A few years ago I met a person at work who had trouble keeping people within his social circle. He was socially awkward and people would make unflattering remarks on his quirkiness behind his back. Naturally, he would also often go out for lunch alone or at his own table. A stranger in a foreign country, I found his situation to be relatable as I once had similar struggle when I was doing my university degree 6500km away from home.

I decided to initiate a conversation one day and found out that we shared some common interests and opinions - we hit it off almost immediately. For a while, things were great. Soon, I'd include him in my larger social circles and that's when his behaviours and the dynamics started to change.

It started with harmless, friendly banters then quickly evolved into rude insults and even physical aggressions played off as jokes. He would call me out with offensive names in public, casually hit my head or try to knock me off my chair. Clearly, this person has the social skills akin to a 12 year old bully so it didn't take long for me to give him a piece of my mind and we haven't talked ever since.

Why people use insults

People normally use insults for a few different reasons. The most common ones are:

1. Testing boundaries - insults in the form of small teases are the most common and unimaginative way to assess a person's mental strength. We'd normally encounter these when interacting with people whom we don't engage with that often or someone we just met for the first time.
2. Confidence booster - certain people have the tendency to mock others as a display of confidence, power or rank. Naturally, confidence built on such fragile construct is often just a facade to hide a much larger issue of one's own social insecurities.

Regardless why a person throws an insult our way, the way we respond will likely influence how much it will impact our mental well-being and how others might perceive us. Strangely, the old adage of to just "let it go" is not always the best strategy. Insults were meant to disempower a person and being quiet can be seen as a sign of weakness.

How to respond to insults

Insults are not harmless. Left unanswered, a small tease has a way of calcifying - first into a habit, then into a dynamic. That is exactly what happened with the friend I mentioned earlier. The banter became the default way he spoke to me, because every time I let it slide I was quietly teaching him that it was acceptable.

But meeting an insult with anger rarely works either. Lashing out hands the other person proof that they got under your skin, and for someone fishing for a reaction, that is the whole reward. You also tend to look like the aggressor to everyone watching, even though you were the one provoked.

What we want is a response that takes the sting out of an insult without escalating it - one that says "this doesn't bother me" while keeping you firmly in control of the exchange. That is where agree and amplify comes in.

Agree and amplify

The technique is exactly what it sounds like. When someone insults or teases you, you don't deny it and you don't get defensive. You agree with it - and then you exaggerate it until it becomes absurd.

Say a colleague jabs, "Nice shirt, did you get dressed in the dark?". The defensive reply - "What's wrong with my shirt?" - only invites them to keep pulling at the thread. The angry reply makes a scene over nothing. Agree and amplify goes the other way: "In the dark? I had my eyes closed the whole time. Took me a solid forty minutes."

Two things happen at once. By agreeing, you strip the insult of its power - there is nothing left to attack, because you have already conceded the point. By amplifying it into something obviously ridiculous, you make it clear that you are in on the joke and not remotely wounded by it. The insult lands on no one. More often than not the other person laughs and moves on, and you come across as relaxed and quick-witted rather than rattled.

It works for a few reasons:

1. It denies the insulter the reaction they were fishing for.
2. It reframes the exchange as play rather than conflict - which means you, not them, are setting the tone.
3. It signals confidence without you ever having to claim it out loud.

Knowing when not to use it

Agree and amplify is a tool for teases and jabs - the boundary-testing and confidence-posturing insults from earlier. It is not a tool for genuine cruelty, harassment, or anything that turns physical.

My friend's behaviour did not stay verbal, and no clever comeback would have fixed that. When someone hits you, or humiliates you in a way that crosses a real line, the answer is not wit - it is a clear boundary, and if that boundary is ignored, distance. I gave him a piece of my mind and we never spoke again, and I have never regretted it. Humour can defuse an insult; it does not excuse one.

So amplify the small stuff, name the big stuff, and learn to tell the two apart. The goal was never to win every exchange. It is to make yourself a poor target - someone whose buttons are not worth pressing, because you keep handing them back with a smile.