Do you ever just deal with someone who feels like a social Piranha? You’re going about your day, enjoying yourself, feeling hopeful about things, and then they come through, like a hurricane, and when they leave, you’re left with the wreckage. You were feeling good and now you feel defeated, dark, hopeless, helpless, worried…You really feel like somebody put you through a meat grinder and you’re barely a pulp of what you were before. Negative people have a way of doing that to you. Their energy is extremely powerful.
If you’re a positive person, your energy – your light – is also powerful. But positive people don’t typically seek to actively and aggressively put their energy onto others the way negative people do. They’re constantly trying to shed themselves of this yucky feeling they live with, and some of the way they do that is by passing it off onto others. They don’t, by the way, rid themselves of negativity by spraying it everywhere. They typically find that it’s somehow only amplified after they share it. If you have a family member, coworker, neighbor, or someone you must regularly interact with who behaves like this, you need to protect your good energy. Here are ways to navigate interactions with negative people.
Keep the attention on them
Negative individuals are typically also critical individuals. Of course, never of themselves (if they were self-critical, they’d realize they were negative, and do something about it). They find some relief in being critical of others, which is why, when you interact with them, it’s important to keep the focus on them. Just ask them question after question about themselves, so they don’t have the chance to start picking apart your life. If there is one thing negative people may like more than being critical, it’s being showered with attention.
