How To Hug A Porcupine

Tunde Mo’ Aguda and Travis Bradberry, Ph.D.

Do you have a porcupine character in your family, workplace and neighbourhood? Sure! You will have somebody around with this personality type.

How to Hug a Porcupine: Simple Ways to Love the Difficult People in Your Life by Debbie Joffe offers strategies for managing challenging relationships with empathy and understanding.

“How to Hug a Porcupine: Easy Ways to Love the Difficult People in Your Life” offers practical and insightful advice on how to deal with challenging people with grace and compassion. In this review, I will share with you six lessons I learned from reading this book, and how they can help you hug your own porcupines.

1: Opposites attract. We often find ourselves drawn to people who are different from us, who challenge us, who stimulate us, who complement us. But sometimes, these differences can also cause conflicts, misunderstandings, and frustrations. The book teaches us how to appreciate and respect our differences, and how to use them as a source of strength and growth, rather than a source of division and resentment.

2: Who is a porcupine? A porcupine is someone who, for whatever reason, always seems to cause problems, irritate others, or incite conflict. They may be rude, aggressive, manipulative, passive-aggressive, defensive, or withdrawn. They may be our family members, our friends, our co-workers, our neighbors, or even ourselves. The book explains how to spot the porcupine in others and in ourselves, and how to understand the underlying causes and motives of their behavior.

3: Loving a porcupine is not easy, but it is possible. The book offers us easy ways to love the difficult people in our lives, such as listening, empathizing, validating, complimenting, thanking, apologizing, forgiving, and letting go. The book also teaches us how to set healthy boundaries, how to communicate effectively, how to negotiate and compromise, how to cope with stress and anger, and how to avoid and resolve conflicts.

4: Porcupine habitats. Porcupines can be found in different habitats, such as home, work, school, or social settings. The book provides us with specific tips and strategies on how to deal with different types of porcupines, such as spouses, children, parents, siblings, bosses, colleagues, customers, teachers, students, friends, or strangers. The book also helps us to adapt to different situations and scenarios, such as holidays, reunions, meetings, parties, or emergencies.

5: Are you a porcupine too? Sometimes, we may not realize that we are also porcupines, that we also hurt and annoy others with our quills. The book invites us to reflect on our own behavior and attitude, and how they affect our relationships with others. The book also encourages us to take responsibility for our actions, to acknowledge our mistakes, to apologize sincerely, to change our negative thoughts, to improve our self-esteem, and to seek help when needed.

7: Why are you attracted to porcupines? Sometimes, we may wonder why we keep attracting or staying with porcupines, why we can’t seem to break free from their influence or control. The book helps us to explore the reasons behind our attraction, such as our childhood experiences, our personality traits, our unmet needs, our fears, our hopes, or our fantasies. The book also guides us to make healthy and wise choices, to respect ourselves, to love ourselves, and to love others.

These are the seven lessons I learned from reading How to Hug a Porcupine, and I hope they inspire you to pick up this book and embark on the journey of hugging your own porcupines.

Here are ten lessons from the book:

1. Understand the Porcupine: To effectively deal with difficult people, it’s crucial to understand their behavior and motivations. Empathy can help you respond to them in a way that addresses their needs while maintaining your own boundaries.

2. Set Boundaries: Establishing clear and respectful boundaries helps to manage interactions with difficult individuals. Boundaries protect your well-being and create a structured environment for healthier relationships.

3. Practice Patience: Patience is key when dealing with challenging behavior. Allow yourself time to respond thoughtfully rather than reacting impulsively or emotionally.

4. Avoid Personalizing Their Behavior: Recognize that difficult behavior is often about the other person’s issues and not a reflection of your worth. Avoid taking their actions personally to reduce emotional impact.

5. Use Active Listening: Show genuine interest in what the difficult person is saying by actively listening. This involves reflecting back what you’ve heard and asking clarifying questions, which can help de-escalate tensions.

6. Communicate Clearly: Effective communication is essential. Express your thoughts and feelings honestly but respectfully, and make sure to listen to the other person’s perspective as well.

7. Stay Calm and Composed: Maintain your composure in the face of challenging behavior. Staying calm helps you think more clearly and respond in a measured way, which can defuse difficult situations.

8. Seek Common Ground: Find areas of agreement or shared interests that can serve as a foundation for more positive interactions. Focusing on common ground can help build rapport and ease conflicts.

9. Practice Forgiveness: Holding onto grudges can be detrimental to your own well-being. Practice forgiveness as a way to release negative feelings and move forward with a more positive outlook.

