Do you fantasize about sending your least favorite uncle to a desert island?

Or, would you like to send your boss downriver in a swift boat minus the oars?

When people get on our nerves, we do need to distance ourselves from them. Even if we can’t physically gain distance, we can distance from them emotionally.

Otherwise, these people disturb our mental health.

However, there are right ways and wrong ways to attain distance from others.

For example, if you cut yourself off totally from a close family member, this can be a mistake. Why? Total cutoff can increase the tension.

Having nothing to do with another person can cause you to think about him or her too much. He or she might as well live in your home.

In order to gain “healthy” distance from almost anyone, there are a few tricks everybody should understand.

First of all, distancing yourself doesn’t necessarily mean announcing, “Hey, jerk, I’m cutting you out of my life!”

Naturally, rapists and ax murders need to be ordered out of your life. But, ordering your uncle to never call again will probably hurt you more than it does him.

You can find ways to still associate with someone who irritates you. The key is to emotionally disconnect from that person.

You do this when you stop thinking the other person can change. You accept their flaws and move past them. You stop focusing on those flaws.

You can still physically associate with him or her, but you can emotionally pull the plug.

For example, a woman we’ll call Michelle has real trouble dealing with her grown stepchildren. They make life miserable for Michelle.

“I have trouble being in the same room with my husband’s children,” Michelle told us. “They talk about me behind my back. I’m tired of trying to build a close relationship with them.”

Michelle knows, however, that having nothing to do with her stepchildren wouldn’t work. It would cause a lot of problems between herself and her husband. Her husband won’t admit there is a problem going on.

“Never seeing my stepchildren would mean I’d have to make a lot of excuses,” Michelle points out. “They all live within five miles of us. My husband has a good amount of contact with them.”

Here are some tips we gave Michelle:

Curb strong feelings by emotionally disconnecting. Behave in a civil and somewhat friendly manner toward the stepchildren, but strive to feel more neutral toward them.

Take back your power. Do something to prove to yourself that you can stop the pain. For example, return only one out of three of their calls, if at all possible.

Initiate calls and contact. If Michelle stays in touch with her stepchildren, they will not realize when she is choosing to ignore their calls or requests.

Leave the stepchildren out of conversations. We advised Michelle to stop complaining about her stepchildren to her husband. This pushes them farther into the background.

We instructed Michelle to use a pleasant tone of voice when talking about her stepchildren to her husband. This way, she can pull back from them without her husband suspecting she’s distancing from them.

Otherwise, he might try to “fix” the distance Michelle needs to create. He might talk about them more or initiate even more visits.

“I had to create distance with my wife’s brother,” says a man we’ll call Tony. “This brother was calling my wife three times a week to borrow money. He’s a drug addict. For two months, I unplugged the phone after we got home from work. I’d hurry home to delete messages he’d left during the day.

“My wife didn’t realize I was screening these calls, because she’s not a phone person. I did anything I had to do in order to push my wife’s brother away from our family.”

Tony has the right to protect his home this way. Even if his wife might perceive this type of action as harsh, Tony is correct in doing anything he has to do in order to protect his home and his income.

“Talking with my wife never worked,” Tony emphasizes. “She’d get angry if she thought I was pushing her brother away. I did the distancing without my wife really knowing it. Now, however, her brother says he’s going into rehab, thank goodness. Without getting money from us, he hit rock bottom. Rehab was his last step.”

In pulling back from someone, in order to create distance, try to establish enough distance to feel okay about the relationship. For example, you might see a certain friend only once per month.

Trust your instincts about how much distance you need in any relationship. For example, if you truly dislike a certain relative, you might choose to have lunch with him or her only once per year.

In between these “annual” lunches, you might call him or her every third month or send a card occasionally.

Your goal in distancing from a person is to stop having strong feelings, such as hate and anger.

Negative feelings will harm your own health and your peace of mind. No person has the right to cause this kind of disturbance in you.

If in-laws, stepchildren, neighbors, or co-workers hurt your peace of mind, take a step back from them and keep them at bay. Disallow them from taking up space in your day.

Above all, don’t think you can change others. You can’t. You can only change yourself in relation to them.

Judi Hopson and Emma Hopson are authors of a stress management book for paramedics, firefighters and police, “Burnout To Balance: EMS Stress.” Ted Hagen is a family psychologist.