When your partner attacks you or complains about you, retaliation may be tempting, but it's often not the healthiest solution. Try these strategies instead, writes swhitbo
, and emotional exhaustion. Perhaps you can identify with these outcomes if you’ve been at the receiving end of that ever-critical partner.The Canadian researchers proposed that one way that people cope with violations of their sense of justice is to engage in simple retaliation. This might strike you as extremely counterproductive but, as Liang et al. suggest, the retaliation doesn’t have to occur in reality to be effective.
In the comprehensive model that Liang and her collaborators tested, the roles of retaliation and a sense of justice were examined as influences on the physical and psychological health of the participants. The measure of retaliation asked participants to indicate how often in the past year they were rude or impolite toward their supervisor.
Following a sample of nearly 200 employed adults over a 4-month period, the authors were able to demonstrate that retaliation actually helped mediate the effects of abusive supervision on physical and psychological health, at least for the period of the study. However, it wasn't just the release of pent-up3 Ways to Neutralize Your Partner’s Complaints
You might be wondering by now whether your best bet for dealing with a critical partner is to go ahead and start your very own retaliation campaign. However, in discussing their findings, a much better solution is to change the organizational culture so that abusive behavior becomes no longer tolerated.
How can use these findings to change the"organizational culture" of your own home? These three strategies provide some practical guides:. Because employees whose supervisors treat them badly can experience significant long-term mental and physical effects, it’s possible for you to be affected as well by an overly demanding and harsh partner. Don’t ignore those effects but instead use them to move on to try to change things.