Dealing with Difficult People
This week you are going to work with one of the hardest practical problems in Stoic life: what to do with the people who frustrate, offend, dismiss, or wound you. The seven passages move in a real progression, from holding your ground with kindness, through understanding why people harm you, to building the inner faculty that makes you genuinely unmoved. By Saturday you will have both a philosophical account of difficult people and a set of trained responses you can actually use.
Passage
When someone treats you ill or speaks ill of you, remember that he acts or speaks thus because he thinks it is incumbent upon him. That being the case, it is impossible for him to follow what appears good to you, but what appears good to himself; whence it follows, that, if he gets a wrong view of things, the man that suffers is the man that has been deceived. For if a person thinks a true composite judgement to be false, the composite judgement does not suffer, but the person who has been deceived. If, therefore, you start from this point of view, you will be gentle with the man who reviles you. For you should say on each occasion, “He thought that way about it.”
— Epictetus, Handbook 42
Reflection
Epictetus repeats and deepens the logic from yesterday, but he adds something new: the person who acts badly toward you is following what appears good to him, and he cannot do otherwise from where he stands. The one who suffers from a false judgment is the one holding it. If you grasp this fully, something loosens. The person who reviles you is not a free agent who chose malice for sport; they are someone whose view of things went wrong. 'He thought that way about it' is not a dismissal; it is a genuinely compassionate account of how error works.
Go deeper
Is there someone you have been treating as though they chose to harm you out of clear-eyed malice, and what changes if you genuinely accept that they were acting from a mistaken view of what was good?
Practice
He Thought That Way About It
Think of someone who has treated you badly in a way that still stings. Write the words 'He thought that way about it' or 'She thought that way about it' at the top of a page. Below it, write out what exactly they thought, what view of good, what fear, what misreading of the situation led them to act as they did. Write it in the third person, as if explaining to someone else. Notice whether any irritation or resentment in you shifts as you write.