Dealing With Neurotics

By Charles Euchner

When you think of neurotic people, you think of someone who compulsively sponges down a clean kitchen counter, or who asks a dozen questions about an issue that’s already been settled, or someone who hovers over kids with all kinds of concerns about classes, teachers, other kids, camp, lessons, friends.

You think of someone who cannot let go of things that need to be let go. You think of someone so nervous and insecure, that he doesn’t let anyone else be calm and secure.

At least a quarter of all Americans — and maybe as many as half — are neurotic in some way.

How do you define neurotic. Albert Ellis offers this pithy definition in his book How To Live With a “Neurotic” at Home and At Work:

Neurotics, according to Ellis, display many of the following traits:

• Indecision, doubt, and conflict
  
• Inadequacy feelings
  
• Guilt and self-blame
  
• Hostility and resentment
  
• Ingratiation
  
• Inefficiency and stupidity
  
• Self-deceit and lack of realism
  
• Defensiveness
  
• Rigidity and compulsiveness
  
• Shyness and withdrawal
  
• Psychosomatic symptoms and hypochondria
  
• Depression
  
• Self-centeredness and an inability to love
  
• Overexcitablity and manic tendencies
  
• Overambitiousness and compulsiveness striving
  
• Alcoholism and drug abuse
  

Yikes! What a list! What in the world can you do to cope with someone displaying even a handful of these traits?

Ellis has some tough words of advice. There’s not much you can do to reason with these kinds of people. Logic and rationality don;t have much to do with their everyday habits. You can’t say, in the words of Isaiah, “Come, let us reason together.” Any reasoning is met with defensiveness, denial, even aggression.

Instead, you need to coax a neurotic out of his or her embattled and confused state. This is beyond the capability of most people. It requires a Christ-like patience and wisdom that most of us lack.

Here’s the toughest part of Ellis’s analysis (found on page 89 of How To Live With a Neurotic):

“One central rule in dealing with a ‘neurotic’: do not criticize! As we have pointed out previously, ‘neurotics’ arrive at their state largely form taking criticism too seriously. Because they make themselves oversensitized, they take further criticism badly. If you down them (or even their traits), you may contrbute to increasing their feelings of worthlessness.

“‘Neurotics,’ in particular, tend to react poorly to appeals that take this kind of criticism. To tell them that they should, for their own good, go from point 1 to 2 equals: ‘Look here, you fool! You know damned well that you harm yourself by remaining at 1 instead of going to 2. Now why don’t you stop acting like a dunce and do the right thing?’ To almost everyone that will sound like censure.”

In dealing with a neurotic — or someone with neurotic tendencies — you have to have amazing patience. You cannot react to every irrational, defensive, or stubborn action. You can’t say, “Hey, pal! You’re not getting it! Try this way!”

Instead, you have to find what works and coax it out of your friend (or spouse, coworker, children, parents, or whatever). You need positive reinforcement of what works, not negative reaction to what doesn’t work.

Nothing could be harder. But it’s the only way that works.