Stoic Guide to Navigating Troubled and Toxic Relationships

Difficult people are one of the most reliable sources of suffering we have, and the Stoics knew it. Marcus filled his private notes with reminders to stay tolerant and kind with the people who tested him.

His famous line about waking up expecting to meet the meddling and ungrateful, and choosing patience anyway, runs through this whole episode. I share how I try to apply that in my own troubled relationships, without pretending it is easy.

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Transcript

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Welcome to the Stoic Handbook Podcast. This is John Brooks Speaking. I'd like to begin today's episode by just acknowledging you, the listener. I've been seeing some of my stats on Spotify and Apple Podcasts, and the episodes are continuing to grow. More and more people are really enjoying them and finding value in them and reaching out to me. So I appreciate that and I appreciate you, and I'm I'm glad that these short lessons can be useful to you. If you are mainly a podcast listener, but you'd like to also get access to my articles where I break down ancient texts, you can visit stoichandbook.co stoichandbook.co and sign up and I'll send you an email every week where I break down and illustrate an ancient stoic text. In today's episode, I want to talk about difficult relationships. If you look back over your life, you'll you'll find that nearly all of the worst times in your life have been caused by other people. Also, of course, on the flip side, almost all of the best times in your life have been caused by other people. If you look at movies and stories, drama, television, we love these things and they are all about other people. Right? Like we are very social. We respond emotionally to other people and events. We respond emotionally to insults and compliments and hatred and love. One of the most addictive feelings in the world is love and intimacy. And one of the most catastrophically painful emotions in the world is isolation and rejection. It is for this reason the Stoics placed a heavy emphasis on how we should interact with others in social situations. They had a lot to say, for example, on how we can navigate insults and difficult individuals. There is a very famous quote by Marcus Aurelius. I'll read it to you in full now. When you wake up in the morning, tell yourself The people I deal with today will be meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous, and surly. They are like this because they cannot tell good from evil. But I have seen the beauty of good and the ugliness of evil, and have recognized that the wrongdoer has a nature related to my own, not of the same blood or birth, but the same mind, and processing a share of the divine. And so none of them can hurt me. No one can implicate me in ugliness, nor can I feel angry at my relative or hate him. We were born to work together like feet, hands and eyes, like two rows of teeth, upper and lower. To obstruct each other is unnatural. To feel anger at someone, to turn your back on him, these are obstructions. So here we see the journal entry to himself about how he should think about dealing with difficult individuals. Now what's really amazing about this is that Marcus Aurelius was a Roman emperor when he wrote it. If someone is at the bottom of a status hierarchy and they're constantly getting bullied and walked all over, you might understand then why they would write a note to themselves about being more tolerant and accepting. But Marcus Aurelius couldn't get arrested. He couldn't be bullied, he could tell people what to do, he could make orders, and he could have people imprisoned or executed. He had lots of power, and yet he still reminds himself to be tolerant and to accept his fellows as just another part of the larger whole. He realized that the path to wisdom and ultimately the path to being a good emperor wasn't to become a tyrannical, oppressive dictator, but was to make good decisions based on all of the available data, to find wisdom and truth, even when it's presented by difficult, jealous, or dishonest or arrogant individuals. In my own approach and thoughts around dealing with difficult individuals, it's a nuanced topic, but one thing that is very important to recognize right at the beginning is that even if you are a practicing stoic, that doesn't mean that you should endure everything that happens to you in life. For example, if you're in a job situation and you're not being treated well, the attitude of, well, I'm a stoic, and if I'm feeling negative emotions because of this, then the issue is with me and I should think about it differently, and I'm failing because I'm letting them get to me. That's actually not a very rational view. For example, the idea of stoicism is to see the world and yourself more rationally, more clearly with your divine reason. We know that we are biological organisms, and as biological organisms, no matter how much reason we have, we know that our emotional systems can be provoked. Maybe we can use reason later on to navigate those provocations, but they can be provoked. So even if you take the greatest stoic sage ever, and you constantly interrupt that sage's sleep, and you constantly berate him and prod him and poke him, and you constantly push him outside of a group, basically, if you constantly tortured such a sage, eventually his biological system would feel that and start to deteriorate or break down. In the same way, if you are in a damaging relationship, whether that be something that is friend-based or work-based or intimate relationship-based, that's having an effect on your biological system, no matter how much reason you have. And so even if you are a practicing stoic, if you notice that there is a very, very damaging relationship in your life, then it is completely acceptable to remove yourself from that. Because ultimately you want to live a life of wisdom. You want to pass your gifts to other people and you want to meet your potential. If all of your energy is being used to navigate a difficult single relationship that is avoidable, how is that wise to do so? So, what I like to do is I like to categorize relationships typically into three categories. These are categories of troubled relationships. The first type I call misaligned relationships. This