Don't Take It Personally

“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.

Connection

Humans need connection just like we need food and water.

We are born small and fragile, depending completely on others to nourish and protect us.   As we grow, we become able to do more and more things for ourselves, and we feel more independent.  But our need for connection remains.   We find meaning, joy, comfort, and safety in our relationships with each other and with the living world around us.

It has always been this way.    Whoever we are and wherever we come from,  all of us are descended from people who spent their whole lives, from cradle to grave, in tight-knit communities that depended on each other for survival.   They hunted together, dug roots and gathered leaves and berries together, told stories and made music together around the fire at night..   They gathered together to celebrate every child’s birth, and they mourned together when one of their kindred died.   

In this way they were connected also with the plants and animals and rivers and mountains and stars that formed their world.    Their world was filled with the scents of grasses and wild flowers, the sounds of wind blowing through the trees and water running over stone,  the sight of the Milk Way spread out across the sky.   We take comfort in these things still.   Japanese doctors have found that a mindful walk in the woods is one of the best ways to help the body recover from stress.  They call it “forest bathing.”

In some ways, we today are more connected than people have ever been before.    We can have instant communication with people almost anywhere in the world.   While at the same time, our lives are lonelier and our valuable webs of connection are smaller and weaker than those of anyone who came before us.

Authentic connection is a biological need shared by all mammals.    Our nervous systems evolved to measure safety or danger based on the voices and facial expressions of the people and animals around us.    When we hear a loving, familiar voice, or see a kind look in another’s eyes, we relax.

When that connection is broken, our first instinct is to try to repair it by attempting  to communicate.  If communication breaks down or feels impossible, we begin to feel afraid, and we fall back into old survival strategies we share with our reptile cousins:  we get ready to defend ourselves or run away.  Our muscles tense, our hearts pound, we become entirely focused on the feeling of danger and the need to either fight or flee.

If both fight and flight seem impossible, we begin to disconnect, go numb, and freeze.

The only way to come back to ourselves in those moments is to come back to each other.

This is especially challenging if we have never known anyone we could depend on and feel safe with, or if we have experienced danger, hurt, or betrayal from someone we trusted.    To some degree, this has happened in almost every life.

The only way to heal our relational wounds is in relationship.   The parts of us that have been hurt or frightened or rejected need to fully experience love, acceptance, and safety.

Therapy is one place that can happen.   Together, therapist and client build trust.   From within that trusting relationship, it becomes possible to explore new responses to frightening and overwhelming situations, new ways to come back to connection.

We get to be our truest selves when we know we are loved and accepted for who we are and who we are becoming.

Hindsight to Foresight

Sometimes when we experience difficult situations we want to just forget about them and move on. If only that idea was possible. Now of course we have all tried to forget our past especially the negatives we don’t want to remember and it can work for weeks or months or even years. What this does though is takes away our ability to gain hindsight. Looking back to see what has gone on so we can better predict how we should make decisions in the future (foresight). Another part of the journey which may get lost if we avoid objectively observing the past is insight. I named my private practice Insightful Release because of the importance insight has to releasing the chains which bound us.

And isn’t that we are searching for... the idea we can attain some level of freedom from our past? It is possible- I see it happen in therapy with my clients and have experienced it in my own life. The joy which is felt when we break our old patterns and no longer feel like a prisoner. I should mention that you do not have to dig up every last event and look at every detail of them to utilize hindsight. That would be overwhelming. It is done much more by objectively seeing your patterns, how they were formed, and then having foresight to see if you may be starting to fall into an old pattern. That is the work- that is awareness- that is how you will find healing.

I offer a gentle reminder that even though the past may be something we want to forget, that very act of forgetting may keep us bound. Be kind to yourself and look to hindsight as a helper which will honor you by offering insight (wisdom) and then you will have the foresight to live the future truly free.