Essential Oils for Navigating Difficult People

I have a hard time with “difficult people”, often defined as people who are not easy to get along with. 

As an introvert and an empath, I actively seek to avoid conflict.

I therefore find it extremely stressful to spend time with people who exhibit disrespectful behavior, are combative, hostile, or confrontational, as their behavior both drains my energy and significantly impacts my ability to feel safe and supported.

I often go out of my way to avoid interaction with difficult people.  

But, as we all know, there are times when contact cannot be avoided. I have one of those situations coming up—with someone whose anger and verbal violence exceeds anything I have ever experienced before.  

As that interaction cannot be avoided and I know that I cannot change this person, I have been actively researching strategies for dealing with difficult people so I might best modulate my reaction.

Characteristics of Difficult People

Some personalities can be more challenging than others due to traits that may include:

• Easily and frequently offended
• Notoriously intense, inconsiderate, or outspoken
• Overtly hostile 
• Needing to be right or insisting on having things their way
• Making others feel uncomfortable 
• Verbally violent
• Diminishing, belittling, or insulting
• Bad temper or unexpected fits of rage
• Focus only on themselves
• Ignore your opinion
• Use emotional blackmail (threatening, bullying, sulking, becoming cold) to manipulate you into doing what they want
• Refuse to honor and engage in the usual rules and social conventions
• Attacking when someone seems too competent or strong
• Defensive or combative when held accountable for inappropriate behavior
• Aggressive, hostile, or rude to others 
• Difficulty regulating emotions
• Exhibiting toxic traits, like gossiping, catastrophizing, excluding, or triangulating
• Second-guessing or challenging everything others say or do
• Lacking concern or empathy for others 
• Feel justified in their abusive behavior
• Grandiosity or acting superior to others
• Expecting you to drop or change plans and accommodate them
• Berates you or treats you like you are incompetent and unintelligent

How Essential Oils Help You Navigate Difficult People

Essential oils can be powerful tools to help you navigate difficult situations, as they enable you to work through your emotions and release feelings that may arise in response to challenging people, including anger and fear. Your sense of smell is directly linked to the emotional control center of your brain, known as the amygdala, where emotions and emotional memories are stored.

Your sense of smell is the only one of your five senses that is directly linked to this unconscious area of your brain, known as your limbic lobe, making the sense of smell and the tool of essential oils the most direct path to healing emotions like blame, shame, and guilt.

Essential oils inhaled through the nasal passageways enable immediate access to the regions of the brain that house intense emotions, such as anger, rage, and terror. This allows us to integrate and release them, rather than suppressing and accumulating them to our detriment.

The word “emotion” can be translated as “energy in motion.” Emotion is the experience of energy moving through our bodies. This emotional energy operates at a higher speed than thought, and essential oils can help us clear the energetic residue of blame, so it doesn’t remain in our thought patterns and negatively impact our energy field or health.

Essential Oils for Navigating Difficult People

Rather than continuing to endure the venomous and often verbally violent behavior silently, I have been attempting to proactively determine positive strategies to help support my emotional regulation and sense of safety, even in the face of extremely difficult or toxic people. 

Essential oils help support emotional regulation, enabling you to better handle challenging situations with difficult people.

1. Parasympathetic to Help Calm Your Reaction

Difficult people may act out because they want to rile you up and get a reaction out of you. If you react, there’s a good chance they will repeat the behavior or grow more abusive. Instead, remaining calm and regulated helps you to ignore the person’s behavior. 

Parasympathetic can help you maintain balance and prevent your fight-or-flight response from being activated. This, in turn, enables you to remain calm and control your reaction, regardless of how aggressive or threatening the difficult person may become. When you can activate your parasympathetic nervous system, you can think more clearly, speak more calmly, monitor your tone and facial expression, and avoid raising your voice. Staying calm and composed also enables you to de-escalate emotion, prevent potential violence, and move to a place where solutions can be perceived and acted upon. 

Applying Parasympathetic™ on the vagus nerve (behind the earlobe on the mastoid bone) activates your parasympathetic nervous system. It allows you to feel relaxed and safe, which helps to trigger chemical and hormonal reactions that allow you to connect, empathize, and bond with others. It also enables you to read other people’s facial expressions and assess whether they are safe to approach or whether they should be avoided, which helps improve the outcome of any conversation.

