Each inhabitant of the planet, as a social being, performs many of his actions with an eye on other members of the society where he lives: whether it will harm them or cause them discontent. Some carry out such verification of public opinion only from time to time, others are not able to fully exist without the approval of others. For them, the urgent problem is how not to pay attention to people who broadcast exclusively discontent and negativity, subject every action to merciless criticism or amaze with their own stupidity, but do not get tired of intruding on it. Following some advice from psychologists will help correct the situation.
How to ignore people's opinions: increasing self-esteem
Difficulty learning to ignore people usually results from low self-esteem. Why it is underestimated is the second question. Often this style of behavior and inadequate assessment of one’s own personality stems from childhood. Significant adults sometimes, when raising a young member of society, do not even notice that they are breaking him, humiliating his personal dignity, convincing him that they are of no value. If this happens for years, and the child’s character is not very strong a priori, serious psychological complexes develop on the basis of such negativity. To eradicate them, you will have to work on increasing your self-esteem. Auto-training will help here, analyzing your own talents and strengths, developing them and applying them in practice.
When is it unacceptable to ignore another person?
Avoiding other people will be unacceptable if it is based on our incompetence to negotiate a compromise. And we don't know how to come to an agreement that will solve or at least minimize our problems. There is also the so-called tactical ignoring. This is when we, for example, ignore a child who shows his anger, resentment or disappointment. Thus, we actually deny the problem of incompetence in raising children, and postpone its solution.
Ignoring people or a person will also be unacceptable when it is a result of our insensitivity to the feelings of others. Obvious rudeness is absolutely unacceptable in this case. When we ignore someone with the intention of humiliating and hurting them, we only invite contempt and disrespect. No well-mannered person would do this. By ignoring another person, we can provoke the following reactions:
- Discontent and anger;
- Hatred;
- Contempt;
- Disloyal behavior;
- Deception.
But is it completely wrong to ignore people? In this case, it must be said that ignoring people is not always something bad. After all, it often happens that in order to avoid conflict, we are often forced to ignore a specific person or group of people. By ignoring them, we can view our action as a desire to behave with dignity and maintain a sober mind. And there's nothing wrong with that.
How to ignore negative people: setting psychological boundaries
Often those who are overly dependent on public evaluation simply have their psychological boundaries violated. They unwittingly give others the right to criticize every aspect of their own lives, even personal preferences. A person who pays attention to little things of this kind runs a great risk of losing his own individuality, becoming a shadow of public opinion. First, he needs to ask Chatsky’s question: who is judging him? Are they really perfect beings without flaws? It is necessary to decide who and to what extent he is ready to let him in. Suppress any attempts by outsiders to speak out on issues that should not concern them because they are too personal.
Where do the fear of condemnation and dependence on other people's opinions come from?
Photo: Thư Anh/Unsplash
There are many reasons that make people depend on other people's opinions. And at the heart of each is the fear of losing something:
• Lose youth; • Lose your social status; • Be left without money; • Lose control; • Part with comfort; • Die.
Many people are afraid of being rejected. This is fear at the genetic level: our primitive ancestors always stuck together in tribes to survive. Therefore, rejection by the tribe is a subconscious fear of death.
How to ignore unpleasant people: knowing yourself and cutting off unconstructive judgments
To eliminate dependence on other people's assessments, you will have to thoroughly work on yourself. First you need to learn to separate the personal from the externally imposed. You will have to analyze what your own desires are, what your soul strives for. Make a plan to achieve such goals. Cut off those aspirations that manifest themselves due to the demands of parents or others around them and contradict personal needs. When wondering how you can not pay attention to a person who is condemning, you need to clearly understand: strangers in such statements are not always motivated by goodwill. Some are guided by envy, a desire to humiliate. If someone is being negative simply out of a desire to criticize, it makes sense to ignore his words.
How to learn to ignore friends?
It may also happen that you want to ignore old friends. In this case, we advise you to talk confidentially. Maybe they found themselves in a difficult situation? It is likely that you will understand each other, and the relationship will become the same.
Unfortunately, this is not always the case. If you find yourself in the middle of a real conflict, which has the only way out - ignoring, directly tell your former friends about it.
Remember: you must be straightforward but polite. Do not be ironic, be serious, so that your words are not taken as ridicule or a childish whim.
There is no need to expect that your former friends will immediately agree with you and you will part ways peacefully. You will probably need a lot of patience to completely eliminate these people from your life. Don't answer their calls or messages. Do they write offensive things to you? Don't give in. Otherwise, you will not get rid of tension, but will increase it. If this doesn't work, say you will complain to the appropriate authorities. Let people who are unpleasant to you understand that you are determined.
