How To Stop Taking Things Personally

hey guys I'm Heidi Priebe welcome back to my Channel today I wanted to make a video about something that is in part addressing some questions I've gotten so I've gotten questions around the topic of how do I stop taking let's say my partner's Behavior so personally how do I stop taking rejection personally essentially how do I stop making other people's bad behavior about me how do I not internalize that and I want to use this video to address that but maybe not in the most uh straightforward or conventional way so this is going to be less of a how-to video it's going to be more of a reframe so it's going to be about why we take things personally what the actual um kind of deeper or more underlying motivation might be for our psyches to want to take things personally and how we can zoom out and look at how that has actually been or is adaptive for us and then make a more conscious choice about whether we want to continue kind of processing and interacting with other people in the world in that way or if there is a new Better Way Forward for us so I'm just going to jump in here the first thing I want to say is that there can actually be a kind of protective mechanism in place when we are taking something personally so let's say someone is angry at us or someone is judging us or someone has said something to us that's unkind or that we are interpreting is unkind there can actually be a part of the psyche that wants to take the things personally and this is particularly active or tends to come up more often for people on the anxious side of the spectrum because essentially when you are operating from an anxious attachment wound whether that's full-blown anxious attachment or fearful avoidant attachment or at times you can have avoidant or secure people feeling into this womb the idea is that for your own psyche there is no such thing as bad publicity which means you will take people loving you but if you can't be loved you will take someone being angry at you you will take someone being frustrated at you you will see any strong emotion being directed your way as a means of being in relation with someone else so there's this song that came out recently by Lewis Capaldi who is one of the only people on the planet who I don't know but would die for and it's called forget me and the lyrics of the song are expressing how like he doesn't mind if his exes still hate him or are still frustrated with him but the worst thing he can imagine is that they just move on and forget all about about him and feeling different to him and this is exactly what it feels like to have an anxious attachment wound it's that sense of as long as some sort of strong emotion is being directed towards me I feel like I haven't disappeared in the world right I feel like I'm still being seen and I still matter to someone even if the attention on me is negative so when you are in a place where you're feeling not particularly valued not particularly connected to people not particularly seen your psyche might actually be unconsciously going out of its way to find things to get offended by so that you stay in heated connection with other people whether that is your partner whether that is strangers on the internet whether that is your family members or your friends if you are in Conflict it means you matter immensely to someone right so what's really interesting here is that when you look at the dynamic maturation model of attachment which is a kind of alternative to the traditional model of attachment it incorporates a lot of John bolby and Mary ainsworth's work but it builds upon it and looks at how we grow and mature alongside our attachment strategies and one thing that distinguishes the dynamic maturation model of attachment from the traditional attachment model is that the dynamic maturation model of attachment calls the attachment Styles strategies so rather than an overall style that dictates how you do everything in your attachment relationships the DMM looks at which strategies are you employing to keep people close and so both anxious and avoidant attachment in the DMM exist on a spectrum you can be a little bit anxious or a little bit avoidant or you can be extremely pervasively anxious or avoidant and when you get right down to the bottom of the spectrum where you are extremely anxiously attached in the DMM what you actually get is paranoia so this is the area where pathology begins to develop and you're likely to have people start to believe things like there are people out to get me I am being watched you might have kind kind of magical or psychotic thinking when you get that anxiously attached and the reason for that is because your psyche finds it intolerable to conceive of the idea that you are alone in the world so if you truly are alone in the world if all previous attachment strategies have failed you so you've tried strategy after strategy after strategy to get your needs met in healthier ways then you might eventually if all of those fail and you're finding yourself alone give way to paranoia and to deluding yourself into thinking that you are so important that people are actually watching or chasing or stalking you when actually they're not but that is the mind's way of coping when it is intolerable for the mind to believe that the truth is you just don't matter all that much to anyone else which I'm not saying is the case but often when you do have a situation where someone Falls that far down the anxious attachment Spectrum it's because they truly are being alone neglected whatever else it is in their lives and that is their minds last resort to try to keep themselves feeling connected to other people is developing false obsessive relationships in their head so the first step to not taking things as