How To Deal With The Problem Of Problematic Persons

BIMBO CABIDOG

Ever came across with problematic persons? How do you deal with their dilemma?

Everyone must have met them: in workplaces, offices, public markets, parks, bus terminals and train rides. They are quite aplenty popping up even at home where folks, tired body and soul, would just rather call it a day and settle down for rest.

The problem with problematic persons is their making a complicated problem out of a simple one. They are the proverbial ones who turn a mere molehill into a mountain, cry wolf when they are only seeing a mouse. They end up not solving the problem but creating a bigger and complex problem.

How can you not deal with them? Well, the better recourse is to leave them on their own. The best reaction is to not react, and just mind your own business. But they make it impossible. They bother, they nag and they pester up to the end of time.

So, deal with them anyway. How to successfully do so is amazingly simple. It takes three steps. They are: Stop, Look and Listen.

A friend of a friend of mine wanted to declare World War III because her child was joked at by playmates for having no father. Well, she begot her son by wedlock and brought him up alone as solo parent. The derision of her son touched a raw nerve. The mom was a ticking bomb ready to explode.

She suspected that her son’s playmates got the story from their parents who talked bad of her, behind her back. She treated the joke as an insult. Soon it waxed into an assault on her person who bore a child without a father. But of course, this was only in her mind.

My friend did not want to have anything to do with it. The issue was just about her friend’s child being joked at by fellow children. It was an innocent affair pure and simple. She wasn’t one to join in reading anything more to it, nor whip up stories out of an overactive imagination.

But the single mom wouldn’t let go. She could not sleep on the wrong. She will not be put down by folks who judge her status. She won’t let hypocrites who think they are clean and decent deny her the right to give her son a normal life, although nobody was actually doing so.

She had no other recourse though but to pester my friend (her friend) no end. She wanted to conscript my friend into her unilateral declaration of war. She could not bring the war to her supposed enemies. She wanted to wage it in my friend’s backyard by talking back even without being heard by the addressees.

The alleged offenders who happen to be just parents of her son’s playmates may even have no inkling at the trespass they were supposed to have committed. The single mom was merely making the problem global. The intransigence was affecting my friend already. So the latter stepped in.

My friend stopped from all other preoccupations to accord the problem time and space. She looked at the problematic person to find what’s really going on. Then she listened to her troubled thoughts.

And her friend just poured out all the psychological and emotional hang-ups that had been weighing her down for a long time. She held on no longer and let everything she had been keeping for years flow like pus from a painful swelling. Suddenly, she was relieved and calmed.

The ally in war that my friend’s friend needed was after all just a true mate to be with her along what she was going through. What she needed was someone she can confide to, who can in turn lend a sympathetic ear and share the heavy load.

What she needed was a friend in the real sense who could take his deeply hidden secret of experiencing hell with genuine empathy and deep understanding.

Many people are going through a lot. Instead of solving their problems, they make these monstrous. It only takes real friends to deal with the problem of problematic persons.