would be a code yellow. So a misaligned relationship would be you're not enemies, you're not abusive, you're not hating on each other, but there are certain personality traits that just don't go well together. Maybe someone talks a lot and you find it hard to get a word in edgeways, right? That's a misaligned relationship. There's no real flow. Maybe someone has interests that are completely different from yours, and every time you decide to chat with them, it's always a struggle to find something that you agree on, and things can become quite tense quite quickly. You might have many misaligned relationships in your life, and and maybe you really like these individuals. Families are full of misaligned relationships. You love different members of your family, but you wouldn't necessarily want to spend every waking moment with them like they are best friends, right? Because you didn't choose them. And yeah, family members can be quite triggering and and and they can be misaligned. And visiting them for a few weeks a couple of times a year can be great, but then you find that if you have too much of it, it overwhelms you and uh the misalignment becomes too much to handle. The next type of relationship is a code orange, and this would be a troubled relationship, a truly difficult relationship where you don't really see eye to eye with a person. Perhaps they are a little bit triggering, perhaps they say things that are quite rude to you at times, um, perhaps these types of relationships, there's not much respect or empathy. A troubled relationship is typically what you see in a romantic relationship when it's close to being broken up, you know, where there's a lot of blame and a lot of arguments, a lot of accusations and victimization. And then the third type of relationship, which is what I call a toxic relationship. Now, toxic relationships are talked about a lot, and it seems like everyone these days has had a toxic relationship or is in a toxic relationship or is with someone who has toxic traits, and and yeah, that word gets used a lot because it's kind of a buzzword, but when I refer to a truly toxic relationship, I'm talking about a relationship that is actually detrimental to your health and the type of relationship that you might need counseling to be able to deal with either during or after. You know, like a very, very emotionally damaging relationship. And the way that we respond to each of these colours, the misaligned, the troubled, and the toxic, are all different, right? So there's not a one-size-fits-all approach. So the idea of the misaligned relationships, now these are very good for stoicism. Marcus Aurelius is talking about misaligned relationships in the quote, Today I will deal with meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous, and surly people. So these are people that are coming in and out of his life. He's not living with them, he's just dealing with them, and they can be difficult to deal with, and there's this there's uh a level of misalignment there. Marcus Aurelius also has another quote where he he says that when you meet difficult people, either put up with them or instruct them. So there's this element when we meet misaligned people, that it might not always be in our best interest to make a huge deal about every grievance that we have. The idea with misaligned relationships is that we focus on the outcome that we want. So if Marcus is dealing with people on a daily basis, he can either focus on the personality traits that he doesn't like in them, or he can focus on, well, look, they are who they are, but I have a job to do, and I want to figure out the outcome that I want, and I want us to get there together. If that means that I have to tolerate them a bit more, and I have to tactically navigate the situation, then so be it. You know, this is not going to be a situation that lasts forever, and there's nothing to be gained by having unnecessary fights and arguments. And at times I may need to instruct them, you know, but I'm going to instruct them in a way that is compassionate. And one way we can do that is use something like the non-violent communication model outlined by Marshall Rosenberg, which to summarize goes something like: you you give an observation without criticizing, then you express your feelings and needs, and then you give a request. So if someone comes to you and they're misaligned and they they kind of accuse you of something or put some blame in, or they're not very grateful for something you've done for them, you can just simply say what you see without criticizing. So you don't, for example, if if you notice that someone's been working a lot, you don't go, you work too much, right? Because that's a judgment. Instead, you would say, Hey, on the books, I've noticed that you've worked 60 hours this week. Okay, so in the case of someone being difficult, you could say something, hey, in the last three conversations I've had with you, I've noticed that you've pointed out three things I've done that you didn't like. Okay, so there's no criticism, it's just an observation. Then you follow up with the feelings and needs. When I hear this, it makes me quite upset and a little bit irritated because I am actually trying my best. And because I'm dedicating so much time to this job that I'm doing, I really need to feel like I have support. I would really appreciate it if you could come to me with a few things that you think I'm doing well, so I could feel that I'm not just doing a terrible job, and I do feel appreciated by you. And then if you do have anything that you don't like, I'd love to set aside some time and brainstorm solutions to those issues. Would you be willing to do that tomorrow? Okay, so that's an example. I've just come up with that off the top of my head, but that's a beautiful way to engage with a misaligned relationship. You're observing something, you're expressing how you feel, you're expressing what you need, and then you're making a request, right? Because you can't just expect things to change, right? You have to make a request, either put up with them or instruct them, and the request can be a form of instruction. The idea of expressing feelings and needs is something I want I want to stick with you. It's a crazy thing, but people think that when you deal with difficult people, you should kind of become a difficult