Jerkology associates
Strategic coaching for dealing with the total jerks trampling your life
Getting bullies to back off
We offer safe, practical, ethical techniques you haven't tried and just might work.
Diagnosis
Anyone can be difficult. I have precise methods for figuring out whether you're dealing with a total jerk.
Treatment Plan
Diagnosis is key to finding their vulnerabilities and the habits you have to break.
Interaction management
Changing how you interact so that their bulling stops working.
Prevention
Learning how to spot, treat, and avoid total jerks in the future.
Why work with me?
Just practical
Most advice on dealing with difficult people is too polite to work.
Tailored analysis
We analyize your jerk’s incentives and how to impose costs.
Surprise them
They have a way to win against all the obvious moves. So stop making them.
Surprise yourself
You’ll realize ways you’ve enabled them and you’ll cut that out.
About My Service
You’ve tried being nice; you’ve tried being tough, you’ve tried everything, and nothing works. You’d leave but you can’t. You’re stuck dealing with a total jerk. It’s soul-sucking, and you’ve run out of ideas.
If that’s you, you’re not alone. You’re up against one of the hardest challenges ever: How to humbly humble someone who will say or do anything to humiliate you.
I’m Jeremy Sherman, PhD. For decades, I’ve researched, coached, and taught advanced Psychoproctology: How to spot and stop absolute buttheads without becoming one. I have strategies you haven’t tried that we can tailor to your situation. Practical and efficient, it won’t break the bank or your conscience.
Testimonials
Memes about a meany's many means.
Get beyond clinical name-calling.
Psychological diagnosis is descriptive of the total jerk lifestyle, with a bunch of clinical-sounding categories that lay people throw around to sound neutral. My approach is not descriptive but explanatory going all the way back through natural history. There are plenty of predatory animals but being a total jerk is a human thing. All organisms evolve toward freedom and safety. With language, humans can “play god” using language robotically to act like they’re free to do whatever they want safely, dismissing all challenges to their behavior. It’s easy. Regardless of their rationalizations, lifestyle brands, or the origins of their addiction to playing God, some people grant themselves absolute freedom and safety. They become “herobots” robotically playing here, “trumpbots,” constantly playing trumped-up wildcard/trump cards to pretend they can do anything and can no wrong. It’s much easier to play god than be human if one can get away with it.
The challenge is to keep them from getting away with it: How to humbly humble people who will robotically say or do anything to avoid humility. That is your challenge and the world’s. This is the challenge my research and coaching is all about.
Dig Deeper
Psychologists simply assume motives and construct mechanistic models for how they operate in us, as if we're machines: This motive triggers that behavior; this childhood causes that character. Ironicaly, we end up with mechanical descriptions of what causes some people to treat people like machines. For 30 years I've collaborated closely with Harvard/Berkeley biologist Terrence Deacon, on explaining the emergence of life from chemistry, mattering from matter, motives from motion, currencies from currents – no simplistic modeling, no skipped steps, no hand-waving abstractions. This rigorously grounded scientific approach informs all of my psychological research and practice.
Keep it simple
I've written over 1,000 Psychology Today blog articles on practical, everyday decision-making many of them under the title Jerkology: What makes some people tick like time bombs. I am committed to making advanced research easy intuitive, and applicable to our busy and challenging lives.