When I served as director of the Cambridge Council on Aging, I dealt often, sometimes daily, with an elderly woman who was famous for complaining about other people. She would telephone city hall with a long list of grievances and, no matter how officials would respond, she was never satisfied.
Colleagues in the City Manager’s office, feeling frustrated, would commonly pass her telephone calls on to me. Like every other public official who ever had to deal with her, I regarded her as impossible to please.
Would that I had for guidance then a book that I have recently read with great appreciation! Called Thank You for Being Such a Pain, this new volume has much more going for it than its clever title. Surprisingly, it turns out not to be just about human relations but also about spirituality.
The subtitle makes this clear: Spiritual Guidance for Dealing with Difficult People. The author, Mark Rosen Ph.D., is a management specialist who is also steeped in the Jewish tradition. He skillfully draws on that tradition as well as religious thought from a wide variety of other sources to present a practical spirituality.
In the introduction Dr. Rosen writes, “This book is primarily intended for those struggling with difficult people in their daily lives.” The core idea of this book is that “our difficulties are not random but are sent to us for spiritual growth.”
The book does not deal primarily with theory but is concerned with real down-to-earth problems in personal relationships. At the same time, its foundation in a spiritual tradition gives it a depth lacking in many other self-help books.
The author does not feel at all apologetic about often referring to God: “Trying to write a book with a spiritual message that avoids references to a Supreme Being,” he says, “is like trying to write a cookbook without references to food.” For him life is a school created by God and “in the school of life, difficult people are the faculty.”
He feels bullish about prayer and meditation. “Meditation is one of the most ancient and holy ways to heal,” he writes. “To pray, just ask from the heart. No previous experience is necessary.”
He defines a difficult person as “someone who causes us to feel things we’d rather not be feeling.” But he warns readers that “some difficult people aren’t; they are just caught up in a situation or role that requires them to act in a certain way.” And some other people get viewed as difficult simply “because they are not like us.”
Therefore it is good policy to “develop the habit of asking yourself why someone might be difficult.”
Potential readers should be warned in advance about an underlying irony in this book. Dr. Rosen explains, “To understand our encounters with difficult people, we eventually need to accept the fact that we are them.”
Men and women whom we find hard to deal with are actually doing us a favor. As the author puts it, “Difficult people help to reveal the spaces inside us that need remodeling.”
He goes even further when he writes, “If you can find a place in your heart to love someone regardless of what they do, you are blessed. There is no better way in Creation to heal the difficulties between you.”
Ultimately, “the most powerful option for dealing with a difficult person is personal growth. Inner change inevitably leads to outer change.” This growth can come as we learn to deal with anger, discover how to forgive others, and develop greater knowledge of ourselves.
When I talked to Mark Rosen, he told me that the desire to reorient people loomed large in his thinking. “I wanted to say right from the beginning ‘stop complaining, stop blaming.’” He feels gratified that some psychotherapists have been giving his book to their clients to help them redirect their grievances against other people.
Clergy also have been finding it useful, thus confirming its value as a book of spirituality.
Dr. Rosen writes that the question most frequently addressed to him asks whether he practices what he preaches. With disarming humility he answers, “I try and regularly fall short,” a response that does this author considerable credit and at the same time pays tribute to the challenges posed by his book.
Richard Griffin