Activating your parasympathetic nervous system enhances your perception of being understood, seen, heard, and felt, which in turn improves your mental and emotional capacity. When you feel safe with others, your social engagement system is activated, enhancing your ability to connect and help others feel safe.

As my friend Eva Detko notes in her new book, Sovereign Health Solution, “Chronic stress ultimately also changes the neurochemicals in the brain, which modulate cognition and mood, including serotonin. Stress can also interfere with our balance between rational thinking and emotions.”

She elaborates that “one of the signs that somebody’s vagus nerve function is poor is their disproportionate reactions to everyday stresses and situations. People whose ventral vagus nerve does not function well have a skewed perception of the world and the people around them. They often misinterpret what others are trying to communicate, and tend to assume the worst. They tend to become easily agitated, are highly reactive, and often jump to conclusions, which can hurt their relationships. Their brains say that danger is everywhere. On the other hand, a healthy ventral vagus nerve allows us to tap into the feelings that warn us of safety versus danger, to connect to ourselves and the world, and to empathize and bond with others, which supports safety. It also enables us to read other people’s facial expressions and assess whether they are safe to approach or whether they should be avoided.”

2. Heart to Help Practice Empathy

It’s easy to feel attacked, get angry, or even lash out when someone treats you poorly, but you never know what is going on in your life.  Instead of jumping to judgment or defensive posturing, it can be helpful to drop into your heart space and practice compassion, empathy, and forgiveness. You can ease your own negative emotions by assuming that others are trying their best and that difficult people are acting out because something challenging is happening to them. Assuming good intent or giving others the benefit of the doubt can help you navigate through interactions with difficult people.

Rather than judging what the person does or says, try to listen and understand where they are coming from. This doesn’t mean that you need to agree with them; it’s just that you’re choosing to treat them with the respect you seek from them. Research suggests that engaging with a person this way–acknowledging their point of view without judging it–can make them feel more understood… and, as a result, less defensive or difficult.

When this person is speaking, try not to interrupt with counterarguments or attempts to get them to see things from a different, perhaps more positive point of view. Instead, try to paraphrase back to the person the points you think they are making, and acknowledge the emotions they seem to be expressing. Showing genuine interest and concern for a difficult person can help de-escalate the situation and potentially motivate them to treat you with respect in return. 

Apply Heart™ over your heart (on the left side of the chest) to balance the heart and support, integrate, and reset all the body’s systems, including mental clarity, physical health, and emotional balance. Opening your heart with the Heart™ blend may help you “treat others the way you want to be treated”.  

3. Kidney Support™ and Adrenal to Alleviate Fear 

Aggressive or erratic behavior can be unsettling and disorienting. When a difficult person blows up at you out of the blue, it’s hard not to get upset, especially when the blow-up feels violent or otherwise unsafe. Your body responds by activating the sympathetic “fight-or-flight” branch of your nervous system, which then triggers the release of stress hormones from the adrenal glands.

Your kidneys, which sit directly below your adrenal glands, are correlated with the emotion of fear.  In Chinese medicine, feelings of anxiety and paranoia can be held in the kidneys, impairing function. Applying Vibrant Blue Oils Kidney Support™ over the kidneys (one inch up and out from the belly button), the back of the neck, or around the outside of the earlobes can help us flow through fear.

Your adrenal glands release hormones like adrenaline and cortisol, which help you mobilize to either fight or flee. Their anatomical proximity to the kidneys may help explain how chronic and ongoing stress can deplete kidney energy, leaving you stuck in a cycle of fear. Prolonged periods of stress can deplete our reserves of these hormones and exhaust the adrenal glands. Applying Vibrant Blue Oils Adrenal® blend over the adrenal glands (back of the body, one fist up from the 12th rib) may help to increase the body’s ability to adapt to stress and maintain healthy adrenal function.

4. Liver Support™ for Safely and Gently Releasing Anger

Difficult people who mistreat you may prompt feelings of anger, resentment, or rage.  Anger is an active emotion that can motivate you to take action and possibly shift the dynamic with the difficult person or remove yourself from the situation.

Repressed or suppressed anger is believed to be stored in your liver, according to Chinese medicine.  Energetically, your liver is responsible for maintaining harmony and the smooth movement of energy (known as chi) throughout the body, including the smooth transition between feelings and emotions as situations change around us. This liver energy supports your drive, planning, endurance, perseverance, quick, clear intellect, ambition, patience, and organizational abilities.