person yourself to kind of fight fire with fire, but it doesn't work like that. A much better approach is to be human, to be real and to be strong. Let me give you an example. If you were having a really bad day and you came to me and started telling me that I was no good, and then I didn't help out around the house, for example, say we live together. If I returned fire by saying, Well, look, I'm trying my best, but you've got to understand I do XYZ and you don't do this other thing. Imagine how you'd feel if I said that, if I responded with another counterattack, versus if you said to me I don't help out enough around the house, and I said to you, Oh wow, okay, um I'm a little bit surprised that you said that and a little bit hurt. Yeah, hang on a second, I'm taking this in. Um Yeah, so you're okay. You don't feel like I'm help helping enough. Now we have a chance of intimacy, right? Because I'm telling you how I'm feeling, it's real. So expressing feelings and needs is uh is a huge thing. Huge, huge, huge huge thing for misaligned relationships. When it comes when it comes time to dealing with troubled relationships, you really have three options, right? If you have a genuinely troubled relationship, and these are typically relationships that you see more than once, so consistently so these so troubled relationships you you see regularly, right? Like partners, friends, co-workers, etc. You have a few options, right? You can accept the status quo and just deal with it. You can leave the relationship, or you can try and change things. It's really that simple. You know, a lot of people stress out about troubled relationships a lot. You have three options. Okay, it's really that simple. You can accept it the way it is, and if so, then don't complain anymore. You've got to be mature about it, right? You can't say, Well, I'm not gonna leave and I'm not gonna change, but I'm still gonna complain. Well, you don't get to have your cake and eat it. You can't accept the status quo and then continue to complain. So if you accept the status quo, you've got to stop complaining and deal with it. If you decide to leave, then you leave if you think that that that's the only option. And if you wanna change the relationship, the key to doing that is change yourself. And the reason why is because it's very, very, very difficult to change another human being. Like almost impossible. It's very, very, very difficult to change yourself. And you are you, and you also want to change, and even so, it's hard to change. Think about habits that you've tried to do, how difficult it is to remain consistent with new habits or getting rid of bad habits or changing behavioral patterns. It's hard. And you think you can do that for another person. It doesn't matter, even if you're a great manipulator, it's very difficult to make lasting changes in another person. But you can change yourself. And people are different depending on the environment they're in. And so if you change yourself, you therefore change the environment that the other person in the troubled relationship is in. This is the best way to change a troubled relationship. And the change can happen overnight, it can be dramatic if you change yourself. But again, if you don't want to change yourself, that's fine. Either leave or accept the status quo. You cannot say that you want to change the relationship, but only change the other while you remain the same. Again, it doesn't work like that. That's not a very mature approach. So the question is, how do you change yourself? Well, you need to learn the difference between good communication and bad communication. The acronym that I like from Feeling Good Together, a book by David Burns, is the acronym of EAR. Empathy, assertiveness, respect. You'll discover that whenever you have a troubled relationship, you will typically not be communicating with empathy, assertiveness, or respect on a consistent basis. Empathy means that you actually acknowledge the emotional state and place that the person who you're interacting with is in. If they're struggling with something, you feel into that. If they're thinking something, you try to really see where they're coming from. We don't just brush it aside and go, ah, well, you know, you're always saying stuff like that. That's not empathy at all. So empathy is truly putting yourself in another person's shoes. Assertiveness, though, on the flip side to empathy, means that you speak the truth. You don't just say only things that you want the other person to hear. You've got to say, Well, I feel this, or I'm annoyed by that, or I didn't like it when this happened. Right? So it's true empathy, but also honesty. And then the third one is respect. So that means no belittling, no sly remarks, no passive aggressiveness, true respect. The kind of respect that you would give a role model of yours if you met them. Actual respect. And if you can't talk to your partner or friend or colleague with empathy, assertiveness, and respect for 30 days, then you know I don't know what you're looking for. Right? It's not rocket science. And you might say, Well, they won't speak to me like that. Sure, they probably won't. But if you continue to speak to them like that, watch what will happen in 30 days. You'll be astounded, actually. It will change everything. Empathy is something that's missing massively in life. Truly, truly, truly missing. Very rarely do people actually empathize with anybody anymore. You know? Like asking you a question, then really thinking about your response and putting themselves in your shoes. You know, like, how's your day going? Oh, I've had a rough day, I haven't had much sleep. How many people would go, oh yeah, okay, you slept b you slept bad, that happened to me last night too, or well, whatever, let's forget about it, let's talk about something else. Or pretend to to care. You know, like oh poor you, yeah, you must be so tired anyway. But what about actually empathizing with someone and going, Wow, this person, they have a lot to do today. You know, they've got to go to go to work, they've got a child to look after, and they've only had four hours sleep. You know? I wonder what their actual day-to-day experience is like. I wonder what their biggest struggle is today, being so sleep deprived. I wonder what kind of thoughts they're having. I wonder if they're experiencing more