Staying Positive with Negative People

Sometimes, you have to deal with negative people. The negative person might be your boss, or a member of your family that you love dearly.

How can you deal with their negativity without losing your positivity?

Here's how I dealt with my extremely negative mom.

Negativity can grow over time

When I was growing up, my mother hid her insecurities well. If she was judgmental and demanding, it was because she wanted us to be the best we could be.

She worked on herself, too, to be the best she could be. She read Dale Carnegie, Norman Vincent Peale, and Robert Schuller. All to mimic a positive attitude she never really possessed.

It wasn’t until well into my adulthood that she revealed (to me, at least) how she had always felt people looked down on her. Her over-the-top retaliation to every perceived slight, and there were many over the years, finally made sense.

In her final few years, however, the mask fell away completely. She was drowning in a sea of helplessness, anxiety, and pessimism.

It got to the point where her worldview was so diametrically opposed to mine, that I could barely talk to her. We literally didn’t speak the same language anymore. A word that I thought was a good thing, like “opportunity”, she heard as a bad thing.

The struggle for common ground

She had good reason for her pessimism. A bunion operation had gone bad, resulting in an amputated toe and leaving her feet in constant pain. Osteoporosis was gradually destroying her spine, crushing her chest and bending her over until she could no longer lift up her head. Long ropes of plastic tethered her to the oxygen concentrator she needed to be able to breathe. She was going blind.

I visited for a month during the holidays, to take some of the caregiving pressure off of my father. I tried telling her about some of the great opportunities in my and my husband’s lives. Only to be met with a wall of negativity the likes of which I had never experienced.

Whatever I mentioned, she found the downside to. Any stirring of hope was immediately squashed with fatalism.

I’ll admit, at first I was angry. My loving, supportive mother had been replaced by this black hole of negativity. It wasn’t fair, and I wanted the mother I’d always known to come back.

I quickly realized, however, that being angry at her wasn’t helping. So I did the only thing I could think of that might.

I pretended that she was a foreign language speaker, inexpertly translating her thoughts into English. Rather than listening to her words, I tried to figure out the emotions that prompted those words. Then I responded to the emotion, not what she’d said.

A real life example

One of the things I was very excited about was an upcoming trip to Los Angeles. My husband had been invited to participate in an X-Prize seminar about the future of health, where most of the other participants were world-renowned experts.

“If they want him to pay for the trip, don’t waste your money,” she warned.

For someone who is afraid of not being respected, being made to pay your own way is a clear sign of disrespect. So that’s what I answered.

“Actually, they think very highly of him,” I told her. “Most people attend on their own dime, but they have a limited number of scholarships to support diverse thinkers. Out of all the people they were considering, they chose him as the recipient of the scholarship, and are paying all of his expenses. We decided to expand the trip and turn it into a week-long vacation, so of course we’re paying for that part.”

“Well, that’s good, but you’ll be all on your own while he’s at this seminar. How can he abandon you like that?”

Rather than getting insulted on behalf of my husband or the implication that I needed to be watched over like a small child, I tuned in to what she meant. Wouldn’t I feel lonely, or left out, the way her health challenges had isolated her? She didn’t want me to suffer and feel bad. So that’s what I answered.

“I’m looking forward to the alone time,” I told her. “I can sit out by the hotel pool and read as many books as I want, and no one will interrupt me. It’s going to be heaven.”

By the time my visit was over, she was telling me how much she enjoyed talking to me. She felt like I was really listening to her. Because I was. I was listening to the positive intentions behind her negative words.

You don’t have to be drawn into negativity

What I found when dealing with my mother was that logical arguments or defensive rebuttals to her negativity only led to more negativity. So, if you're faced with a negative person that you want to keep in your life, don't directly confront their negativity.

Instead, look for the positive motivation prompting the negative behavior, and respond to that. It’s much easier to stay positive and upbeat when you’re responding to a positive emotion. And you may even make the person you're talking to slightly less negative, because you'll be addressing their fears.

In the first three articles in this series, you've learned the difference between negative behavior and negative people, the causes of negativity, and how to have positive interactions with negative people. Keep reading for four strategies to defeat negative influences that threaten to kill your dreams.