Whether you like it or not, not everybody will be cool with you divorcing your spouse. Maybe a friend, relative, neighbor or colleague but real life includes people who will scorn your decision. Because of their orientation or closeness to your spouse, they may despise you. This doesn’t mean it’s sure you will experience this, but due to the nature of human beings, it’s possible. Negativity emanates from negative people. They fixate on your mistakes, lavish insults and make nasty comments about you. In fact, it doesn’t matter whether you served your spouse, or you got served; negativity after divorce has no respect for who served or got served.

The implications of negativity can have an adverse effect on the solid determination you have made and the strength that has kept you going. Negativity makes you question your decision and, as a result, it can make you regret your action. It can make you weak and weakness will slow down your growth. Negative people won’t even know the effect on you. Still, when they see you succumbing to their negativity, they don’t stop. Instead, they try harder with the sole aim of making you feel bad about yourself. Therefore, if you are planning to divorce or get divorced, it is important to empower yourself with ways to deal with negative people. This will help you preserve yourself and prevent you from being drained emotionally. 

Some people opt for quivering, but it is a terrible option. It is better to stand up, stay strong, disarm their negativity and shield yourself from their hostility by taking these steps:

Maintain Your Emotional Distance

The first step is to ensure you don’t get infected with toxicity. Do not stoop to their level by engaging in their habitual negativity. However, this doesn’t mean you should ignore them, nor should you try to make them see the bright side. Attempting to convince someone to stop being negative may lead them to intensify their behavior.

Set Boundaries

Setting boundaries gives you a break from negative people creeping into your life. Keeping them at arm’s length is vital to avoid exhaustion. If you are frustrated or angry, take time to calm yourself. Engage them only when you are cool to have the patience to handle them with grace. Also, if there is an event, and there is a need to hang out with them, ensure it’s a group setting so you won’t have to deal with such person one on one.

Brace and Caution Yourself

Experiencing negativity often makes one slide into frustration and anger, but endeavor to save yourself the headache. Eventually, when negative people realize you won’t give them the reaction they seek, they tend to take their negativity elsewhere. To maintain inner peace, try to ignore insensitive comments.

Be the Light that Drives the Darkness Away

Do not confront negativity with negativity. It is only light that can lift darkness. Therefore, be the light by staying positive. You can affirm your positivity by being nice to negative people. You only have control over yourself, so focus on your happiness. Rise above negativity and stay positive always.

Squash Negative Self-Talk

There is no doubt that sometimes you can absorb other people's negativity, but you should not dwell on it. There is nothing wrong with feeling bad about how someone is relating to you, we are all human and we all have feelings. But your self-talk, which can be thoughts about the negativity you are passing through, either intensify the negativity or help you move past it. Never should you allow negative self-talk because it’s self-defeating. It can send you down an emotional path that is difficult for you to pull yourself out of.

Taking these steps during or after divorce will help you sail through the negativities of divorce and propel you towards the bright future that awaits you.

Joseph Abdalla