personally is recognizing that there might be a highly adaptive reason why you are taking things personally and this doesn't mean that you can't change that and you can't develop healthier attaching strategies but it does go to show that you aren't necessarily doing this for no reason the unconscious mind is very intelligent and it's going to do whatever it feels like it has to do to get your needs met but if you would like to stop this we can move on to step two step two is to make yourself very aware of the fact that most other people are only thinking about how to meet their own needs so I one time read somewhere the quote whether someone loves you or hates you has very little to do with you and I think that that is so true and so apt for what we're talking about today but here's the problem if we're going to accept that most of what people hate or take issue with in relation to us has a lot more to do with them than with us we also have to accept that most of the things people love and admire in us have much less to do with us than it does to do with them so this is often a game we actually don't want to take ourselves out of because if we have the belief that other people liking respecting admiring validating us means that we are good and worthy we necessarily have to believe the opposite to also be true which is that when people don't like us or feel angry at us or are expressing displeasure towards us and something we've done it means that we are unworthy the only way to do away with this whole thing is to opt out of the underlying belief systems that our worthiness or our sense of being good enough is dependent on how other people think of us the opposite of this belief system is to recognize that other people are just existing in the world looking for mirrors right often what people hate in US is what they hate about themselves that they have not integrated so if someone has this rule for themselves let's say I must always be perfectly emotionally regulated at all times or else I'm not worthy of Love they are going to hate it when they see anyone else being disregulated and getting support because that is breaking the unconscious rule they have for themselves and so instead of looking internally and going okay how do I integrate the part of myself that is sometimes disregulated and needs support and allow myself to be loved in that way they're going to go on a crusade trying to get everyone else to stop being dysregulated so that their Fair World hypothesis checks out right if I have a rule for myself and this is how it works for me it must be this way for everybody else that's like the birthplace of all self-righteousness right but when we're able to recognize that a lot of what people take issue with in US is actually just them experiencing an inner conflict then it gets so easy to be like oh wait a minute this person might be putting me down they might have said something that hurt my feelings they might be showing up in a way that I find a little bit offensive or like I don't like it but it's actually just them externalizing their inner conflict that how helps us take things less personally however it also means that when someone is admiring us or when someone is flooding us with love and appreciation and just write up our asses for lack of a better term that also doesn't have that much to do with us that is usually someone projecting some aspect of what they like about themselves onto us that's an inner conflict that they are trying to resolve through over identifying with someone outside of themselves and all the magical made-up traits that they are likely projecting onto Us in the process so this is not to say that all human communication is bogus and has nothing to do with real connection but I think that true connection always comes from a place of both people being integrated and embodied in their own experience and then sharing those experiences with each other without needing to believe other things about each other other than what is being shared and the more we can be aware of how much we are doing that right how am I projecting on to other people where am I getting frustrated with people because I perceive them as breaking a rule that I made for myself right an example of this might be let's say you have the internalized belief that in order for you to have close connected relationships you constantly have to do things for other people you constantly have to do favors to anticipate other people's needs to show up and offer support for other people you might get really mad if you see people getting love and appreciation without doing those things because that is a rule you've internalized for yourself so becoming aware of all of these ways we internalize rules and project anger and jealousy onto people who do not follow our rules but still get what we want helps us to realize that the same is chronically happening in the other direction and that much of what other people don't like about us is actually just them struggling with some sort of inner conflict that their interaction with us is making them more aware of and that they are unconsciously and somewhat foolishly trying to work out through interacting with us rather than through of self-reflection so if you want to make things easier on yourself I recommend moving to step number three which is ask for clarification when you are feeling offended and I want to be clear here that I'm not saying ask for clarification in a kind of anxious get your feelings of anxiety soothed externally way what I mean is asking for clarification about where that person was authentically coming from with what they said was there a misunderstanding that happened is there something you're missing about how this situation doesn't have all that much to do with you so