agitation than usual. I wonder if they feel like giving up. Right? Now that's empathy. But it takes pausing and being mindful of the situation. There's a technique also from Feeling Good Together called the disarming technique. This technique is amazing. It's so simple, but I promise you, it's extremely difficult to do. If you can do it, you will see amazing results in troubled relationships, but it is difficult. The disarming technique works like this. Whenever someone says something to you in a troubled relationship, you try and find the truth in what they say. So if someone says in a romantic relationship, we never go anywhere together. It's like you you don't want to be with me. Right? Now, in a troubled relationship, the typical response to this would be, Well, I went somewhere with you last Thursday, didn't I? Right? So you're basically discounting them, right? The empathy is not even there. But the disarming technique would be hmm. Let me think about that. So how many places have we been in the last month? Yeah, well, we've been out twice in the last month. That's actually not that many times, to be honest. Right, I can see why you'd say that. Um how many times would you like to go out? Like what would be your ideal? I'd like to try and help you with it. Boom. Beautiful relationship there, if you can do that consistently. Hard to do, but it's magic if you can do it. Resentment, that feeling of resentment that happens towards the end of relationships will cover this over. And it'll be really hard to use the disarming technique and to genuinely try and find truth in what the other person is saying if there's resentment. That's a beautiful technique to do in general. Every time there is the trigger feeling, every time you feel like try and try and find truth in what the other person is saying. Again, this goes back to stoicism as well. The Stoics encouraged us when we get insulted to simply ask ourselves, is this true? You know, like if someone says you're bald. It's like, is this true? Not really. I'm not actually bald. Well then they're wrong, and so the insult means nothing. Or they're right and go, Yeah, you said what was self-evident. Either way, there's no insult. You're either wrong or you're right, and that's it. Maybe I learn from it, maybe I don't. But the insult part, that's a judgment that I add to it. I decide to be harmed based on what you said. The third category is of course the toxic relationship. Even Seneca said that some people are an enemy to tranquility. And this means that no matter how deep you go into stoicism, philosophy, self-improvement, if you can help it, why would you chain yourself to someone who is an extremely violent individual whose whole life is there to cause misery in others, right? Like a full-on psychopath, why would you do that? It would make no sense to do that if you can avoid it. And so if you find that you are constantly living in a sense of fear and obligation and guilt, and that you don't have any control, and that you can't seem to have happiness, and that the person you're interacting with can't seem to take requests, or is incapable of showing you any respect, or is incapable of wanting to make any progress towards improving the relationship, and you've tried and you failed, at a certain point you have to leave. Okay, so Jordan B. Peterson has a rule when you should leave a relationship, and the rule is simple. If you think that if you stayed with this person in ten years' time, you'd be homicidal and an alcoholic, then you should leave. Okay, so that's a really simple rule. It's an extreme rule, but it actually makes a lot of sense, right? If you look forward into the future, if you think that you would turn to drinking and you think that you'd become extremely aggressive and angry and resentful and bitter because of this relationship, the feeling that you haven't truly lived your life because you've been so controlled and walked all over and had your self-esteem eroded, then it's time to go. And yeah, you know, that can actually be very helpful to the person as well, because they can use that that data of you leaving to try and help them. Now, there's a lot that I could say about how to deal with insults and the specifics of you know social ninjutsu, how to outframe individuals, and and and there are a lot of stoic principles and tactics for dealing with insults and triggering situations, but I'm gonna dedicate an entire lesson to that because I think it needs its own stage. This is more about difficult and troubled relationships. I hope that these three frameworks have been useful in terms of books that you could read. If you believe that you're in a truly dangerous, kind of toxic relationship, then you can read books like Psychopath Free or The Narcissist's Nightmare, and you might need some support and help to get out of that. But those are more rare than the more kind of troubled relationships. Troubled relationships are incredibly common, and the biggest mistake I see is that the person who's complaining about the troubled relationship is neither willing to leave and doesn't want to change themselves either, but is thinking inaccurately that if they just annoy and criticize their partner, eventually they'll magically change. And I'm sorry to break it to you, but yeah, human beings are not like that. For misaligned relationships, the goal is outcome focused. How can we resolve the situation? How can we move forward together? How can we see each other as working as a whole? How can we collaborate? You know, it's like it's okay to not get along completely. You can still do good work together. Many successful businesses have been run by people who didn't get along, but they worked well together. Right? So, what do you want? Do you want to work well with someone or do you have to just get along with them? Because likewise, many best friends would do a really bad job if they were working together. Many best friends wouldn't make great relationships where there's a lot of negotiation and mature decisions to be made. So I hope this helps, and thank you for listening to the Stoic Handbook Podcast. If you leave a review on Apple Podcasts, that would be awesome. Really appreciate it. And check out stoichandbook.co for more articles that explore ancient breakdowns of Epictetus. Thank you very much, and I'll speak to you soon. Faith permitting.