What To Do When When Someone's Pissed At You | Matthew Brensilver, Vinny Ferraro, Kaira Jewel Lingo

1. Cultivate Daily Meditation Practice

Engage in daily meditation, even for short periods, to build awareness, slow down reactions, and cultivate a deeper calm and equanimity. This practice helps you see thoughts as just thoughts, preventing them from owning your actions and leading to gentler, more skillful interactions.

2. Practice Self-Compassion Regularly

Be kind to yourself, especially when you make mistakes or fall short, by cultivating humility rather than humiliation. Acknowledge that you are doing your best, and understand that going easier on yourself can lead to better outcomes for everyone involved in your interactions.

3. Reflect on Anger Beliefs

Examine your deep-rooted beliefs about what it means when others are angry at you, questioning if you believe anger and love cannot coexist. Challenge old beliefs that may be unhelpful and driving your reactive responses to conflict.

4. Practice Self-Soothing Before Engaging

When activated by someone else’s anger, take a moment to self-soothe and find groundedness within yourself before engaging. This creates enough patience and tranquility to meet their suffering with love and goodwill, rather than an impulse to control or shut down their emotions.

5. Use Reflective Listening

When someone speaks to you, listen journalistically and then repeat back the essence of what they’ve said in your own words. This helps the other person feel heard and understood, which can relax them, and acts as a circuit breaker for your own reactivity, even if you’re still feeling angry.

6. Stay Grounded When Others Aren’t

When someone else is unable to manage their emotions, focus on staying present and grounded in yourself. This prevents you from escalating their strong emotions, allows you to care for yourself, and benefits the relationship system even if they cannot meet you halfway.

7. Reflect Underlying Suffering

When someone is angry, try to compassionately reflect back what you perceive as the underlying hurt or suffering beneath their fiery emotions. This ‘Aikido move’ allows their energy to flow past you and helps them touch the deeper emotion, which can be profoundly helpful.

8. Avoid Immediate Discussion

When someone is angry, do not press for an immediate discussion, and allow them enough time to calm down. Agree to talk about it later if they wish, giving both parties space to process emotions.

9. Set and Maintain Healthy Boundaries

Establish and uphold boundaries for your own well-being, especially when others do not respect them. Remember that you can care about someone while still choosing the distance at which you can love both yourself and them simultaneously, even if it means transforming or ending a relationship.

10. Apologize Without Justification

If you realize you’ve been unskillful or lacked mindfulness, apologize as soon as possible without attempting to justify your actions. This acknowledges your contribution to the situation and avoids further escalation.

11. Ask for Help When Overwhelmed

If you feel overwhelmed by anger and cannot manage it on your own, explicitly ask for help from a trusted person. This act of vulnerability can serve as a circuit breaker, allowing you to receive support and de-escalate the situation.

12. Inquire About Underlying Fear

When someone expresses anger, consider if fear might be the deeper, primary emotion driving their reaction, and also check for fear within yourself. Recognizing this underlying emotion in both parties can instantly diffuse tension and foster compassion and empathy.

13. Avoid Controlling Others’ Suffering

Be mindful not to mistake your intolerance of another person’s suffering for genuine compassion. Instead of trying to control or blunt their suffering for your own comfort, strive to engage with them on their own terms, even if it means being willing to grieve with them.

14. Embrace Humility, Not Humiliation

When you fall short or make mistakes, cultivate humility by appreciating your shortcomings and seeing the complex causes and conditions that underlie them, rather than succumbing to humiliation, which is self-focused and hinders growth. Embrace seeing your limitations as part of sincere practice.

15. Welcome Deep Self-Awareness

Cultivate an attitude of welcoming self-awareness, even when it reveals your limitations, idiosyncrasies, or past ‘jackass’ behavior. It is always better to see these aspects of yourself than not to see them, fostering a continuous path of growth.

16. Develop Bespoke Partner Signals

Work with your partner to develop specific, agreed-upon signals that can gently indicate when one of you might need to take a breath during a heated moment, without escalating the situation further.

17. Avoid Self-Judgment in Conflict

When someone is angry at you, avoid compounding the situation with self-judgment or immediately siding against yourself. Instead, challenge the internal narrative that their anger confirms you are a ‘bad person’.

18. Don’t Side With Yourself

In moments of conflict or when receiving criticism, actively resist the impulse to immediately side with your own perspective. Instead, inquire into what might be worth hearing from the other person’s perspective.

19. Be Patient with Learning

Understand that some insights and practices may take time to fully integrate and become effective, sometimes years or even decades. Approach your personal development with patience, recognizing that seeds planted now may bear fruit much later.