this kind of reminds me of the years and years that I spent writing articles on the internet for a living for a period of a couple years I worked as a staff writer for an online publication and I would write on average three articles a day and over those years I got like thousands of comments on my stuff right and the more I read the comments and analyzed them both the very excited happy loving ones and the Furious angry dissatisfied ones I learned that almost every single comment I've ever gotten in my life boils down to one of two sentiments sentiment one is I see myself in this thing and I like it sentiment two is I see myself in this thing and I don't like it often when people Express anger or dissatisfaction or are in some way not happy with us it's actually because some part of them feels misunderstood or misrepresented or unacknowledged through the interaction with us and if we can get to the root of what that thing is for the other person almost all of the time we will learn that it's not personal at all usually it takes about three pointed and intentional questions to get to the root of what the person's actual issue or complaint is and in my experience someone's actual issue or complaint as long as they are let's say self-aware and vulnerable enough to be able to articulate it eventually is not at all in the ballpark of what we thought it was so one of the most powerful questions I think we can ask in any interaction where we're feeling offended upset like we are in kind of a hostile environment with someone else is the question what am I missing right it seems like there's something here we aren't seeing eye to eye on and I feel like I don't have the whole picture is there anything you think based on what I've said that I am missing I'm really committing to getting that question answered for yourself is almost always going to make the situation feel a lot less personal because what you're missing very rarely actually has to do with you even if the other person is coming at you with a lot of let's say stories about how they think your character is even if they are coming at you with a whole bunch of insults and I don't necessarily recommend that you sit through conversations like this right if someone can't speak respectfully to you it's usually time to hang up the phone go no contact whatever it is but if there's still respect present in the conversation just try asking what am I missing I'm noticing myself getting a little activated or feeling a little offended and I think I might be missing something in this interaction or misunderstanding something you're saying would you be willing to expand a little bit on blank being able to say that sentence will save you immense grief if you are able to humble yourself enough when you're feeling offended to say it so for myself that's sometimes what I like to do just literally identify a name I'm feeling offended communicate that to the other person then give the benefit of the doubt let them know I think there might be something I'm missing or misunderstanding and give them the opportunity to clarify their position if they truly are attacking you and just trying to be an you will find out very quickly because when you say that sentence they will come back with more assholery but if you actually are missing or misunderstanding something you've now opened the door to figuring out what's actually going on in this interaction right and that is a door that if you open it will get you much closer to that place where you are not feeling chronically activated and offended step number four for not taking things so personally is get really clear about what your own triggers are so a lot of the time we get offended in similar situations right like for myself I have a really big trigger around people thinking they know me better than they do I get really activated and kind of defensive and on guard if someone makes an assumption about my life that is either inaccurate or incomplete or that I imagine they don't have the full story around I get activated in my body even talking about it I can feel it right now but it took me a lot of different situations that that happened within for me to recognize that that's a trigger that comes up for me so this work starts with awareness right with being willing to recognize situations in which you're offended as kind of like an x marks the spot over a trigger response that you have right so pairing the thought I'm triggered I'm offended I feel defensive with the thought let's figure out what's going on here there's an X marking this spot let's dig here now this does not mean accepting that you are being completely crazy or irrational every time you feel offended or defensive right it's very possible that someone truly did say something unkind or inconsiderate towards you however you might be having a 10 out of 10 reaction to a 4 out of 10 situation because you have a trigger that comes alive in that situation so your job is to figure out what it is that's taking this thing from a four to a ten it is your time to ask yourself what am I missing right I feel offended I recognize this situation is probably not as hostile as I feel like it is so what am I missing when in the past have I had situations where let's say someone giving me unsolicited advice or being overly familiar with me has actually been dangerous or a big threat to me and can I recognize and hold space for the fact that when that happens in my day-to-day life now I get very activated and I tend to make the situation I'm facing seem bigger and more threatening in my mind and body than it actually is now learning to down regulate from triggers learning to deal effectively with triggers is an entire skill set in and of itself that we're not going to go through in this video but that