Taking it personally? Blame your brain.

  

     Tongue-in-cheek? Oh yeah, but the topic of not taking things personally has been written about ad

nauseam. I’m sick of it too, but here I am again. Part of being human seems to mean that not taking things personally is an issue we wrestle with over and over and over.

    Last week I listened to a Sounds True podcast, Our Attempts to Feel Better, while I was on the bike at the gym. In the podcast Dr. Kelly McGonigal talks about how the default state of the brain is to interpret any experience we’re having as being about who we are. Oh, wow. My brain is preset to take every experience I have personally.

     This was a startling “ah-hah” for me. I listened to the podcast three times. It also made me laugh because it confirmed something I’ve suspected for years. My brain is entirely self-centered. Thankfully my mind doesn’t have to lurch along in the same biological rut.

    How on earth is that biological preset useful? Despite how much we’ve evolved as a species, our gray matter still contains a strong lizard brain. The lizard brain is concerned with survival. Feeling good equals surviving. Feeling bad equals I might die. In this instance “good” means food, shelter and a measure of safety. “Bad” means I might starve or I’m about to get squished by a wooly mammoth. Given the way many of us live, this may seem like a ridiculous association, but it is part of who we are. We have a direct experience of how hard wired into our brains this is when our fight-or-flight response kicks in during non-life threatening situations.

     The lizard brain operates on an “all or nothing”, black and white premise. Survival is either threatened or not. There is no discernment around the level of the threat or the possibility that my emotional well-being may in jeopardy rather than my physical survival. The lizard brain equates taking things personally, i.e. interpreting whatever is going on as being about me, with being able to survive period.   

     Layered on top of this brain preset, I have my own experience with what happens when someone blames me for something and gets angry. We’ve all had those experiences. The ones that occur in childhood leave the deepest impressions.

      Say you’re raised with a critical parent who blames you for things not being done “right.” When that parent blames you, s/he gets angry at you and you get punished. Your child brain makes an association that says, “If someone is angry, I get hurt”...and your lizard brain agrees.

      Your child brain isn’t able to distinguish the difference between someone being angry at you and someone feeling angry when they happen to be standing next to you. The difference between someone being angry to what you did vs. being angry at who you are is lost too. It’s all about you. The lizard brain affirms that perspective as the one most likely to ensure your survival.

    So if someone is upset at me, gets upset when they’re with me or says something negative to me,  my lizard brain and all my experience that supports it jumps to tell me I’d better take this personally or I might not survive. Fortunately my mind and higher brain functions give me more options. But even beginning to disconnect from taking this personally means I have to step out of my biological programming.

     I go to my favorite question, “What else might be happening?” Not that I know my brain is programmed to take things personally, I have a new way to answer that question. For this question to really interrupt the mental hamster wheel I’m running on I need to have more than one answer.

    If I can’t come up with anything else, I go back to a trick I learned from a therapist I saw in the twenties. When I answered “I don’t know” to a question she asked, she’d respond with “Make something up.” It took me years to figure out what that was really about.

    It doesn’t matter how improbably most of my answers to “What else might be happening?” are. What matters is that while I’m engaged in answering the question I’m not feeding my story about why whatever happened is about me. I’ve distracted myself enough to get out of my own way.

     And what about that story I’m telling myself? The story is where I assign meaning to what happened. Inevitably the story comes from some other experience that felt the same but may not be relevant. So the next step is to disconnect how I feel from what I’m telling myself about the feeling.

     When I take something personally it has nothing to do with the situation or what the other person said. If you tell me I’m a crappy firefighter because I can’t save anybody, I’ll be confused. I might laugh. I might wonder if I’ve wandered into a Salvador Dali painting. I won’t take it personally. I’m not a firefighter. Nothing in what you said applies to me.

     However, if you told me I was a crappy firefighter because I’m too selfish to save anybody….oooh. Regardless of whether or not the rest of your statement applied, I’d hear “selfish.” I’m not a selfish person. But I do wrestle with the distorted belief that being a healer means showing up for other people all the time so if I take a day off, I’m being selfish.

    So there is a land mine in my internal landscape that can get triggered by word “selfish.” If I react to that trigger and take what you said personally, nothing in my largely unconscious choice to go there is about you or what you said.

     The entire process happened inside me. It occurred because part of my internal landscape reacted to the word “selfish.”  I am more likely to take what someone says personally when their words match what I am already saying to myself.

     I am far from mastering the art of not taking things personally. I do it less when I’m feeling pretty good about me. Now that I know there is a biological basis for believing it’s all about me, I can be more compassionate with myself when I go there. In the meantime, repeat after me….I am not the center of the Universe.