Try to discuss the situation only with loved ones. By attracting strangers, you risk becoming the center of an entire epic. Answer questions concisely, and gradually they will disappear.
Ignoring people is an extreme measure. Let it be expressed not only by words, but also by actions, therefore:
- Avoid potential meeting places (for example, a bus stop where you have often seen each other before, or a favorite cafe). If you do collide, limit yourself to nodding your head. Stop and ask “How are you?” will be redundant. We also do not recommend turning away if you have already been seen. Behave calmly and respectably.
- Ask mutual friends not to invite you to the same events (except for a large event like a graduation or wedding, when you don't have to talk to every one of three hundred people).
- think about what else unites you, and protect yourself as much as possible from unnecessary communication.
Keep in mind that it is equally important to expel people who are unpleasant to you from your own head. This is not easy if they previously played a significant role in your life. In order not to be distracted by memories, keep yourself busy, not with routine, but with something interesting. Buy a book of poems that you’ve been wanting to read for a long time, try cooking a new dish, go to the zoo. New impressions will not take long to arrive!
It has been observed that cleansing the mind, sometimes in a surprising way, transforms an unpleasant situation or removes a person from your life, or relationships improve naturally.
How to ignore stupid people: lack of touchiness
Anyone who is offended by someone else's criticism only makes things worse for themselves. This does not bring negative feelings to the offenders, and some of them - with troll tendencies - will rejoice at the deterioration of the mood of the one on whom the emotional slop was poured. There are several options for productive actions on how to ignore a harmful person:
- Ignoring, reducing contacts with unpleasant individuals to a minimum.
- Communicate with those who are unpleasant solely on issues that cannot be avoided, preventing them from getting personal.
- Reluctance to get into arguments, especially with narrow-minded individuals. Here the advice of the great Mark Twain comes in handy: you shouldn’t argue with an idiot, because then you end up on his territory, and there he will crush you with his own experience.
- Internal readiness for the unfavorable consequences of some of your actions, because only those who are inactive do not make mistakes.
- Lack of regular recall of other people's unconstructive statements. This does not mean that a person has stopped paying attention to himself and his own shortcomings. Only constructive criticism should be taken into account.
Work on yourself
Stop insults
Resentment is unexpressed anger that is stopped for some reason. Accordingly, it turns out that when we take offense, we punish not the one who offended, but ourselves. Because we keep this destructive energy inside.
We also “fall” into the position of victim. If exaggerated, it looks like this: “I’m so unhappy, they treated me unfairly and now I feel bad.” Then the offender must either make amends, or someone else must take on the role of a defender and seek justice, reconcile, and so on.
So, fight the grievances. If you are used to reacting this way, then understand that you are only harming your emotional state and health. If they are trying to manipulate you in this way, clarify what exactly hurt him and what to do about it now. You will receive more detailed information on what to do by clicking on this link.
Mindfulness
If you actively “engage” with a negative person, that is, you react to his words, actions, etc. Then try to think about why he attracts you so much. Once you realize the reasons, it is likely that you will stop feeling so many emotions towards him.
For example, at work, a colleague constantly looks unhappy, which irritates you beyond words. So much so that it sometimes spoils the mood for the whole day. If you ask yourself, “Why am I reacting this way?” or “What exactly causes anger in his behavior,” then you can understand that he simply resembles one of your relatives who is completely unpleasant to you.
Or that there is simply sadness inside about, say, the loss of a loved one, but it is repressed and denied. Why do you also want to avoid sad and unhappy people?
In general, think at your leisure, look for the root cause of such reactions, even to insults.
Because if a person considers his appearance attractive, the word “freak” will not cut the ground from under his feet. Yes, it will make you angry, but not so much as to lower your self-esteem or ruin your mood for several days.
If you are surrounded by a large number of negative individuals, take time to think about why this happened. Why do you choose them, attract them into your life. Believe me, nothing usually happens for nothing.
Refusal
Learn to refuse if you really don’t want to fulfill a request. When a person is put under pressure and he gives up, this means that the manipulator managed to find a weak point, which he will now use for his own purposes.
When you are truly ready to help, even to sacrifice something, that’s one thing. But when you have to act from completely different motives and emotions, it’s a bad thing. For example, the favorite method of those who like to use people for their own purposes is to press for pity, to try to induce feelings of guilt and even shame.
If you succumb to the tricks of a manipulator, it will be very difficult to get rid of negativity. Therefore, arm yourself with the recommendations from this article and declare a fight against such treatment of you.
