“Never waste your time trying to explain who you are to people who are committed to misunderstanding you”.

It is inevitable in life that some point you are going to meet some aggressive or controlling people. These people could present themselves in many forms they could be family, a partner, friends, colleagues or even your boss. How you deal with these people or situations may have a great impact on your future relationships.

In these situations it can be easy to react and then become part of the problem without even realizing. It takes a conscious effort to become a certain person that is proactive when another person is being aggressive or undermining. When you make the decision to treat people with respect, and that is including yourself because remember a person that gets aggressive and talks about other people is only coming from a place of insecurities and ego. Generally people won’t value themselves enough to be kind to others and they may create a reality that fulfills their own needs by taking out their aggression on other people.

Here a few simple and effective ways to deal with aggressive people…

Understand – Know that people are not their behaviours. This is not giving someone an excuse to behave a certain way; it is more so helping you not react to something that possibly might have nothing to do with you. There is always an underlying issue for someone getting very aggressive.

Stay Calm – One of the motives around aggressive and controlling behaviours is to get the other person more worked up or just to get a certain response. Be calm and don’t give the behaviour what it wants. When you don’t give negativity attention and send it love, it will go away.

Don’t allow guilt – One common tool attached to aggressive behaviour is to try to make you feel guilty. Doing things out of guilt is not normally coming from a good place so most of the times when you decide to be motivated by shame or guilt it can leave you feeling drained and depleted. Be centered in yourself and certain in your own decisions and choices you have made in life, they are experiences not other people’s weapons against you.

Know your own rights – No one has the right to be aggressive to you or behind your back so respect yourself enough to be direct or remove yourself from the situation. If this is something that has arisen behind your back then you could look at it from this perspective: if someone is taking the time out of their life to talk about you then let them, chances are people will probably know them as someone that talks about others freely in public. Either way you give yourself some credit you are not wasting your time on being negative towards others.

Don’t request anything from them – Aggressive individuals love being given control and power. Be cautious of your situation that you are not putting yourself in a situation that might backfire. There is always many resources and options if you change your perspective from victim to victor.

Shift the focus – In many cases someone that is getting aggressive will be in blame mode and putting their focus on you, if you can create an opportunity to change the focus to something more settling in the same context then do it. You will be creating an exit strategy to end the aggression and transition into another topic.

Resolution – One thing is to be sure that this is not coming from you. We tend to attract what is required to be healed within ourselves. I’m sure there have been some situations in your life where you have had a repeat of people or behaviours popping up in your life. If so ask yourself “what do I need to learn from this that will improve me as an individual”?

These are just a few tips to handle aggressive individuals, if you require any more information just flick me a message and I will be more than happy to assist.

Peace & Love 

Michael Sorgiovanni