You know how every now and then you come across a person who just rubs you the wrong way? Somehow, everything they do really bugs the heck out of you, and you really WANT to call them out constantly? There are perfectly innocent explanations for what they do and they aren’t attacking you specifically but DANG they offend you.
First question: any general insights about why this happens? Do you think it’s a pervasive personality things, or more likely to be a “perfect storm” of certain personal situations at the time of contact? Is it possible to irritate someone so much and not, in some part of yourself, know that you’re doing it?
Second question: how on earth do you manage to stop being so irritated with someone, if you can’t or don’t want to get away from the environment they’re in?
(Okay, this thread is an admission of total Zen failure on my part!)
Yes. I know someone who has rubbed me the wrong way since the very first time I met him. He has never said or done anything negative to me, but I just can’t stand being near him. It’s not his attitude or voice or smell or mannerisms; it’s nothing in particular . . . just everything.
I recently discovered that everyone feels the same way about him.
Ooh, this happens to me but only with folks that I’m really close to. I don’t know why I get in the mode of everything they do bothering me so and it’s almost impossible to get out of. As to getting out of it, I try really hard to be extra nice to them when I’m feeling like this so that I can force my opinion to change. I’m not always successful and it takes a while, but eventually I get back on the right side of things.
Many people find those with Borderline Personality Disorder totally cringe worthy, even if the person doesn’t do anything in particular to them.
Those with Hysteronic Personality Disorder can be pretty tough to take as well.
Also, many people find those with Antisocial Personality Disorder or actual psychopaths to be quite creepy and unpleasant to be around.
So, perhaps your nemesis has one of these things going on, or perhaps they just rub you the wrong way. You should probably just accept it and avoid them as much as you reasonably can, 'cus they’re not likely to quit bugging you.
In my experience it usually has to do with the other person’s sense of humor. They’ll either poke a little too much fun at someone (not necessarily me) to where it becomes borderline antagonistic or mean. Or they are just always saying something negative about something else. Just negative negative negative.
If I can’t get away from them I just tune them out. Let my subconscious listen for keywords that signal me to start paying attention to something they’re saying because they might actually have something to contribute.
I don’t often run into people I dislike, especially not for no apparent reason, but it happens. There’s a woman in one of my classes who rubs me the wrong way. She’s never been anything but nice to me, but I’ve seen one too many catty expressions on her face when someone makes a comment in class. If there’s one thing I can’t stand it’s people being obviously patronizing to other people and thinking they are cleverly disguising it. Those little stolen glances of disdain. It always reminds me of insecure highschool bullshit and I want to slap those stupid little looks off their faces.
I just don’t like her, and one reason this bothers me is because a) she’s Latina and b) she’s a lesbian and I’m heavily concerned with the plight of both Latinos and gays in this country. So in addition to feeling general guilt for not liking her for no apparent reason, I feel also like I’m missing a learning opportunity or betraying the cause, or something.
Yes, it’s totally irrational. Both my dislike and my guilt. That’s human nature I guess. I deal with it by not getting carried away with thinking about it when she does something to piss me off. And I don’t treat her any differently because a part of me wonders if maybe I just misinterpreted her behavior.
The gist of it is that people that rub you the wrong way are your “allergy”. They have in abundance a trait that is the negative opposite of a core quality of you.
That’s a very interesting read, Maastricht. It hits things on the nose. I can, indeed, think of an “allergy” that’s at the root of my dislike for these people.
One of them is a strictly moral Catholic, to the point of being schoolmarmish… I’m the opposite. I like men. A lot.
One of them thinks everything has to be obtained through lots of hard work and suffering and lots of TALKING about the hard work and suffering… I’ve generally been content with what comes easy.
Yet another wants to automatically assume a lot of responsibility and authority that she doesn’t deserve… and I’m her far more qualified superior at work. Who she refuses to respect. Grrrrrrrr.
The last wants a boyfriend so badly, she scares men away. The ones that hang out with me. Whoops.
What gets me about these people is how much they all like to talk about how they don’t talk much about these qualities in themselves. Hee hee. Jane Austen would enjoy it.
Freud and some other psychodynamic theorists might say that particular qualities in another person that annoy/irritate us (but not other people) are attributes we find unacceptable in our own makeup or are ones we secretly envy.
