Not Taking Things Personally

Sometimes, the hardest and wisest thing to do when someone is behaving badly or taking actions that affect us adversely is not to take their behaviour personally.

My youngest son, Nathan, works at a company that finds participants for market research. He works on site, interviewing and selecting those who are most appropriate for the group and paying those who are not needed. The policy is that anyone who shows up more than fifteen minutes late cannot participate or be paid.

Last week, a woman arrived for a group, clearly flustered, sixteen minutes late- one minute after the person hosting the group had closed the door. Nathan told her she could not join the group, nor could he pay her, expressing his sympathy for her situation. The woman was furious. She started yelling at him and demanded to speak to his boss. He gave her his supervisor’s phone number and waited while she called.

He told me he could feel himself starting to react to her anger with a sense of indignation. Although he'd been polite he could feel his patience wearing thin. As he waited for the woman to get off the phone co-workers came over and sympathized with how unfair the woman was being. “But,” he said, “their sympathy didn’t really help. It just made me feel justified about getting upset with her. And then, I thought: I don’t know this woman. I don’t know what is going on in her day or her life. Getting upset with her only escalates the situation and makes us both feel worse. I don’t have to take her reaction personally. I can let her say what she needs to say and leave.” So that’s what he did. Wise man, my son.

I’ve been reading Pema Chodron’s book Taking The Leap. She talks about times when we get our buttons pushed- someone is rude or unreasonable or just won’t do what we want or hope or feel certain they promised to do- and we get angry or hurt or afraid. Pema calls it “biting the hook.” Emotionally and mentally we get dragged into a drama, a story that causes suffering. Jungian psychoanalysts would say a complex- an emotionally charged and relatively autonomous part of our unconscious formed around a past injury or trauma- gets activated. When we bit the hook or are possessed by a complex we go unconscious. Everything feels very personal, and we are reactive.

Of course, it’s one thing to maintain perspective when a total stranger is yelling at us in a situation where there is nothing we can do (and we often fail to remember it’s not personal even then.) But it’s quite another to stay awake and aware when the other is someone with whom we have an intimate relationship and his or her actions affect us profoundly, materially and emotionally.

Many of you know that I am going through a marital separation. It is heartbreaking and difficult, as these things usually are. But I ask myself- can I take what the other has done or is doing, even a little less personally? The danger here is that I will go into denial about the emotions that are arising in the moment. (Although I admit that these emotions are sometimes about feared future consequences or about past injuries, neither of which are happening now.) I do not want to deny painful emotions. On the other hand, I don’t want to add more suffering to my pain or to the other’s pain- and thereby escalate and prolong the suffering.

So, I try to do what Nathan did: take a step back, slow my reactivity down just a little, and consider what other choices I have. It’s not about being passive. I may need to say or do something. It's not about abandoning myself. In fact, it’s about a deeper level of self-care that does not re-wound the self by taking what the other does or says, personally. I remind myself, “This is what the other can do, right now. What he can or can’t do is about him. It’s not about me. I do not have to take it personally.”

Sometimes- not all the time- this creates the smallest breathing space around reactivity, buys enough of a pause to simply be with the emotion and consider what response is necessary. When we respond instead of react we’re much more likely to communicate clearly and that’s likely to lead to less suffering all around.

So, here’s to learning how to take things a little less personally, how to let the other be wholly other- an individual with their own struggles and stories that are not ours. From that place, finding right action and real compassion may just be possible.