Comment by toyg
5 years ago
> I used to do tech support
As someone who also "graduated" through the trenches of tech-support, I think you underestimate how much that job hardened you and made you able to evaluate this sort of situations in a more detached way. The ability to calm down, bypass a human, and get to the root of a problem standing behind such human, is a skill that few people develop outside of such jobs. Even in healthcare, where "troubleshooting" agitated people is an almost daily occurrence, not everyone learns to cope.
Perhaps. And that's what, in my opinion, people should actively engage in learning.
Perhaps somebody should build a chat-bot which would insult you in various ways and you are to just look at that and respond calmly (while being mindful of your feelings and avoiding feeling bad). That might suit for a risk-free exercise. And as I have mentioned, anonymous image boards are a useful experience too.
BTW I've seen a number of movies about the military where a sergeant would shower the recruits with humiliating insults - perhaps that's the purpose of the act.
Whatever, I can recommend "the fourth way" book by Peter D. Ouspensky to whoever feels interested in developing their capacity to deal with negative emotions rationally and doesn't mind a humble bit of mystical speaking (there is some + it is not really scientific as a whole yet I find it quite rational and, well, amazing). It has helped me a lot.
The most famous of those movies is the one where one of the recruits snaps and murders the sergeant and himself. Not a great example of how human interactions should go.