Resisting a pointless Yelp war

Post date: 2020-02-17 21:27:29

I had a bad experience with an abrasive business owner and wrote a Yelp review laying out my experience. A few weeks passed and the business owner replied to my review with several paragraphs of unflattering and untrue rebuttals. Help me move past this feeling that I must defend myself, in this situation and in others.

I feel disproportionately attacked and defensive despite knowing that this person has their issues. I know I don't need to rebut their ridiculous narrative because it's freaking Yelp and I could never make them see my perspective or get an apology for them making things up instead of addressing the real issues I had with their service. How can I best work through these feelings in a productive way?

This is a pattern in my life. I have a hard time even talking about it in therapy, so I'm starting here to try to get a handle on this feeling of a rush of adrenaline and panic when someone makes me look bad. I actually had to schedule an extra therapy session when dealing with this person before I stopped using their services and wrote the review. I felt then and still feel ridiculous that I'm so worked up by a professional who did a bad job and was very rude to me. I don't feel ready to bring it up in therapy again since I am judging myself for not being over it. I will eventually have to, I know!

Do you have a good strategy or perspective around letting negative experiences with difficult people that disagree with you that don't involve ignoring your feelings... or in my case, writing neverending snippy Yelp replies?
It feels too hurtful or scary to be strongly opposed by someone. When I feel like this, I tend to shove down how I really feel, but that eventually fails and it leads to obsessively composing a mental rebuttal that takes down their response point by point in the most bad-ass way possible, then feeling ridiculous because I know instead it'd just look desperate and do nothing to give me the internal acceptance of the situation I need. Hope me, rejection sensitive people of MeFi!

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