#033 When They Lose Control, You Don’t: The Stoic Art of Dealing with Difficult People

It’s been a few weeks since my last post, but I’m back. I try to write every week, though I’ve never believed in forcing words out just to meet a schedule. I write when something moves me, and a recent interaction did exactly that. It gave me the spark for this week’s reflection.

People will test you. Clients who belittle your work, friends who speak from envy, family who weaponize words when angry. They lose their grip on reason, and in those moments, you’re tempted to meet fire with fire. But the moment you react in kind, you become one of them. Yet another person enslaved by impulse.

A Stoic doesn’t measure strength by how loudly he responds, but by how little he’s disturbed.

Marcus Aurelius once wrote: “When another blames you or hates you… their soul is in turmoil. Why should you be disturbed as well?” That line is the essence of emotional sovereignty. Most people don’t want peace, they want control. They insult, provoke, or test you to pull you into their chaos. The second you take the bait, they win.

The Stoic’s task is simple but brutal: stay composed while others fall apart.

Their chaos isn’t your responsibility

Every insult, outburst, or tantrum is a confession of inner instability. People lash out because their minds are disordered, not because truth is on their side. Seeing that clearly is liberation. You stop personalizing their behavior. You start treating it as data and evidence of what rules them.

When a client is disrespectful, it reveals their insecurity, not your inadequacy. When a friend grows spiteful, it’s their ego burning from comparison. When family members attack in anger, it’s because they’ve lost control of their own narrative. Your role isn’t to absorb it, it’s to remain unmoved.

Every insult is an invitation to lose yourself

Over time, I have come to realize that just as misery loves company, anger wants company. It thrives on reaction. When someone offends you, they hand you a test: Will you rule yourself, or will they? The Stoic doesn’t suppress emotion, they observe it, dissect it, and refuse to become it.

That pause between stimulus and response is where maturity lives. You don’t respond immediately because truth doesn’t need haste. You let time strip the emotion away, and when you do respond, it’s surgical, not emotional.

Resilience is not endurance, it’s detachment

A lot of us tend to mistake resilience for tolerance as if being mistreated and staying silent makes us noble. It doesn’t. Stoicism isn’t about enduring abuse; it’s about deciding what deserves your energy. Detachment means you don’t fight every battle, because most battles are noise. You withdraw your emotional investment. You become selective.

You can set boundaries with calm precision. You can walk away without explaining yourself. You can say, “This conversation isn’t productive,” and mean it. You don’t owe anyone your peace, and you don’t need to prove your calm. Power is quiet.

Don’t descend to their level

Matching someone’s insult with your own doesn’t make you equal, it makes you identical. Weak people mistake retaliation for strength. Strong people understand that the ultimate revenge is indifference.

The Stoic knows that silence unsettles the insecure more than any counterattack. When they shout and you don’t flinch, they face their own reflection: small, noisy, uncentered. You’ve already won without a word.

Control is the only real wealth

The Stoics understood something most people never do: the richest man isn’t the one who owns much, but the one who controls himself. External control is an illusion — over people, over outcomes, over perception. The only domain you truly command is your own mind.

When others lose control, they spend emotional capital recklessly. You, on the other hand, conserve yours. You stay deliberate. You choose reason over reaction, discipline over impulse, silence over noise. And that’s not weakness. Not at all. That’s mastery.

The truth is, difficult people will never disappear. The world more or less runs on conflict, ego, and misunderstanding. But as Stoics, our aim is not to fix the world, our aim is to stand steady in it.

So when someone loses their temper, let them. When they insult you, let them. When they spiral, stay still. The world measures strength by dominance. The Stoic measures it by control.

And in a room full of people shouting, be the one who doesn’t.

Speak soon,

Rey Mungai

Sophia • Andreia • Dikaiosyne • Sophrosyne

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