Last month, Assistant Professor of Psychological Science Jessica Stern ’12 published Beyond difficult: An attachment-based guide to dealing with challenging people. Stern, a developmental scientist with expertise in attachment theory, close relationships, and child development, discusses why she wrote the book and how she hopes the content will help readers.
Answers have been edited for clarity and length.
Who is this book for?
This book is for anybody who has had a difficult relationship—whether that’s in your family life, dealing with a difficult kid as an educator or as a parent, or navigating difficult work relationships. For most people, we’ve had at least one relationship where we wished we had a guide we could pull out and say, “What do I do?” My coauthor, Rachel Sampson, and I tried to write the book that we ourselves wish we’d had in some of those difficult situations.
We wanted the book to be very accessible, even to people who had never read a psychology research paper before. We wanted them to know that there’s a fascinating science of how to build stronger marriages, friendships and workplace relationships.
You spend a lot of time focusing on highly sensitive and neurodivergent people. Why do you highlight these two groups?
These groups are often misunderstood and mislabeled, either as a bad kid or as a difficult adult. As a developmental psychologist, what I see in educational spaces is that children who are highly sensitive or neurodivergent are often mislabeled by teachers and by peers as being the kid no one wants to deal with. Instead, we can understand that everybody’s nervous system is wired a little bit differently, that it’s biologically based and not something we can change. But what we can do is provide a supportive environment that doesn’t overstimulate these kids so that they either act out or shut down. The same basic principle is true for adults. Each of our temperaments is a little bit different. Understanding that the person next to you might be more reactive to the context that they happen to be, we might look at the environmental circumstances that might be leading them to act in this way.
In the book, we also look at people’s relationship histories and attachment style. One of the other major reasons behind difficult behavior is that someone is feeling threatened, insecure or triggered. Usually that comes from a place of not having had secure, safe relationships as a child or as an adult. One of the nice things about that framework is, first, it inspires a little bit more compassion, rather than combativeness, toward the person. But second, there are certain strategies that we can then use to help the relationship feel safe enough that the person can calm down and have a constructive conversation.
How did you and your coauthor team up for this book?
Rachel is a clinical psychologist in Australia. She and I met at a professional training many years ago and discovered that we had similar interests, but I was doing more of the scientific work and she was putting those ideas into practice with her clients. It’s very easy for me, as a researcher, to say, “Here’s what people should do” in theory, but it’s a very different thing to be a practitioner who’s seen it in action with real people.
Should this book be read in order, or can the reader jump around?
The book is divided into three parts. The first part is about understanding difficult behavior: getting a better grasp of what’s really going on when someone rubs you the wrong way. The second part of the book is about working on oneself. Based on your own temperament and attachment style, what are the things that you’re bringing to this interaction that you can strengthen or improve? There’s a lot that’s within our control. Part three is about the relationship. Once you’ve worked on yourself, how do you strengthen this relationship? What are specific things that you can do, like giving feedback in an effective way, not letting things stew? And what do you do when another person is just not going to change?
You’re about to become a first-time mom. How do you hope the content of this book will help you parent?
Most parents have probably experienced their kid acting in ways that they might describe as difficult, for reasons that might initially feel inexplicable. I hope that as I enter parenthood, I can remember to always be curious about what my child is communicating and what I may be missing. My hope is that I can be genuinely curious about what my child is trying to tell me so that I can meet their needs and help them flourish in their own relationships.