Complicated people or the art of making the simple difficult

There are people like that, complicated and demanding, of the who have a problem for every solution, a contradiction for every evidence and a storm for every moment of calm. They are petulant and thieves of internal peace, complex personalities who love arguments, which exhaust, weaken and that we must learn to manage to preserve our mental and emotional integrity.

Many of us would love to be able to take these types of profiles to our “spam” tray, to a parallel dimension where our closest reality would remain safe and intact. However, if there is something that we all know, it is that whether in our family, in our work environment or even in our group of friends, There is never a shortage of this type of complex people with whom we are -almost- forced to live.

Confucius said in his texts that There are people who seem to find some kind of reward by finding fault in others.. This can be very disabling if the person who practices this practice is our partner, or a father or mother with their children.

In this way, the “complicated” personality, understood as one that shows erratic, unequal, narcissistic, manipulative, and sometimes even psychologically aggressive behavior, contains nuances that need to be known in depth.

The art of make the simple difficult hides a labyrinth of emotional problems that will be very useful for us to discover.

Complicated people or the ability to see the world from a negative perspective

We are all complicated in our own way. Each of us has those particular threads lodged in our minds and hearts, where fears and insecurities, frustrations and anxieties mix.

However, the main difference with respect to those other profiles that live on the more extreme side of complexity is the inability to establish functional, respectful and stable social and emotional relationships.

The most obvious feature of these people is that They present clear emotional instability. Something like this undoubtedly warns us of a series of underlying problems that explain that rigidity, that inflexibility and constant inclination to look for other people’s faults, to make things obvious, to make what is difficult easy and take root in the subsoil of negativity.

Complicated people, and this is important to keep in mind, may suffer from some dysthymia. (a chronic depressive mood disorder) or even some type of personality disorder that undoubtedly makes it difficult to have daily and meaningful dealings with the people who make up your immediate environment.

Other times, and Daniel Goleman talks about this in his book “Emotional Intelligence”, when we go through situations of high and continuous stress over time, we stop thinking clearly, we are not able to see priorities and we have a “natural tendency” to see things much more complicated than they really are.

With all this we mean something as simple as it is obvious: difficult and complicated people, those with whom we sometimes find it so difficult to live with, They may hide some type of underlying problem that explains that pattern of behavior. Sometimes, they are men or women who need help.

On the other hand, We ourselves can also, at a given moment, live with that dark cloud in our heads.where life, at moments, is not tremendously complicated, like a puzzle with pieces missing, like a Tetris game that is impossible to solve.

Intrapersonal and Interpersonal Intelligence

According to Howard Gardner, there is not only one intelligence, but there are several. He is the father of Theory of multiple intelligences. Two of these intelligences are Intrapersonal and Interpersonal.

The first, in summary, refers to the ability we have to go deeper into ourselves, to know our emotions, feelings. To know who we are and where we are going. The second, Interpersonal Intelligence, is the same but in reverse, that is, know the status of othersunderstand their emotions and be empathetic and assertive with our environment.

From this theory, it would not be unreasonable to affirm that complicated people they would need to develop these two types of intelligence. Why both? To know themselves and in this way know others. Both intelligences feed off each other.

According to this theory, we all have different intelligences, we just develop some more than others. Even so, all of them can be enhanced, so difficult people have an interesting path ahead of them to begin to see life in a simpler way.

Smart tactics for dealing with difficult people

In view of the above, we are already clear that first of all it is advisable to be sensitive to these behaviors and understand that complicated people may be going through a delicate personal moment.

However, and on the other hand, also There are those who have chronicled their manias, their narcissistic tricks and that hidden desire to make life difficult for others.

If this is the case, if there is a profile near us with these same characteristics, the first thing we must be clear about is the following: We cannot change their way of being, but we can change the way we interact with them so that their actions affect us less.. We explain how.

5 keys to maintaining control with complicated profiles

The most obvious recommendation is the following: establish distance. Now, we are not just referring to “physical distance.” – which as we already know is not always possible- We refer to the need to establish psychological and emotional barriers. A complex challenge that we can achieve with these keys:

We must always communicate assertively.Make it clear how you feel every time the difficult person does or says something that affects you, hurts you, or bothers you. We must put on the table what the effects of his actions are. We must detail what he cannot do, what should not be repeated. At the same timeit is advisable to offer alternatives to your actions so that you take them into account. For example: next time it would be nice if you didn’t just focus on my mistakes. If you provided solutions or proposals instead of criticism, everything would be better. I know you can do it and I trust it. Finally, it is also very wise to always remain calm and understand that losing your nerve will make the situation more tense. The ideal is to build a distance barrier, a safety space.

To conclude, there are people with a natural tendency to complicate themselves and the lives of others. Let us first be able to understand their perspectives and intuit if behind them there is some type of problem that requires our help.. If not, there is no other option than to deploy our emotional umbrellas to protect ourselves from their personal storms.

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