10. Take Care of Yourself: Ensure that you’re taking care of your own emotional and mental health. Engaging in self-care activities and seeking support from others can help you manage stress and maintain resilience when dealing with difficult people.

These lessons emphasize the importance of empathy, clear communication, and self-care in handling challenging relationships effectively.

How Emotionally Intelligent People Handle Toxic People

Toxic people defy logic. Some are oblivious to their negative effects on others, while some enjoy causing chaos and provoking people. Either way, they create unnecessary complexity, strife, and worst of all stress.

The Effects of Stress on the Brain

Studies have long shown that stress can have a lasting, negative impact on the brain. Even brief stress impairs hippocampal neurons—crucial for memory and reasoning. Prolonged stress damages neuron dendrites, and sustained stress can destroy neurons permanently. Stress is a formidable threat to your success—when stress gets out of control, your brain and your performance suffer.

Identifying and Managing Work Stress

Most sources of stress at work are easy to identify. Working to secure a crucial grant for your non-profit inevitably brings stress, which you’re probably equipped to handle. It’s the unexpected sources of stress that take you by surprise and harm you the most.

The Power of Emotional Intelligence and Toxic People 

Recent research from the Department of Biological and Clinical Psychology at Friedrich Schiller University in Germany found that exposure to stimuli that cause strong negative emotions—the same kind of exposure you get when dealing with toxic people—caused subjects’ brains to have a massive stress response. Whether it’s negativity, cruelty, the victim syndrome, or just plain craziness, toxic people drive your brain into a stressed-out state that should be avoided at all costs.

The ability to manage your emotions and remain calm under pressure has a direct link to your performance. Research by TalentSmartEQ with more than a million people, shows that 90% of top performers excel at managing stress to stay calm and in control. One of their greatest gifts is the ability to neutralize toxic people. Top performers have well-honed coping strategies that they employ to keep toxic people at bay.

Dealing with Toxic People: A Strategy Guide 

I’ve discovered many strategies for handling toxic people that successful people use; here are the top twelve. To deal with toxic people effectively, you need an approach that enables you, across the board, to control what you can and eliminate what you can’t. The important thing to remember is that you are in control of far more than you realize.

12 Strategies Used by Successful People to Handle Toxic People

They Set Limits with Toxic People (Especially with Complainers)

Complainers and negative people are bad news because they wallow in their problems and fail to focus on solutions. They want people to join their pity party so that they can feel better about themselves. Often, people listen to complainers to avoid seeming rude, but can easily be drawn into their negativity.

You can avoid this only by setting limits and distancing yourself when necessary. Think of it this way: if the complainer were smoking, would you sit there all afternoon inhaling the second-hand smoke? You’d distance yourself, and you should do the same with complainers. A great way to set limits is to ask complainers how they intend to fix the problem. They will either quiet down or redirect the conversation in a productive direction.

They Don’t Die in the Fight

Successful people know how important it is to live to fight another day, especially when your foe is a toxic individual. In conflict, unchecked emotion makes you dig your heels in and fight the kind of battle that can leave you severely damaged. When you read and respond to your emotions, you’re able to choose your battles wisely and only stand your ground when the time is right.

They Rise Above Toxic People 

Toxic people drive you crazy because their behavior is so irrational. Make no mistake about it; their behavior truly goes against reason. So why do you allow yourself to respond to them emotionally and get sucked into the mix?

The more irrational and off-base someone is, the easier it should be for you to remove yourself from their traps. Quit trying to beat them at their own game. Distance yourself from them emotionally and approach your interactions like they’re a science project (or you’re their shrink, if you prefer the analogy). You don’t need to respond to the emotional chaos—only the facts.

They Stay Aware of Their Emotions

Maintaining an emotional distance requires awareness. You can’t stop someone from pushing your buttons if you don’t recognize when it’s happening. Sometimes you’ll find yourself in situations where you’ll need to regroup and choose the best way forward. This is fine and you shouldn’t be afraid to buy yourself some time to do so.

Think of it this way—if a mentally unstable person approaches you on the street and tells you he’s John F. Kennedy, you’re unlikely to set him straight. When you find yourself with a coworker who is engaged in similarly derailed thinking, sometimes it’s best to just smile and nod. If you’re going to have to straighten them out, it’s better to give yourself some time to plan the best way to go about it.

