“The Problem With People Is That They’re Annoying”, or, Learning To Be Curious
“The problem with people is that they’re annoying.”
~Leon Hammer, M.D.
If we are to form an authentic, mutually respectful relationship with someone, we’ve got to accept them, “warts and all.” We’ve got to do that whole “love is a verb” thing, and learn to even love their “warts”.
The thing is though,
as our dear teacher Dr. Hammer said in one of his books, people actually *are* annoying. They get under our skin. They push our buttons. They say things they don’t mean. They say mean things.
Other-people-are-annoying tropes are all over the place: when your roommate (...spouse, kid, or whoever) leaves dirty underwear on the bathroom floor? Annoying. Your friends’ or partners’ little idiosyncrasies that were endearing at first? Annoying. The sounds of your lunch mate’s chewing, the kids crying, a restaurant roaring with so many voices that you can hardly hear yourself think? Annoying, an-NOY-ing, ANNOYING!
So what do we do with this barrage of other people’s annoying-ness?
In a word, the solution is to remain curious. One of my Hakomi Psychotherapy trainers was fond of saying things like “the opposite of fear isn’t calm. It’s curiosity.” And for me, the opposite of “annoyance” isn’t “tolerance”: it’s openness and curiosity.
In this sense, curiosity is nothing more than a willingness to be with whatever is getting under our skin—indeed, being with the feeling of something getting under our skin—with an open-minded kind of stance like “huh… So that’s happening and I’m having an experience about it. Interesting!”
Coming into relationship with the annoying stuff around us requires curiosity. But curiosity requires resilience, and resilience is the sort of thing that’s gotta be earned and learned. And the problem with things like patience and resilience is that learning patience requires patience, and earning resilience requires resilience.
So how do we learn patience and resilience?
We start small. For instance, is there some mildly annoying thing that you can bring your attention to? The next time it happens, can you slow down, take a breath or feel your belly and pay attention to it? And maybe also congratulate yourself for paying attention to it? If so, Congrats! You’ve just gained more resilience than the moment you took on this challenge. If not, Congrats! You’ve just learned a bit about the size of that annoyance. Maybe you could think of something smaller, something less annoying, and start there?
For those folks who have ever done Vipassana, this might remind you of the practice of “being with things as they are”... and then loving the heck out of them.
In Hakomi, we call this type of attention “loving presence,” and it’s a core tenet of the work that I do with clients…. But at the end of the day, even if it’s really tough for us humans to do sometimes, it’s also not all that fancy: it’s just a matter of staying curious toward what’s happening in the moment, and learning to love it for what it is, annoyance and all.