Psychoanalysis

What To Do When You Are Feeling Annoyed By Someone

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When you’re feeling annoyed by someone it’s an important moment to actively raise your conscious awareness around what your own state of mind has been like of late. From the psychoanalytic point of view it’s a good bet that actually you haven’t been feeling too comfortable in your own skin, that you’ve been carrying around some unpleasant, unwanted thoughts and feelings.

Now, we’re not necessarily saying that the person annoying you isn’t saying and doing things that most people would agree are in fact annoying. What we’re saying is that unconsciously, when you’re carrying around the burden of unpleasant, unwanted thoughts and feelings, you’re looking for any and all suitable targets to project these feelings onto in order to find some psychic relief. You get to feel justified in unloading all of that unwanted psychic energy onto a person in the form of harsh words and deeds when the rationalization is in place that this person is being annoying.

If you were feeling comfortable in your own skin, if you were feeling healthy and happy and positive about yourself and your life, the same stimuli that you define as annoying would probably slide right off of you, you’d take this person’s comments and actions in stride and most likely quickly change the cadence and tone of the interaction to something more to your liking using your own positive energy without even thinking too much about what was occurring.

If you make yourself more attuned to your own state of mind you’ll be less likely to project the unwanted thoughts and feelings that belong to you onto the unsuspecting victims around you. But if you really do believe that you can’t let the annoying stimuli go without remarking upon them you can still approach the situation with loving speech. Becoming more aware of your own negative state of mind will help prime you for that too. You can remind yourself that you’ve been suffering of late, in ways small or big, and that you don’t like how it feels and therefore don’t want to add more suffering to the world with harsh, unkind words or actions. Ask yourself, “What can I say or do right now to improve the situation for both of us rather than just for me?”

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