When you are facing conflict try to keep the surface of your inner-pool of emotions calm and steady. Your inner-calm is your safe haven in moments of challenge.
We sometimes avoid difficult people, but we often do it because we know we cannot control our emotions in their presence! In this sense we are putting those people in control. The way you put yourself in control around difficult people is by learning how to maintain your objective calm in the midst of their emotional upheaval.
Anger can be a beautiful and useful tool. The fire of anger can serve you as a tool of survival, as a remover of obstacles, as a dramatic and effective psychological or theatrical punctuation of communication, and as a useful force of destruction when we decidedly need to wreck things in our lives with a controlled implosion.
If petty and meddlesome people stress you out try to begin looking at their slights, insults and jabs as a form of training. Being insulted offers you an opportunity to practice having a non-response internally by remaining calm.
Being told you are wrong or insulted, gives you an opportunity to practice decency and having a non-response internally.
Once you detach from conflict through non-engagement, you rise to a state of empowering calm awareness, empathy and safety.
Until you quit participating in your pain, cooperating in your abuse and engaging in the contest, you will always be a part of other people's games of torment and inner-suffering.
No one can make you feel anything; you are completely responsible for how you feel.
The fulcrum of resistance is in your mind where you pit yourself against the weight of the external.
When you release yourself from the need for approval and control you can stop punishing yourself and others.