first step is having awareness around when they're happening so is this truly a situation where anybody would feel a 10 out of 10 offended response to this or is this a situation where some old wounding is coming up and I'm reacting to that alongside the situation this is going to help us gain some perspective at the least when we're feeling very activated now step number five or kind of reframe number five is recognizing that just like other people tend to project onto others and work their internal conflicts out externally we often feel offended as a means of avoiding our own inner triggers as well right if I can get really mad at someone else for the way that they're showing up in the world and the way that I want them to be communicating differently with me then I don't have to take any responsibility for what that brings up inside of myself and a really good example of this is I see people like fixating obsessively on let's say their partner's Behavior or their ex's Behavior or their friend or their family members disrespect and yes it is good and healthy to be able to recognize disrespect however then our job if we are recognizing true disrespect is to respect ourselves enough to disconnect from the situation right to go I'm not fine with you talking to me that way or treating me that way I'm going to draw a boundary here but often when what we do instead is get really fixated on trying to change someone else's Behavior or change the way that they're speaking to us or showing up towards us it's because we're trying to resolve some internal conflict externally so I had a situation one time where I was super fixed stated on not liking the tone that this person would take with me I thought they were condescending I thought that they were rude I had all of these judgments about this person and I was so fixated on it like I could not let it go I felt desperate to get this person to change the way they talk to me and other people and I realized after a while of being very internally angsty about that that actually I saw a lot of traits in that person that I also saw in myself when I was triggered when I was activated I also had a tendency to mount a moral high horse and talk down to people and be unaccepting of other people's point of view and be rigid in the way that I thought and I was so frustrated and caught up with my frustration at this other because they were displaying behavior that I knew I had not fully acknowledged in myself and that I had not done repair work interpersonally around in situations where I had shown up in that way and as soon as I was able to recognize that it was like my anger this other person just evaporated because it wasn't about them and it was never about them right people have the right within the realm of things that are legal to show up in whatever way they're going to show up in the world but when we are chronically obsessive about the ways we want other people to be different it's often because we're seeing some aspect of ourselves mirrored back to us in that other either we want to change them so we don't have to change ourselves or we're avoiding some sort of vulnerability inside of ourselves right deciding that this person hates us and that everything they do is about us and that they're out to get us might feel a lot more soothing and comforting than realizing that we're actually not that important to them and actually they're out for themselves and they are not thinking that much about us they are not waking up in the morning thinking about how to make our day miserable they're just thinking about how to meet their own needs and actually we're responsible for meeting ours but if we find that thought threatening and we don't want to acknowledge that it's really adaptive to spend all of our time deciding that everybody else's behavior is about us right so if the goal is to take things less personally there has to be a kind of reframing around the way that we think of other people's communication with us even if someone is being truly terrible and abusive and unkind to us it probably doesn't have that much to do with us it is our job to just set some boundaries get that person away from our inner child and then find people who are more respectful to interact with however anytime we want to stay engaged in this Psycho Drama anytime we find ourselves obsessively ruminating about something that we're taking super personally it's probably because we're getting something out of that rumination and that there's something more vulnerable underneath that actually needs a dressing inside of us usually some sort of feeling of loneliness unworthiness being unseen or not cared about by anybody and if we can address those feelings and learn to find Connections in healthy fulfilling ways and build towards that type of life it gets a lot easier to not take things personally but doing this requires an incredible amount of self-honesty alright that's all I have to say for today on the topic of taking things less personally I feel in my bones that this video might have a follow-up video with more kind of Hands-On advice at some point in the future but for now let me know in the comments where you guys are at in this process if you tend to err on the side of taking things super personally or maybe on the other side of not taking things personally enough and not showing up and fighting the battles that you ought to be fighting any thoughts Reflections comments questions leave them below I love you guys I hope you're taking care of yourselves and each other and I will see you back here again super soon [Music]

Channel: Heidi Priebe

Views: 87,558

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Id: J1ptE5Xb70k

Length: 22min 47sec (1367 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 05 2022