They Establish Boundaries with Toxic People 

Most people undervalue their ability to manage chaos when working or living with someone. This couldn’t be further from the truth. Once you’ve found your way to Rise Above a person, you’ll begin to find their behavior more predictable and easier to understand. This will equip you to think rationally about when and where you have to put up with them and when you don’t. For example, even if you work with someone closely on a project team, that doesn’t mean that you need to have the same level of one-on-one interaction with them that you have with other team members.

You can establish a boundary, but you’ll have to do so consciously and proactively. If you let things happen naturally, you are bound to find yourself constantly embroiled in difficult conversations. If you set boundaries and decide when and where you’ll engage a difficult person, you can control much of the chaos. The only trick is to stick to your guns and keep boundaries in place when the person tries to encroach upon them, which they will.

They Won’t Let Anyone Limit Their Joy

When your sense of pleasure and satisfaction are derived from the opinions of other people, you are no longer the master of your own happiness. When emotionally intelligent people feel good about something that they’ve done, they won’t let anyone’s opinions or snide remarks take that away from them.

While it’s impossible to turn off your reactions to what others think of you, you don’t have to compare yourself to others, and you can always take people’s opinions with a grain of salt. That way, no matter what toxic people are thinking or doing, your self-worth comes from within. Regardless of what people think of you at any particular moment, one thing is certain—you’re never as good or bad as they say you are.

They Don’t Focus on Problems—Only Solutions

Concentrating on your challenges can perpetuate stress and negative feelings. However, directing your attention toward self-improvement and enhancing your situation fosters a feeling of empowerment, leading to positivity and diminished stress levels.

Regarding toxic people, giving too much thought to their troublesome nature only grants them influence over you. Prioritize your well-being and reclaim your power. Quit thinking about how troubling your difficult person is, and focus instead on how you’re going to go about handling them. This makes you more effective by putting you in control, and it will reduce the amount of stress you experience when interacting with them.

They Don’t Forget

Emotionally intelligent people are quick to forgive, but that doesn’t mean that they forget. Forgiveness requires letting go of what’s happened so that you can move on. It doesn’t mean you’ll give a wrongdoer another chance. Successful people are unwilling to be bogged down unnecessarily by others’ mistakes, so they let them go quickly and are assertive in protecting themselves from future harm.

They Squash Negative Self-Talk

Sometimes you absorb the negativity of other people. There’s nothing wrong with feeling bad about how someone is treating you, but your self-talk (the thoughts you have about your feelings) can either intensify the negativity or help you move past it. Negative self-talk is unrealistic, unnecessary, and self-defeating. It sends you into a downward emotional spiral that is difficult to pull out of. You should avoid negative self-talk at all costs.

They Limit Their Caffeine Intake

Drinking caffeine triggers the release of adrenaline. Adrenaline is the source of the “fight-or-flight” response, a survival mechanism that forces you to stand up and fight or run for the hills when faced with a threat. The fight-or-flight mechanism sidesteps rational thinking in favor of a faster response. This is great when a bear is chasing you, but not so great when you’re surprised in the hallway by an angry coworker.

They Get Some Sleep

I’ve beaten this one to death over the years and can’t say enough about the importance of sleep to increasing your emotional intelligence and managing your stress levels. When you sleep, your brain literally recharges, shuffling through the day’s memories and storing or discarding them (which causes dreams), so that you wake up alert and clear-headed. Your self-control, attention, and memory are all reduced when you don’t get enough—or the right kind—of sleep. Sleep deprivation raises stress hormone levels on its own, even without a stressor present.

A good night’s sleep makes you more positive, creative, and proactive in your approach to toxic people, giving you the perspective you need to deal effectively with them.

They Use Their Support System

It’s tempting, yet entirely ineffective, to attempt tackling everything by yourself. To deal with toxic people, you need to recognize the weaknesses in your approach to them. This means tapping into your support system to gain perspective on a challenging person. Everyone has someone at work and/or outside work who is on their team, rooting for them, and ready to help them get the best from a difficult situation. Identify these individuals in your life and make an effort to seek their insight and assistance when you need it. Something as simple as explaining the situation can lead to a new perspective. Most of the time, other people can see a solution that you can’t because they are not as emotionally invested in the situation.

Bringing It All Together

Before you get this system to work brilliantly, you’re going to have to pass some tests. Most of the time, you will find yourself tested by touchy interactions with problem people. Thankfully, the plasticity of the brain allows it to mold and change as you practice new behaviors, even when you fail. Implementing these healthy, stress-relieving techniques for dealing with difficult people will train your brain to handle stress more effectively and decrease the likelihood of ill effects.

Additional sources: https://medium.com/@thankyoumaababa/7-