Guardrails Are Not Solutions
It is frustrating to deal with people who lack any sort of curiosity. They go through life stumbling from one problem to another, without any inclination to know why the problem existed or how it ever got resolved. Naturally they have no interest in preventing those problems in the future. Even when they try, their idea of prevention is simply erecting more guardrails.
The trouble with such people is that they operate from within their personal safety net. Everything is about them. Their emotions take priority over the issue at hand. So every problem they attempt to resolve gets filtered through the need to satisfy their feelings first. This is the frustrating part: more often than not, the solution that feels satisfying is different from the solution that is actually right.
For them, preserving their emotional core takes precedence over finding real solutions. Everything is perceived as an attack. When you are emotionally secure, you operate from a place of curiosity. You treat everything as a puzzle to be solved. The right questions occur to you naturally. Instead of taking everything as a personal affront, you begin to wonder what actually produced the issue, what the ideal outcome looks like, what the second best outcome would be, and what is required of you to reach it.
This approach is calmer and longer lasting. You understand human emotions better because you have already resolved your own. What you feel takes a back seat to what is required of you. When you eventually solve the problem, the sense of accomplishment outweighs the emotional turmoil you were containing. This elevates your self esteem, and your brain reinforces the same behaviour again.
People who are emotionally driven are operating from a template handed to them by others. No one has ever told them that what they feel is unreasonable. They have always been rewarded for doing the bare minimum. Their demands were always met. They were never made to sit with disappointment. What little self control they possess also stems from fear, fear of what shouldn't be done lest it harm them. So they absorb that fear too into their emotional template.
In the end, you are dealing with a person who has never built a template of their own, because they have never internalised their suffering. They never had to, and once the emotional template solidified, they never wanted to. But life happens to everyone, even them, and when their emotional security is threatened, they suffer more than most. It isn't pleasant to watch them suffer, but at least you understand why.
Their endless suffering has one root cause: a lack of evolution in thinking. The better way to deal with this is to acknowledge the emotion but still ask what the right solution is. What feels right and what is right can sometimes differ. You can only play the cards you've been dealt, not the cards you wish were in the deck.
You think about a solution only once the cards are dealt. That is circumstantial thinking. You examine the circumstances and then determine the right approach, rather than deciding on a fixed approach and forcing it onto every circumstance. People who claim to have rigid principles, who insist they do not tolerate such and such, are usually the ones who end up suffering endlessly. They cannot regulate their emotions well. Too much anger, too much hatred for certain kinds of people, too much conflict in their life, too narrow a vision to contain it.
None of this requires you to ignore your emotions. On the contrary, it requires you to be cognizant of them, to be aware of their existence. You need to dig deeper into the cause behind those emotions. What are you feeling, and why does the feeling exist? When someone insults you, how do you perceive the attack? Until you uncover your true identity and resolve the internal conflict, you will never resolve the external ones.
As you feel within, so you will reflect outward. The path to external conquest runs through internal conquest first.