And thre you have hit the problem with Freud on the head; such a broad theory “explains” everything, but predicts nothing. X may happen, but the opposite of X may happen as well, as it is somehow the same as X. Or not. Anyway, our hour is up and we can talk about it in our next session. Please pay on your way out.
The core quality theory at least has the advantage that it is A more specific and B more helpful as it leads the focus away from the annoying person, whom we can’t change anyway, to ourselves.
That applies to about 10 - 25% of people for me. I normally just avoid them. However, I recently started a job as a Senior Consultant to a pharmaceutical manufacturing plant and the person they gave to train me really, really rubbed me the wrong way to the point that I didn’t even want to go to work after the second day.
He is extremely knowledgeable but, as far as I can tell, he has Asperger Syndrome or something similar and can’t read social cues. He literally stood over my shoulder inches away from my face and raised his voice and used bad and aggressive language every time I did something he didn’t approve of with the plant systems even if it was correct but not the way that he would have done it. A lot of it was just incredibly simple things like different ways to start a program.
I got fed up really fast and just wrote a harsh e-mail to a vice-president of the consulting company. He did a good job of giving me advice and telling him the real way to do training. It seems to work although I can’t change his core personality but he got bitched out royally for it. I have never done that before to anyone.
However, if you ever work in retail in any capacity, you will soon find out that a significant percentage of the population is basically insane. I haven’t worked those jobs since college but there are a lot of crazy and belligerent people out there. I have no idea what they do to their family but it can’t be good.
If you find Freud to be a reputable source for anything whatsoever, then I will add you to that type of list as well. It is shameful that he is still referenced in any textbooks at all and I say that having a degree in psychology/behavioral neuroscience and Ph.D work in the same. Freud is the most referenced complete crackpot ever. If they had a Nobel prize for ‘Making Shit Up’, he would have won every single year that he practiced.
I’m just giving an alternative way of thinking about the problem that may be instructive, not necessarily definitive.
I find it helpful to me. I have a BIL that drives me crazy with his fawning behavior over his only child. He waxes on and on about the time he devotes to his child and seemingly is directing his long pointy finger at me for not committing the same amount of effort with my two children, even though I’m am involved in their lives. I feel guilty when I’m around him for no good reason.
Nobody else in the family feels the same way I do as far as I know.
I have an acquaintance who drives me nuts. The only topic that interests him is himself and his views. He doesn’t seem to be interested in other people except as subjects for his conversations. (He also smacks his lips when he eats)
There are very few folks that drive me batty, but he even pushes me toward anger.
One kid in high school, a couple of years younger than me, completely set me off just by my looking at him. I didn’t know him at all. I would mercilessly disdain him to my confidants (though I’m not aware I ever did anything outwardly visible that he might notice). Now, decades later, it turns out he’s in the same technical field that I am, but went much further than I ever did, and by reports is the happy and likeable fellow, free of regrets, that I wish I was.
These days I think it mostly happens with people who are polar opposites in some kind of multidimensional way, like Myers-Briggs profiles. And yet some polar opposites are, instead, irresistably fascinating to me, like the fish in “Nine and a Half Weeks” that the artist has become absorbed in examining.
I find that the older I get the less often this happens, and I vary between knowing nobody like this and occasionally being aware of just one person like this.
Freud was a genius and pioneer in the field of philosophy. His philosophy shaped the development of psychology to its detriment for decades. I cannot deny his powerful influence nor the harm that his ideas have perpetuated on the mentally ill for the past century (obviously I don’t think it was intentional on his part. He was a revolutionary philosopher who no doubt thought he was helping people.)
Just because too many people in the field of psychology still buy Freud’s bullshit doesn’t mean it’s true. The psycho-dynamic theorists are finally taking heat because most of them refuse to join the party that real psychologists call ‘‘gathering and analyzing scientific data.’’ Psycho-dynamic theorists want to call it an ideological conflict, I call it an empirical one. There have been very few randomized controlled trials that study the effects of psychodynamic theory on psychological disorders–those that have, show that pscyhodynamic therapy works about as well as placebo. Why are so many people continuing to practice something that has no scientific validity?
