Disclaimer, with love — please note that these writings are for inspirational and educational purposes only, they are not replacements for appropriate professional advice. If you are looking for support, reach out and I can link you with the right professional!
Taking something personally is a universal human experience. You can take literally anything and make it into a personal offense against you.
The guy driving the car ahead of you who didn’t move when the light turned green? Doing it on purpose.
When your mom responded with, “okay,” to your text? So pissed off at you.
The fact that Disney+ raised their prices dramatically last year? Fucking with you.
The question, if I were to rephrase it slightly, is not how you stop taking things so personally (the ego mind will forever see things in this way), but how you recognize when it’s happening and respond differently to it.
Your mind is obsessed with you. There’s no way in hell it will never stop making everything about you. I once heard a quote that said, “A mind is smart, but it is not wise,” and I think that applies here. Your mind wants to do whatever it takes to protect you, but since it lives inside your skull and can’t physically fight off a predator for you, it has to relate everything back to you.
Thankfully, you are not your mind. You are not your heart, your lungs, or your legs. None of these things define you in any way, they simply exist as body parts. You, if you want to get really technical, are the consciousness observing your mind. Have you ever had that experience, whether in meditation or in a moment of your daily life, where you really see your mind? You see what’s happening and you remain completely unaffected by it? That’s the you I’m talking about.
This part of you is constant - it’s always there, witnessing everything. When we talk about getting to a place of not taking things so personally, we’re really talking about accessing that witnessing part. The part that notices without reactivity.
Let me make something clear though: The goal is not to get to a place where we never react. That’s impossible and quite frankly, not helpful. You will need to react to life, that’s just how it goes. The goal is to be able to recognize when your reactions are helping you or hurting you. Every response we have to anything is the result of a mind-made story. Even if the response is helpful or informative, what’s leading to that response is a story your mind made up.
The mind loves stories.
When you are taking something personally, you are usually caught up in a story that your mind is spinning. You might not recognize it in the moment, but it’s there. The story goes something like this:
“I can’t believe this happened…this shouldn’t be happening…this is unfairly happening to me…this is happening purposefully to me…I don’t want others to be this way…” and on and on.
All minds do this, no exception.
The reality is that there’s nothing inherently wrong with the mind’s story. Where it goes off the rails is when we default to it, believing what it’s saying, and not stopping to explore if what it’s saying is actually true.
Byron Katie’s work is superb for helping us not take things so personally. Her four questions are:
Is it true?
Can you absolutely know that’s true?
How do you react, what happens, when you believe that thought?
Who would you be without that thought?
What I find useful about these questions is they help us begin to see through the narratives we hold onto and expand our self-concept.
So, the guy who cut you off, is it true that he’s an asshole? You might think so. Can you absolutely know that’s true? No, you can’t. Why? Because you don’t know him or anything about why he did what he did. The goal isn’t necessarily to give him the benefit of the doubt, though you can, rather it’s to help you see that you can’t actually know truth with absolute certainty. How do you react, what happens when you believe that the guy is an asshole? Well, you probably tense up, it’s possible that you go through the next 20 minutes on edge, and maybe you start to believe that everyone is self-serving and this impacts how you show up in your life. Who would you be without that thought? You tell me. Who I would be without that thought is a person with a little bit more freedom, more grace, more openness.
Questioning the story is one way in. But there's another entry point that doesn't get talked about nearly enough, and it has nothing to do with your thoughts at all.
Are you connected to your own power?
Beyond just the fact that a mind loves to tell stories and is very ego-centric, another reason why you take things personally may have to do with the fact that you are not connected to your own sense of personal power.
