How To Not Take Anything Personally

To understand how to not take anything personally, you need to understand what is actually happening.

(This is my personal perspective accumulated over 10 years of passionate and relentless in-depth research and exploration to find answers for dealing with my own personal traumas).

We all have our own struggles with ourselves, no matter what they may be - not feeling good enough, feeling ashamed, guilty, angry and regretful over life choices, etc. This is completely normal and a vital part of the human experience for our current level of development. We need these challenges to learn how to become masters of ourselves, but so many of us have become so deeply stuck.

Growing up, we are not taught how to deal with our discomfort and pain - how to face and hold them, then how to process and release them. All too many of us follow the examples of the exact opposite - to suppress and drown them out with endless distractions (including even with productivity and success). As a result, just about all of us are still holding the same pain and trauma’s from childhood that have since only been building. And nope, time alone does not release them for you.

The uncomfortable feelings eventually become too much to contain and spill out into the moment at its first given trigger. Actions you may take may be someone’s triggers and the actions of another may be your trigger.

Since we don’t actually recognise what is going on here and how to deal with our pain levels being so full, many of us try dump it on each other (or a collective group) - blaming and judging them into taking responsibility and ownership to try get them to do something about it. This however, misses the point entirely.

It’s one things for us to recognise our own issues and try to do something about it, but if anyone (including your parents or any figure of authority) makes you feel shit about who you are or something you’ve done, this treatment is coming from their own pain (that has already been at its edge for a very lone time). This is also from their inability to know what else to do with such a situation as a result of having no strong examples in their lives of dealing with it in another way growing up.

The pain that they are trying to transfer is not yours. It never was. This pain was neither their’s either. This is all just a result of parenting that passes down unhealthy-with trauma’s onto their kids through emotional manipulation, because that’s exactly what was done to them by their parents growing up. This same behaviour therefore gets brought out into the world.

I need to make this very clear. Parents do the best they can with what they’ve been given in this life. We can’t blame them either. They simply have not been shown another way. This exact cycle of transferring pain goes back countless generations, but YOU can choose to no longer contribute towards the spillage of pain and fear that is contaminating humanity.

When you encounter a situation when someone is trying to make you feel shit (even if you did something wrong or by mistake), simply observe their emotional and psychological treatment towards you. Emotionally unstable treatment is your first and biggest sign. Recognise that this is only learnt behaviour from poor life examples. This results in the inability to know how else to manage and regulate ones own mind and emotions for the better. It’s the exact same visa-versa when someone triggers your pain and how you go about treating them.

Your adrenaline and emotions will be heightened when you are in a situation where an emotionally manipulative performance (dramatic or covert) is taking place against you. This is where its easy to become completely consumed and fall unconscious to the drama unfolding. This is where its vital to breathe deeply and remain as calm as possible as the observer. To keep calm and centred in the moment when dealing with such situations will serve you greatly. Heightened negative emotions (such as fear) dramatically narrows and shuts down our awareness and judgment greatly. Therefore, you will have access to better choices the more calm you can remain.

Remember, no matter how emotionally charged someone is towards you, they are not the enemy. They are just struggling and don’t know any other way of handling it. This is where compassion and understanding is so vital to be able to keep our hearts open and stable during the emotional storms that others find themselves in that can get pointed in our direction. 

This is how you can learn to not take anything personally - it’s not yours to carry. It never was.