The second agreement is Don’t Take Anything Personally. The first, Be Impeccable With Your Word, asks you to watch what leaves your mouth. This one asks you to watch what you let in.
Personally comes from persona, the mask an actor held up so the back row could tell who he was. To take something personally is to take it as though it were thrown at the face behind the mask. Most of the time it was thrown at the mask, or at some other mask the person thought they were seeing, or at nobody standing there at all.
Humans are narcissistic by nature. We live our lives as if everything is all about us, unaware that most of the rest of the planet’s population thinks the world revolves around them too. When we are stuck in the ego state of believing that others’ actions are caused by us, we cause our own suffering by taking responsibility for others’ actions. When we take things personally, we are ingesting a negative Outer World experience and incorporating it into our Inner World experience. We do not have to let hurtful actions or opinions of others be the poison that harms our Spirit.
Sometimes, I think we take things personally and take responsibility for being the cause of others’ actions because, on some level, it gives us a false sense of control. If it’s my fault, then I am no longer the victim – If it’s my fault, then I have some kind of choice. This is a well-known symptom of traumas such as child-abuse and rape, but I think it happens on a more subtle level with the micro-traumas of unkindness.
The research goes where you went. Ronnie Janoff-Bulman, working with survivors in the late nineteen seventies, split self-blame into two kinds: behavioral, I should not have taken that road, and characterological, I am the kind of person this happens to. The first turned out to be the more bearable, because a road can be avoided next time. The mind will pay in guilt for a future it thinks it can steer.
A part of you makes that trade, and it has been making it since you were small. In a house where an adult’s mood was the weather, a child who could read the first shift in the air had work worth doing. That part learned to run everything through one question, what did I do, because back then the answer was often useful and sometimes kept her safe. It is not trying to make you feel responsible for the woman at the DMV. It is trying to keep you out of a house you already left.
Often interactions with others are rooted in projection. A projection is a defense mechanism in which a person rejects their own unacceptable attributes and ascribes them to others – a classic example is the person who chronically lies and cannot stop, and who hears a lie in everything anyone else says. But, it works at other levels too. So if I had a father who cheated on my mother and that was a traumatic experience for me, I might always assume my husband is cheating. Now if I’m the husband, and I take that personally, I might get annoyed and offended that my wife doesn’t trust me. I might react, get defensive, or get sucked into an argument. On the other hand, if I don’t take it personally, I don’t have to defend against an accusation and I can understand that the projection is really just my wife’s wound that hasn’t quite healed.
Most of the time though, we don’t know others’ history and psychology well-enough to understand what the projection is. But, we still don’t have to take other people’s actions and opinions personally. We can develop a clear boundary that states “this is your stuff.” If the clerk at the checkout counter is rude, do I need to get all huffy (how dare you treat me this way)? He might be miserable with his life and you just happen to be there for him to share his misery with. He might have a headache. You might remind him of his mother with whom he has a conflictual relationship. None of that has anything to do with you.
Now, I’m not saying that we take no responsibility for our actions. If I am bitchy towards people, I am going to cultivate bitchiness, aggression and defensiveness in others. I’m responsible for that. The person I’m being bitchy to though, has a choice in how they respond to my bitchiness. She could get mean back, she could simply not engage and walk away, or she could lovingly confront me on my behavior. Her action is hers to take responsibility for.
And some things are aimed at you exactly. The slur. The partner who has learned where the soft places are and goes there on purpose. The boss who moves you off the account a week after you named what was happening on it. This agreement is about where a behavior comes from, not about how much damage it does, and those two come apart. You can see with complete clarity that a man’s contempt is his and not yours, and still need to leave the room, file the report, end the marriage. Not taking it personally is not the same as not taking it seriously. When somebody hands you this agreement to close down a conversation about what they did, they have not offered you a teaching. They have found a use for one.
The body knows it got in before you do. Ingesting is the right word for it. Something arrives that was never yours and the body goes to work on it. For one person that is a clench, in the jaw or the gut or the hands. For another it is a wobble, the ground gone unreliable underfoot. For another it is jitter, a current with nowhere to go, so the leg starts moving or the sentence gets rehearsed for the fourth time. None of those may be yours. Yours is whatever showed up while you read the list. It comes before the argument you are about to have with yourself. Learn its name. It is the earliest notice you get that something crossed the line and went in.
A simple way to not take things so personally is simply by repeatedly checking in with yourself and asking yourself “am I taking this personally?” If you are then you check inside yourself and see:
- What role did I play in this interaction? (What chain of events did I help to set off?)
- Do I need to modify my behavior in the future (You may not. If me stating a boundary sets someone else off, I’m certainly not going to stop setting boundaries to avoid conflict).
- If so, then you can think to yourself what you need to take responsibility for and what is the other person’s responsibility. When we detach from taking things personally, we don’t have to suffer the emotional turmoil that other people’s behavior causes.
If you just can’t let go of it, there is another practice you can use that comes from Shamanistic traditions. Find a quiet space, imagine that you and the conflictual person are meeting in neutral territory with your best selves – the place in you that is beyond personality and wounding. Visualize the hooks they have into you, unhook them, and say something like “I give these back to you. They are not mine. May you transform them into goodness.” Then visualize the hooks that you have into them and say “I take these back. They are not yours. May I transform them into goodness.”
The people who lay this down do not get better at proving the remark was not about them. They get slower. The mask stays where it is and people will go on throwing things at it. Standing behind it to catch what comes is optional, and it always was.
May you learn to not take things personally.
May you surrender to grace with yourself and with others.
May you know peace.
The Toltecs were a people who lived in central Mexico, and people who carry that ancestry are alive today. Nearly everything said about the Toltecs of the past comes down to us through the Aztecs, who looked back on them as a vanished golden age. No Toltec text survives that anyone can hold these agreements up against. What travels under that name in modern spiritual writing runs through a twentieth-century line of teachers, Carlos Castaneda among them, whose account of his own apprenticeship did not hold up when it was examined. None of this makes the four agreements less useful to you. Their authority comes from what they do when you try them. If they work, they work because they work, whoever said them first in Tula, the old Toltec capital.
Where the agreements come from: The Four Agreements by don Miguel Ruiz.
More in the Four Agreements series