s interesting system pre-requires that you not be solely goal-oriented in your interaction with difficult people. Her system implies that you also must be journey-oriented. Goal-orientation is a mindset whose central motive springs out of the preoccupation to “get things done,” which is generally a good mindset to occupy but which makes difficult people impossible to actually enjoy. When you alter your mindset into include journey-oriented tendencies, you alleviate your instinct to ruthlessly plow through people and leap over potentially meaningful obstacles, and you gain the possibility to actually enjoy difficult people and the lessons they offer you.