Adoption
Perhaps this will support you in a difficult moment, but a happy person does not need to hurt the people around him. And he certainly won’t be happy if he realizes that he has harmed someone. Only deeply unhappy individuals do this; in this way they compensate for their unfulfilled desires.
Therefore, before you get traumatized by such people and their statements, think about the fact that it’s not about you, but about them. You simply turned out to be a “victim of circumstances.”
There is a defense mechanism of the psyche called projection. It consists in the fact that we attribute to the people around us and to reality in general those qualities and characteristics that we reject in ourselves. Let’s say if I have accumulated a lot of anger that I have not been able to notice or realize, I will consider my interlocutor to be a fairly aggressive person. And interpret his words, intonation, and gestures as hostile.
So, the attacks of another towards you may simply be his projection, which is why it is so important not to take accusations or insults to heart. And also be attentive to your own feelings. Is he really as negative as you think?
How to ignore people’s rudeness: humor can help
It is not easy to resist the outright rudeness of strangers. Well-mannered individuals sometimes fall into a stupor from this. Some people have a desire to reciprocate in kind, speaking no less rudely in response. Such actions should not be allowed, because this is precisely what the boor often achieves, trying to unbalance the other and then point out his imperfections.
It makes sense to use such experience to strengthen your own character and cultivate strong-willed qualities. We should treat other people’s negativity in much the same way that people paid attention to mold—the history of the invention of antibiotics that saved many lives. In other words, try to extract something useful for yourself from negative situations. Since it is still necessary to fight back against a boor, it is advisable to use directness and humor for such purposes. A clear example of this is a situation that arose in public transport for one resourceful woman. She was sent along a route known to many by a drunken citizen. She replied that she was there more often than this character - sober.
Back Next
Remember, conflicts cannot solve all problems.
Of course, in some situations you have to be tough and firm. But often retaliating with anger can make the situation worse. Therefore, try to less often respond to anger with anger. Reciprocal irritation only aggravates the conflict, heats up emotions, preventing the other side from admitting that they are wrong. In such circumstances, rational arguments are drowned in emotions, each side remains stuck with its own, and the problem does not receive any solution.
The accumulated tension leads all parties to the conflict into a state of mutual indignation. People stop being focused on solving the problem. Their attention is directed only to their emotions.
Therefore, try not to aggravate initially difficult situations, do not bring emotions to the limit, because this is not an option.
Often a smile and kindness can do much more than harsh words. This can lead to easing tensions and resolving the conflict. Use these peaceful weapons to get out of difficult situations and you will see for yourself their effectiveness!
Why do some people annoy us?
People can be annoying for various reasons: you envy them, they are unfair to you, or their appearance does not fit into the environment around you. Someone speaks too loudly, and others are constantly asked again. There could be a million reasons. It’s not a fact that you yourself are fair to them, but you just want them to unhook you and leave you alone. However, there are people who deliberately “harass” you. These are called energy vampires. Consciously or not, they “coward” you like a pear, feeding on your energy of irritation. In this case, you will definitely feel tired and empty. It’s not for nothing that they say about such people that they “drink blood.” In essence, this is exactly what it is, a vampire takes away part of your vitality.
Have an honest conversation with your colleague
If the irritant is bad habits, then you should tell your colleague about them. You can offer your own options for eliminating them. The main thing is not to keep feelings to yourself and learn to tolerantly voice what you don’t like.
It happens that such aspirations of colleagues irritate:
- get a promotion;
- get a salary increase;
- become the manager of a large project;
- be appointed head of department, etc.
This is a manifestation of ordinary envy. It is important to recognize that your colleague is truly a professional in his field and deserves a promotion. It is necessary to think about what the envious person lacks to achieve such a goal. You need to analyze the character traits and qualities of your ambitious colleague and try to develop them in yourself. If the person is lazy, offer the boss to pay a salary based on performance. This can motivate a colleague. And also the director will know who to monitor, and if the employee does not cope with his duties, he will be fired. This is a great opportunity to express yourself and show your high professionalism.
A colleague's desire to earn more can cause envy
Completion
And finally, I would like to recommend an article on how to emerge victorious from a conflict situation. If the irreparable has happened and it was not possible to anticipate the scandal, then at least try to solve it in a constructive way.
In order to defend your boundaries and maintain relationships with your interlocutor, especially if they are related and close.
Good luck and achievements to you!
The material was prepared by psychologist, Gestalt therapist, Alina Zhuravina
Source: Qvilon.ru
