After getting asked how to handle negative people, the speaker shares three moves: send a mental birdie, walk away, or confront them. With PTSD, his emotional energy is limited, so he stopped wasting it protecting people from their own stupidity.
So I had someone leave a comment on a post about— I talked about negativity and how to deal with negativity. And they asked me, how do I deal with negativity? Well, I sent them an emoticon of a birdie finger and I thought, well, that's somewhat helpful. But then I started to think about it and in reality, that is how I deal with negativity. I don't care anymore. I either give people a mental birdie I walk away from it, or I just passively-aggressively attack their negative thoughts and comments. I don't care anymore. The amount of energy— I'm tired of spending emotional energy trying to protect people from their own stupidity, and I don't want to do it anymore. So I just walk away from it, I confront it, or I just can't be bothered. And I think there comes a place where you realize that you've got limited emotional bandwidth to deal with the things that are important. And someone being a whiner is just not one of them.
