How to Deal with Negative People

A reader asks:

How do I deal with extremely negative people? I’m often forced to be around a couple family members who are constantly complaining and playing the victim. Not only is it exhausting, but it’s really taking a toll on me and making it harder for me to be present and loving in my other relationships.

First of all, be careful with that phrase negative people. I’ll use that term here since it’s how the reader phrased the question, but it’s worth thinking carefully about the language we use to describe other people. My own hunch is that while some people do act in negative ways much of the time, to define them in terms of those negative behaviors is probably counterproductive in the long-run.

That said, I think we can all relate to the reader’s dilemma of what to do about negative or difficult people we can’t simply avoid outright.

Here are a few thoughts….

1. Avoid Reinforcing Negative Behavior

While it might be tough to hear, it’s important to acknowledge that you could be contributing to their negativity and its effect on you. And if that’s true, learning to identify and eliminate this is often some of the lowest hanging fruit when it comes to dealing with negative people.

For example:

I had a client once—we’ll call him Jake—with a sister who called him 3-4 times per week to vent and complain about their mother.
Initially, Jake got into the habit of taking his sister’s calls out of sympathy and wanting to be supportive.But over time he realized that continuing to take her calls was in fact reinforcing her complaining.
This was not only stressful for him but also rewarded, and therefore perpetuated, his sister’s complaining behavior.
Of course, at this point it was hard for Jake to stop taking his sister’s calls because he had established a pattern of behavior between them which both people came to expect.
Plus, anytime he tried to not take her calls he felt tremendously guilty—a state that wasn’t helped by his sister’s tendency to criticize him for not being loving enough anytime he didn’t take her calls.

Ultimately, Jake did manage to implement better boundaries with his sister. And as a result, feel much less stressed out.

But the key was that he had to be willing to accept that he would feel bad implementing these boundaries. And that these bad feelings—guilt, sadness, frustration, anxiety—were not actually bad things or a sign that he was doing something wrong despite how they felt.

In other words, Jake had to internalize a key belief at the heart of all emotional health:

Just because an emotion feels bad doesn’t mean it is bad, or that you’re bad for feeling it.

Now, you might be saying to yourself:

Okay that makes sense. But how do you develop this belief that it’s okay to do things like setting boundaries even though they lead to all sorts of difficult emotions—for me and other people?

The trick is that beliefs are based on behavior, not thinking.

You can tell yourself it’s okay to feel guilty for setting a boundary until you’re blue in the face. But nothing’s going to actually change until you repeatedly demonstrate to yourself through your actions that you can do it.

Jake didn’t start to feel confident setting boundaries with his sister until he had set and enforced boundaries with her dozens of times.

How you feel and what you believe are downstream of your behavior.

So, if you have a hyper-negative person in your life, you need to figure out how you may be reinforcing some of their negative behavior and avoid doing that. And like many challenging things in life it’s not the thing itself that’s hard so much as being willing to tolerate the difficult emotions that come with it.

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2. Lower Your Expectations

One of the hardest parts about dealing with negative people is your own expectation that they won’t be so negative in the future.

See, surprise is an emotional amplifier:

If you expect something to be anxiety-producing, you will feel anxious. But if you’re surprised by something that’s anxiety-producing, you feel much more anxious.
If you expect something to make you feel sad, you will probably feel sad. But if you are surprised by something that leads to sadness, you’re likely to feel much more sad.

So, if you expect someone to be a little less negative, but then they end up being just as negative (or maybe even more negative) than they usually are, your emotional response to them is going to be more intense than it needs to be.

A couple of examples:

Your father who’s normally quite callous and unemotional has just lost his brother to cancer. You expect that this loss will make him a bit more emotionally available and sensitive. In reality, he ends up being even more closed off and insensitive. So the next time you spend time with him, you’re not only frustrated by his insensitivity but also disappointed that he hasn’t changed like you expected him to.
One of your coworkers who’s normally very pessimistic and always worrying about the worst-case scenario gets a huge promotion and raise. You expect that this promotion will make him at least a little bit less negative all the time. In reality, he is now more stressed than ever which amplifies his negativity. And from your end, you continue to get stressed and anxious in response to his anxiety, but now it’s amplified by the surprise of things going the opposite of how you expected them to.
Your spouse is normally very critical, always pointing out flaws and mistakes in you and others. But she just started therapy and you expect that she will be a little different now. Turns out, she spends most of her time in therapy criticizing and complaining about people in her life, which leads to her to being even more critical of you and everyone else. So now, in addition to feeling sad and hurt when she criticizes you, you also feel frustrated and disappointed.

