How to deal with the difficult or crazy people in your life

...and everyone has at least one, if not more, difficult people they are obliged to deal with.

Buddha never said this, but had he been Irish he might have

I got started thinking on this topic when a friend posted a link on Facebook to an extremely good Forbes article on the subject:

I thought it was too good to not share, and what a good subject to blog about. However the more I researched the subject, the more I found that people way more qualified than I had already written really interesting articles and I would better serve you, my readers, by letting you read these yourselves.



I was interested to read in one article a suggestion to do something I have observed my mother in law do - very effectively - she will wait quietly for a natural pause in a conversation she does not want to engage in, and then say something totally unrelated - always managing to pick a topic that will be guaranteed to distract the speaker - and it always works. As soon as I realized that was what she was doing, I wait for it to happen and observe mesmerized. It is like watching a little old lady redirect a flow of lava.

Here are links to some of the better articles I found.

WebMD
Psychology Today
Think Simple Now

However I couldn't resist posting some of my old and new favorite quotes on the subject. This first one was extremely familiar to me - I wonder if this is where she got the idea.

"...When dealing with someone difficult, interrupt the pattern by asking a question completely off-topic..." — Paramhansa Yogananda

"You cannot control other people. You can only control how you respond to them.
You must change how you react to people before you can change how you interact with them,”
— Rick Kirschner, N.D., coauthor of Dealing with People You Can’t Stand.

“Most of the time, difficult people just want something different than we do,
— Ronna Lichtenberg, author of Work Would Be Great If It Weren’t for the People.

"To carry a grudge is like being stung to death by one bee"
— William H. Walton 

"Hating people is like burning your own house down to get rid of a rat."
— Henry Emerson Fosdick, American author (1878-1969)

“How people treat you is their karma; how you react is yours.”
 ― Wayne W. Dyer