“Don’t take it personally.”
How many times have you received – or given – that advice?
How many times have you stopped to think about what it really means?
On a good day, it is an easy enough guideline to follow if a stranger is rude to you in a store or someone honks their horn at you in traffic. It is never fun to be on the receiving end of someone’s negative emotions. But once you get over the initial shock of the situation, it is easy enough to let it go.
What that stranger said or did wasn’t about you. How could it be? They don’t even know you. They have no idea who you are. It truly wasn’t personal.
Maybe they had just had a fight with their partner. Maybe their favorite coffee cup broke. Maybe they had just received bad news. Whatever it was, you were just in the wrong place at the wrong time. They were having intense feelings about something else, and you ended up being the accidental and incidental target of them. It is frustrating, it might even be hurtful, but it is not personal.
It gets much harder to take that position when someone you love says or does something that hurts you.
Then it does feel personal. They know who you are. They must have known how their words and their deeds would affect you.
Yet, ultimately, the hurtful things that the people you love say or do aren’t really about you either.
Think for a moment about something you said or did that really hurt somebody you loved.
Most likely, it wasn’t your goal to cause pain. Maybe you had a really frustrating day and a friend got on your nerves and you snapped at her. It wasn’t really her you were mad it. You just had a lot of anger building up in you, and she happened to be the one who received it.
Maybe you did want to cause pain. Maybe you were hurt that your partner forgot your birthday, so you said something really cutting and cruel, hoping that hurting him would make you feel better. Of course, it didn’t. Because deep down, your goal wasn’t to cause pain, your goal was to do something that might make you hurt less.
Even when things seem incredibly personal, they are not. All of us are interpreting every interaction we have through a haze of unrelated emotions and a life time of experiences that might feel similar to this particular moment, but actually are completely different. Along the way, we make wrong guesses about other people’s thoughts and feelings and intentions. It isn’t personal.
Sometimes we do get to have moments of deep, authentic intimacy. Those are truly personal, and we intuitively recognize the difference. The more we learn to be present in our bodies here and now, present to each other here and now, the more often we get to have those interactions.
As for the rest – practice not taking it personally.