February 28, 2019
Don’t Bug Me:
A Field Guide for Repelling the People Who Annoy You
James D. Bash
ISBN: 978-0-692-04267-0
New Book Teaches How to Repel Annoying People Who Exhibit Bug-Like Behaviors
We all know just how annoying a mosquito can be with its incessant buzzing and threat of biting us. We’ve all been stung by a bee or bit by a chigger, and we’ve all applied various bug sprays to ward them off. But what about the human pests in our lives? They are a lot more difficult to fend off, and their bites can be a lot more painful. Fortunately, Dr. James D. Bash has a remedy. In Don’t Bug Me, he offers practical advice for how to avoid or cope with the various “bug-us behaviors” of the people around us.
Don’t Bug Me is divided into eleven chapters, each one depicting a specific annoying and sometimes downright bad behavior that people exhibit. Bash equates these various behaviors with those of bugs and then offers practical steps on how to cope with the individual behavior. For example, people who give subtle insults that we may not even notice at first are insults but that hurt us later are equated with chigger behavior. Gossiping is equated with the behavior of ticks. As the book goes on, the behaviors become more intense, culminating in narcissistic personality disorder being equated with hornet behavior and psychopathy being equated with scorpion behavior. Bash concludes the book by looking at some positive behaviors he equates with those of butterflies, honeybees, and dragonflies.
Each chapter delves deeply into the various behaviors. For example, the chapter on bullying looks closely at not only a definition of bullying and how the behavior plays out, but it also considers the reasons people engage in bullying. What impresses me most about the book, however, is that Bash isn’t afraid of asking the bigger questions, such as “Why am I being bullied?” and “Why am I being lied to?” and “Why is this person manipulating me?” The number-one repellent to such behaviors lies within ourselves, and so does the attraction. People bully us or exhibit other bug-us behaviors because they know they can and because we let them. Consequently, Bash offers strategies for warding off these negative behaviors.
Don’t Bug Me then becomes a deep look into who we are as people. It does not claim that the victims of such behaviors are to blame for being bullied, cheated, or lied to, but rather, that the victims need to learn how not to put themselves in the position of becoming victims. That doesn’t mean, either, that we have to confront the bullies by fighting them, but that we can learn skills for avoiding people who exhibit such behaviors, and skills for coping with them when they can’t be avoided so we no longer have to be their victims.
Going yet a step deeper, Bash asks us to consider when we may have exhibited some of the negative behaviors he examines in the book. Perhaps we will come to the realization that we also try to manipulate people—and don’t even realize we are doing it. Deeper issues may lay beneath such behavior such as codependency, including people-pleasing. We may discover that we are, for whatever reason, unable to express our needs in a straightforward manner so we try to get our needs met by manipulating others, by engaging in passive-aggressive behavior, or by people-pleasing and even trying to guilt others into doing what we want. Realizing we have such tendencies and learning how to control and eliminate them will not only help us have healthier relationships, but it will allow us to walk in the shoes of the other people using bug-us behaviors. We will be better able to understand such people then, including that they are just doing the best they can with the tools they have learned—tools that may not be working very well for them.
Don’t Bug Me then is not just a fun book that allows us to think of the annoying people in our lives as bugs. It’s a deep look into human psychology—although in a fun way—to make us realize truths not just about others, and not just about ourselves, but about the relationships that can be formed when two people come together, and the tools needed to make those relationships healthy.
Throughout the book, Dr. Bash also makes learning these tools easy. Just as we may use DEET to ward off real-life bugs, we can use the DEET philosophy to improve our lives. DEET here is a mnemonic for Determination, Education, Effort, and Trust. I’ll let you read the book to understand the mnemonic, but the last word comes down to learning to trust your intuition about other people and also learning to trust yourself about whether the insults people hurl at you are true. Dr. Bash uses other mnemonics and catchy phrases and comparisons throughout the book to make his points memorable.
Don’t Bug Me is a book that will help anyone who is suffering from insults, low self-esteem, relationship issues, bullying, or any of the other problems that can arise when two people come into contact. Ultimately, it offers practical and proven advice that will improve anyone’s life. It should be required reading for everyone, middle school and older. Then it would bring about an awakening of why many of us do things to others we shouldn’t or don’t even realize we are doing, and how, ultimately, we can create a happier planet by just learning how to treat one another a little better.
For more information about Don’t Bug Me and James Bash, visit his Amazon page.
— Tyler R. Tichelaar, PhD and award-winning author of When Teddy Came to Town and The Best Place.
