Thanks for the question J. Have you ever walked into a room, said hello to someone and received little more than a grunt in return? What did you think when they did that? Perhaps, What have I done? Why is she upset with me? Or maybe, Well, if that’s the way he wants to be, I won’t bother talking to him either. Then, sometime later, you discover that the person had just received some bad news, had a splitting headache or was simply having a terrible day, it had nothing at all to do with you.
We humans are remarkably good at taking things personally. Someone doesn’t return our call, disagrees with something we’ve said, doesn’t invite us somewhere or seems unusually quiet, and we quickly construct a story about what it means. The interesting thing is that we don’t respond directly to what happened, we respond to what we think happened. Someone not returning my call is simply someone not returning my call. Everything after that, they’re ignoring me, they’re angry with me, they don’t value me, is my interpretation, and many interpretations are wrong.
Of course, sometimes behaviour definitely is directed at us. Someone may criticise us, reject us or say something deliberately hurtful, but even then we have choices about what we do next. One of the traps we fall into is allowing another person’s opinion of us to become our opinion of ourselves. If someone thinks I’m selfish, that doesn’t automatically make me selfish. If someone doesn’t like me, that doesn’t mean I’m unlikeable and if someone disagrees with me, does one of us have to be in the wrong?
Everyone sees the world through their own experiences, beliefs, expectations and wants, just as we do. Their judgement of me tells me something about how they see me, it doesn’t tell me who I am. This becomes particularly important in close relationships. When our partner is unhappy, we can immediately become defensive because we hear their unhappiness as criticism. Instead of listening to “I felt hurt when that happened,” we hear “You’re a bad partner.” they are two very different statements. If we can resist the urge to defend ourselves, we might instead ask them to, “Tell me what upset you.” That response can completely change the conversation.
Perhaps the biggest issue is to find out why we take things personally in the first place, often it is because something important to us feels threatened. We want to belong, we want to feel loved, respected, capable and significant. When someone’s behaviour appears to challenge any of those things, our emotional response can be surprisingly strong. The answer isn’t to stop caring what anybody thinks, relationships matter and sometimes what others have to say is valuable. The skill is learning to find useful information in what they are saying, even if it seems to be criticism, blame or judgement. We can’t control what other people think about us, what mood they’re in or what they say, but we do have considerable influence over what happens next. Sometimes the most useful thing we can choose is simply not to make somebody else’s behaviour all about us.