There are two main things you should take away from these examples:

Everybody has unrealistic expectations whether you realize it or not. So if you struggle with a negative person in your life, best to assume that you do have some unrealistic expectations even if they’re not obvious at first.
Your expectations are compounding your emotional struggles. Dealing with negative people is hard enough without that second layer of surprise, disappointment, or even outrage that comes from expecting them to be different only to have things stay exactly the same—or even get worse.

At this point, people always say something like:

Okay, I get that my expectations are unrealistic and not helping anybody. But they keep happening! Why is it so hard to drop these unrealistic expectations?

Like any bad habit, maintaining unrealistic expectations of people is hard to break because we’re getting something out of it.

If you really do want to lower your expectations of people, you must identify what you’re getting out of it and figure out a better way to get that need met.

For example:

If you have expectations of your parent learning to be more loving and emotionally available, what you might be getting out of that is the brief joy that comes with imagining the possibility of your family dynamic being what you always wanted it to be. Consequently, if you want to drop this expectation, you might need to work on cultivating other joy-giving relationships so that you don’t need it from your family of origin as much.
Or let’s say you have an expectation that your spouse will overcome their tendency to play the victim and always blame everyone else for their problems. This expectation might be serving the function of briefly inflating your mood by making you feel like a victim of his victim-seeking!

The more general pattern is simply this:

Being constantly disappointed in people is an ego boost for you because other people always being in the wrong makes you constantly feel in the right.

So ultimately, the trick to genuinely letting go of unrealistic expectations of people is to find better ways to generate self-esteem and confidence. Because the more confident and secure you are with yourself, the less you’ll need unrealistic expectations of others to fill your emotional needs.

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3. Stop Giving Them Brainspace

When I work with clients on this dilemma—trying to deal with a negative person in their life—I’m often surprised by how much time they spend thinking about this person outside of real interactions with them.

For example:

The husband with a hypercritical wife who spends half our sessions complaining about her and her constant negativity.
The parent with a chronically ungrateful adult child who spends hours each day dwelling on why they’re like this and what they should have done differently when they were young.
The woman who gossips about her responsibility-shirking boyfriend every time she gets together with friends.
The employee who’s habitually imagining all the future problems their cranky and constantly irritable manager is going to heap on them.

Look, a little complaining is a perfectly normal thing and something all of us do from time to time. Similarly, we all worry, ruminate, or vent here and there.

But if you’re spending significant amounts of time and energy thinking about this negative person in addition to your inevitable interactions with them, that’s on you. And one way or another, if you want to be less stressed out and affected by them, you need to take responsibility for your own mental habits.

If you allow negative people to live in your head, don’t be surprised if your head feels like a negative place.

If this describes you, the first thing to do—as usual—is to get every honest with yourself about the extent of the problem…

Do you chronically worry about this person and what they might think, feel, or do?
Do you habitually ruminate on them, their interactions with you, and what you wish was different?
Or maybe you are in the habit of regularly criticizing yourself for your interactions (or lack thereof) with them?

Regardless of what other people say or do, you alone are responsible for your attention and how you choose to invest it.

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4. Spend More Time Around People You Enjoy

Interestingly, most of us approach the problem of how to deal with negative people in a fundamentally negative way.

For example, the first three suggestions I made in this article are fundamentally negative in that they’re about doing less of something…

Not reinforcing their negative behavior
Lowering unrealistic expectations
Reducing unhelpful mental habits

But you can also approach this problem from a more fundamentally positive angle. Instead of asking what can I do less of or try to eliminate, you might ask: What can I do more of or try to add?

I think there are a lot of interesting approaches that come out of this perspective shift. And one of my favorites is so obvious it’s easy to miss:

You could make an effort to spend more time around positive people.

Even if you can’t reduce the frequency or quality of your interactions with negative people in your life, you can positively impact how you feel overall by increasing your interactions with positive people in your life.

For example:

You could be more disciplined about calling your best friend who lives out of state at least once a month.
You could sit with different people at lunch and try to make new friends.
You could start participating in an online community based around one of your interests or hobbies.
You could schedule more frequent date nights with your spouse.
You could go on more outings with your young children.
You could even spend more time with yourself: Journaling, meditating, or just allowing yourself to be solitary more often.

Many of us are problem-solvers at heart, which more often than not means we start with the assumption that when faced with a problem, we need to address the problem.

But when there’s not much you can actually do about the problem itself, sometimes the optimal strategy is to stop problem-solving altogether, and instead, make more time to do what you love, including spending more time with people you enjoy.

Next Steps

If you’re interested in learning more about how to improve your relationships, here are a few resources you might find helpful: