Quick to take offense? Stop taking everything so personally.
Learn how to keep your cool when you feel like you’re under attack.
by: E.B. Johnson
We’re all susceptible to taking offence from time to time, but taking things personally all the the time can cause some serious problems in your relationships and your life.
When our sensitivity buttons get pushed, a whole host of reactions and emotions can get brought to the surface. A lot of those reactions are negative ones, based around negative emotions like irritation, resentment and hurt. If someone says something that feels like a personal affront, we can quickly find ourself wrapped up in injured emotions and feelings of being irked, humiliated and even exasperated.
Taking everything personally is a sure-fire way to sabotage yourself and alienate yourself from the people that matter most. Before turning that distress and disappointment inward, take some time to understand your emotions and the way they drive your reactions.
Why are we so offended?
As social animals, we define ourselves — in part — through the relationships we share with the world around us. We interact with an assortment of people on a daily basis and through those interactions, we come to have a general idea of who we are.
We like to look to others for our happiness, our security and even our safety. We like to look to other people to fill our needs and reaffirm our opinions and ego. The problem is, however, that when we give our judgement away to others, we make a bargain with the devil, meaning we give away more of ourselves and our power than we should.
Taking things personally and being easily offended starts with this bargain. It begins when we give individuals more power over us than they should. Allowing someone’s opinion of you to impact the way to feel is allowing someone to question who you are and what you believe.
We are offended because we no longer rely on ourselves to define who we are on the inside or the outside. Instead, we have been quietly and carefully trained to place that power into the hands of other, a foolhardy errand that leaves us feeling unfulfilled and hopeless.
Instead of reacting when someone pushes our buttons, we must learn that there is greater power in taking a step back and consider the facts.
The feelings that fuel the offense.
While it might not thrill us to admit we’ve give away such a stake in ourselves, it is necessary in order to embrace our emotions openly and honestly. When we are brave enough to face our feelings and get to the root of their existence, we can come to some truly stunning revelations that allow us to transform how we react and interact to the opinions of others in our lives.
More often than not, we react to a minor affront because it unconsciously reminds us of an unresolved or lurking trauma that was experienced at some point in your life. While your reaction might seem disproportionate to the other party, it makes sense to you, and it’s understandable when you get to the root of your trauma and the trapped remains of your past that are holding you back.
We are primed to take offense from birth. As children, we were only able to perceive the world through understanding the things outside ourselves. We would see them, process them and then relate them back to us. As adults, we know better than to relate every cause and effect to ourselves, but the impulsive child still lurks, preventing us from making sane, objective decisions.
Offense happens most often when we’re feeling low or vulnerable, but it always comes down to feelings of:
- being demeaned or degraded
- being accused of immorality, negligence or unreliability
- being objectified
- being victimized, exploited or persecuted
- being criticized, blamed, put down or chastised
- being ignored, dismissed, passed over or rejected
- being discriminated against
- stupidity, uselessness or inconsequentialness
While some of these are perfectly justifiable reasons to take offense, it’s not always wise to do so. Sometimes, it’s better to just walk away, but it’s going to take developing some tools to get there.
These 9 tools can help you get there, but they take commitment and time to master. Use them together to reclaim your authority of your feelings, or alone as pieces to a bigger self-discovery puzzle. There’s no one size fit all solution when it comes to taking everything personally (or not). It all comes down to you and the choices you make.
How to stop taking everything personally.
1. Suspend your judgement.
We get hurt in life, and when that happens it becomes easier to see the worst in everyone. People with a lot of trauma in their past often have a high negative self-bias, which makes them believe that everyone and everything is ultimately out to do bad.
If you want to stop taking offense every 5 minutes, start by suspending your judgement about other people and their intent. Stop reading into what they’re saying and stop trying to analyze every breath between their words.
Realize that you may be unconsciously jumping to conclusions and stop yourself before you get worked up into an emotional frenzy. When you know that you’re prone to reading other people’s intent distrustfully, you’ll be able to open up your dialogue and prevent the worst before it happens.
2. Lower your expectations.
Hurt and anger have their foundations in the same place: disappointment.
We expect much of ourselves (and other people) and when those Everest-like peaks aren’t reached, we become disappointed in others and ourselves. We can avoid this disappointment — as well as all the hurt feelings that come along with it — by dropping our expectations and accepting that we are human, prone to all the mistakes and missteps that humans make.
Our frustrations always relate to our personal ideals. We are often perfectionistic and don’t give ourselves or others room to make mistakes. These ideals are impossible to reach and therefore self-defeating, so the only way to correct is to start treating ourselves with a little compassion.
3. Ask yourself: if this critique came from someone else…would it be constructive?
Part of taking offense can just come down to hearing it from someone that we don’t necessarily care for. It’s impossible to learn anything about yourself if you’re not willing to learn from your adversaries and the adversity you face.
Facing our weaknesses is uncomfortable and often threatening, but it is the way we come to recognize our strengths. We might feel compelled to resist criticism when it comes from someone that we don’t like, but chances are there is valuable information in there that can help make us a better version of ourselves.
4. Consider the overinflation.
Before you jump into any reaction or conclusions, stop to consider your reaction and consider the fact that it might be majorly overinflated.
Getting our feelings hurt can cause us to justify just about any reaction, but just because something feels justified doesn’t mean it is. Our feelings are real; our perceptions, not so much. Ask yourself what you’re really reacting to and then ask yourself if you would think this same reaction was over-the-top in someone else.
Remember, when you overact, it’s the childish part of you that is struggling to relate its perception of itself to the outside world. You’re not that child anymore. You’re a strong, confident adult who knows who and what they want from life. Be brutal with your honesty and have enough respect for yourself to fess up when you’re overreacting.
5. Take a deep breath and detach.
Sometimes it doesn’t matter what is “right” or “wrong” about a situation — you have to detach and just walk away.
Although we feel like our justice and our perspective is the most important, that’s not true. The world doesn’t revolve around us and life isn’t fair. Sometimes, you aren’t going to get an apology and you’re not going to get a chance to tell your side of the story.
That’s fine.
Pull yourself back from the brink by stopping, counting to 10 and taking a deep breath. Remember that the person who offended you is also a human, as broken and as bleeding as you are. They may not say what they mean and (more than likely) their words are coming from a place of deep hurt.
Know your limits by knowing when to walk away from a battle that serves no purpose to your journey. Life is a decades-long civil war, not a flash-in-the-pan battle. Know what battles are worth fighting and what battles are worth walking away from and detach yourself from the consequences when there’s nothing you can change.
6. Stop looking for things that offend you.
There are some out there who love the feeling of being offended. You’ll know the ones I’m talking about; the ones that like to lurk and skulk in the corners of a Facebook comment section, always looking for the next mis-marked Starbucks cup or neutrally gendered bathroom.
People with unstable egos prop up their paper-thin sense of self by compensating with a sense of superiority. They legitimize their self-worth by contrasting it to your outraged disapproval. The angrier you get, the more validated they become. Their self-doubts are camouflaged temporarily but always bubbling beneath the surface. To feed their need for confrontation is only to degrade yourself.
Rather than looking for things that offend focus your attentions and your energies only on the things which heighten your awareness of self and emotion. Let go of the needless tension that comes with drama and recalibrate in a way that allows you to work instead on your own shortcomings.
7. Overcome self-centeredness.
The all-about-me mentality is toxic and common in today’s social media age. This “God-of-my-own-universe” mentality leaves the psyche a breeding ground for being frequently offended, as every action or inaction, ever thing that is done, said or undone becomes a reflection of who and what you are.
Reduce the impact things have on you by reducing their connection to you. If you reside at the center of everything, everything is connected to you in some way no matter how mundane.
Move yourself away from the center of everyone else’s life (because you don’t really exist there anyway) and allow life to be indifferent to you. See things for what they are — a bit of good and a bit of bad all mixed up together. Your mother’s bad mood isn’t about you. The snarky way your boss spoke this morning actually has nothing to do with you.
Everyone is entitled to their opinion, just as you’re entitled to yours, but the only opinion you have to be attached to is your own. Work on learning the importance of your own opinion and stop worrying so much about the opinion of others by getting over yourself.
8. Develop a peace time practice.
Rather than a pastime, develop a peace time practice that allows you to calm and recenter yourself whenever you’re feeling vulnerable or looked down upon.
Meditate, journal or just spend a few moments relaxing quietly while you focus on your breath. Nothing can beat a regular and quiet practice when it comes to cultivating a better understanding of ourselves and a better peace of mind.
9. Invite humility in.
Developing humility will allow you to analyze your actions in an honest way. Being humble means being able to look at our actions and understand them for what they are. When we are humble, we understand that sometimes it us we that are the first offenders and that’s okay.
Humility is not about self-flagellation. It’s about understanding and compassion. It is knowing that you are doing the best that you can with the baggage that you have.
Being humble is an immunization against offense, but it’s one of the most brutal skillsets to cultivate. Inviting humility in means taking some hard, brutal looks at who we are and how we react, and it’s not for the faint of heart.
As your humility grows, remember: this pain is a friend to our peace and our equanimity. When we have peace and we have self-control — we have happiness.
Putting it all together…
It’s easy to get offended when you feel like you have so much of yourself out there on the line. Sticking up for yourself is one thing, but taking things personally is another. The trick to life is finding the balance and finding the strength to walk away when the time’s come.
By cultivating our humility and taking a brutally honest look at who we are and why we respond to things like we do, we can learn not to take things so personally and let go of the things that no longer suit us. Learning not to take offense is one of the hardest skills we can master, but it’s possible when you set your boundaries, accept yourself and realize the value of your perceptions.
Life isn’t always fair and it isn’t always under our control. Reclaim your power over the present by learning how to let go of offense before it nestles in your heart. You are the only one who can give someone the power to hurt you. Choose to keep that power for yourself.
