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How to Deal With a Negative Person

It’s easy to spot a negative person, he or she will always complain, criticize, judge and find fault in every single thing. We don’t mean to judge here, but a negative person is, in simple terms, someone who drains you of your energy.

You can’t avoid being around negative people all the time, you will have to learn how to deal with them. How to deal with a negative person? Understand that the negativity is a form of pain that’s being expressed by the negative person. Treat him or her with compassion and protect your level of energy by setting up healthy boundaries.

“Hurt people hurt people. People hurt others as a result of their own inner strife and pain.”

–Will Bowen

Table of Contents

Choose your friends wisely. We have all heard this statement, you can read more about choosing friends in another of our articles. But what happens when our lifelong friends become negative friends? Maybe they went through a breakup or lost their job, now they hate relationships and people who earn well. How can we deal with this sort of situation? 

Good friends, especially childhood friends are hard to replace. Have a genuine heart to heart conversation with them. Tell them that you understand that they are going through a tough situation and they need to vent. But be clear that you will not listen to their complaining 24/7 or end up being their punching bag! 

See how you can help with advice and being a good listener. Make sure that both you and your friend can keep moving forward with your lives. If the friendship feels like a complete drain of your energy you may have to take some space for yourself. After all, if you don’t have your peace of mind, you cannot be the light that you are meant to be in this world.

Almost all of us have faced this situation. How can we possibly avoid negative coworkers? We have to talk to them in order to get work done. Here are some tips on dealing with negative coworkers.

  • Compassion – always remember that ‘bigger the jerk, bigger the pain’. When people are unable to process the pain they feel, they project it outside of themselves. The more pain they feel within themselves, the more frustrated they become with their lives. This helps us to understand that negative comments that are directed at us are in fact unprocessed pain of that person that is directed at us in the form of negative comments or actions. In psychology, this is called displacement. Simon Sinek, the popular leadership expert often says that if your boss is mean to you, you should ask your boss whether he is doing ok or whether anything is bothering him. Most of the time, this simple act of kindness helps people to open up and become aware that they are projecting their anger onto you unfairly. 
  • If your coworker is a constant complainer, gradually avoid talking to him/her unless it’s purely for work
  • Turn the conversation into something positive
  • If you are the one being attacked by a negative coworker, see how it feels to you. If it feels too toxic, talk to your boss and change your environment. If you spend the majority of your day stuck with a toxic negative person, immediately take measures to change your work environment.

Sometimes we end up in a relationship with a negative person. We may not understand it at first, because we tend to attract who we are inside. In other words, we attract people who are just like us, as Abraham Hicks puts it ‘We attract those who are a vibrational match to us’. 

If you become aware and awake enough to identify that you are in a relationship with a negative person, first see the qualities within you that attracted this person into your life. Clear out those characteristics in yourself, for example, you may realize that you judge others in a very harsh way. Gradually change these attributes within you and you will notice that the person that you are in a relationship with will gradually respond to your changing energy. 

If the relationship does not evolve into a more loving positive one, then you have to decide what you truly want in your life.  You might have to end the relationship eventually, but always remember the effect of those around will have on your own wellbeing. So make sure to try and choose those who are good for your wellbeing.

This can be a very tricky and complicated situation. Your spouse may not have been negative from the beginning, then life happens and gradually people change. Maybe your spouse got triggered by some childhood trauma, most people are triggered by their childhood trauma later in their adult life. The key here is to be loving and compassionate and dealing with the situation with kindness. 

Talk to your spouse, see what is bothering them. Start your day with something grounding and positive. Do a 5 min yoga session together or a 5-10 min meditation. Do not keep focusing on negative comments/actions of your spouse. Focus on the positive, and most importantly be an example of positivity. 

Change yourself first. If you complain to all your friends about your spouse it will only increase the problems that you are having and you end up becoming a negative person. 

Find joyful activities that both of you can do together. Eventually, everything will change for the better. 

But if you are stuck with an abusive spouse, seek professional help, do not stay on hoping for things to change. Sometimes people come into our lives to teach us something and they move on. Have faith in the universe and all the lessons that come with it.

What we are discussing here is how to deal with negative comments that are used with the intention of causing harm. There are other types of comments that could be conceived as negative comments – constructive criticisms. These types of comments which are meant to improve our performance, work or life can be perceived as negative comments but are actually useful to improve your life. Know which comments to ignore and which ones you should take into consideration. Have a list of people that you truly trust and ask for their opinion when you need it. In time you will know which negative comments that you should ignore and which ones you should consider listening to.

In a time where online bullying has even led to suicide in teens, it is vital to know how to deal with negative comments. Best-selling author Dr. Brené Brown received many negative comments after her TED Talk. She stated that after reading all the negative comments, she felt so hurt she ended up binge-watching Downton Abbey and even researched online about what went on during the time Downton Abbey was filmed because she didn’t want to deal with the hurt she felt from all the negative comments. Her online surfing led to the discovery of the famous quote by Theodore Roosevelt, she lives by this quote and mentioned the quote in her book ‘Daring Greatly’.

“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.” 

–Theodore Roosevelt

Brené Brown after reading this quote by Roosevelt, created her own to help deal with all negative comments.

“If you are not in the arena also getting your ass kicked, I’m not interested in your feedback” 

–Brené Brown

Remember that those who attack others with negativity are doing so because they lack something within their own lives. If you are being attacked by someone, it may mean you have something that they don’t and as a result, they might be feeling envious or jealous.

By the way you feel, you can know whether you are around a negative person or whether you are around a positive person. You will notice that someone ‘feels off’ or you will feel ‘completely drained’ after talking to a negative person. If you walk into a room where two or more people have had a huge argument moments before you arrived, you can immediately ‘feel’ that the energy in that room ‘feels off’. Energy that induces fear, sadness or a general feeling of ‘feeling drained’ is what we call negative energy.

There are many crystals that are well known to deflect negative energy. Find your local shop for ‘all things good vibes’. Get some crystals and necklaces to deflect and protect your energy. This can certainly help you boost your confidence in facing negative people that you are unable to avoid. Start a ritual in the morning, send out a prayer to the universe asking for protection from negative energy. 

Another trick taught by bestselling author Kate Northup is visualization. She says that before walking into a meeting with a negative person, she closes her eyes and picture herself being surrounded by a protective bubble. This simple trick has always worked well to protect herself from negative energy.

Depending on what we go through in life, we all can become a negative person. We have to be aware of our energy and what we put out into the world. At the same time, depending on where we are in our own spiritual journey we will be affected by many different types of negative people. 

It’s Spiritual to be Rich – Kate Northrup

Takeaway

We hope the methods we discussed here will help you in how to respond to negative people that you may come across in your day to day life.  We might have to distance ourselves from certain people due to their negativity to protect our own well being, But………Always remember….. That people are at their core are inherently good. We all come from the same source and have desires just like anyone else. Have compassion for negative people and move about your business.

“If you meet someone whose soul is not aligned with yours, send them love and move along.”

–Wayne Dyer

Tommy P.
Tommy P.

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