When your liver energy is balanced, you feel kind, benevolent, compassionate, and generous. When your liver is physically or energetically congested or stagnant, you might experience intense feelings of angry outbursts, irritability, resentment, frustration, rage, impatience, jealousy, or even depression.

Liver Support™ helps support the release of anger, including frequent irritation, impatience, resentment, or frustration, as well as being critical of yourself or others, control issues, an inability to express your feelings, feelings of not being heard, not feeling loved, or not being recognized or appreciated. Formulated to help move through and release anger and negative emotions attached to traumatic experiences from the cells of the liver to promote optimal healing. The oils in this blend help the body recognize, work through, and release anger, fear, or frustration caused by traumatic experiences, so they don’t overwhelm you.

Liver Support™ allows you to gently let go of negative emotions, including repressed anger, which can create stuck energy and impede your liver’s ability to heal. Place the bottle under your nose and breathe deeply, fully inhaling the oil for 3–7 breaths, then slowly exhale while intentionally releasing the anger. It helps you breathe into and work through the emotion.  You will know that the essential oil is working when you no longer smell it.

You can topically apply 2-3 drops of Liver Support™ over your liver (on the right side of the body, under the breast) to help you work through and release your anger, and boost your resilience. You can also apply it around the ankles, as this is often an area where we hold resistance to moving forward in life and block the ability to receive joy and pleasure. Start at the back of the ankle and apply under the ankle bone, then move around to the front and back under the other ankle bone, all while allowing yourself to release your anger. For more tips on detoxifying emotions, read this article.

5. Small Intestine Support for Healthy Boundaries

Healthy boundaries are the limits you establish around yourself to protect your time, emotions, body, and mental health from the unhealthy, draining, manipulative, or damaging behavior of difficult people.  Boundaries are the invisible lines and gates you have set up to inform people what you are willing to do and not willing to do. These boundaries help define what you are willing to say “yes” to and what you decide to say “no” to. They give you a sense of agency and sovereignty over your time, energy, and physical safety.

Boundaries also convey to people how they are allowed to treat you. No matter the situation, you should never be expected to accept poor, inexcusable, or violent behavior. Everyone is entitled to respect, and you have a right to express your feelings if you feel you have been disrespected.

Clarity about your values and needs can help you create clear boundaries. The more precise you are about your identity and needs, the easier it is to honor them. When it comes to difficult people, boundaries can include avoiding time with them or clearly defining what kind of behavior you will and will not allow. People treat you the way you allow yourself to be treated, and clearly stating and enforcing that you will not tolerate verbal violence or hostility can help protect you in your interactions with difficult people.  

For example, when setting boundaries with difficult people, consider making it about you and your limits, not about them.  You can tell the difficult person what you are going to do (such as leaving if you feel attacked), not what they should do. You’re only in control of what you do, but what you do can limit the other person. This works because it’s argument-proof and can’t be refuted.

Small Intestine Support helps you establish clear boundaries and advocate for yourself in a respectful manner that allows you to prioritize your own physical, mental, and emotional needs. On the physical level, the small intestine plays a critical role in the digestion process, absorbing and assimilating key nutrients while preventing harmful pathogens and toxins from entering the body. On an emotional level, the small intestine plays a similarly discerning role with emotions, helping to understand experiences and determine healthy and appropriate relationships and boundaries.

Small Intestine Support™ blend supports the healthy functioning of the small intestine as it sorts and transforms food, feelings, and ideas into valuable ingredients for the body/mind. It also helps correct imbalances where you are overly sensitive to others’ criticism, emotions, or opinions at the expense of your own.  Small Intestine Support™ can be applied around the ears or smelled. You can start at the bottom of the ear, at the earlobes, and gently massage upward along the exterior of the ear, targeting many of the major reflexology points. This article and chart highlight specific points on the ears associated with various issues.

Featured Oils:

Ready to get started? Click the link below to order today:

• Parasympathetic™ available here
• Heart™ available here
• Kidney Support™ available here
• Adrenal® available here
• Liver Support™ available here
• Small Intestine Support™ available here

References:

• https://managementtraininginstitute.com/dealing-with-difficult-people/
• https://www.dr-eva.com/a/2147506584/nfUHASyo
• https://www.academia.edu/5643678/The_relative_effectiveness_of_active_listening_during_initial_interactions
• https://vibrantblueoils.com/introducing-emotion-balance-blends/
• https://vibrantblueoils.com/applying-essential-oils-on-the-ears/