“Don’t take it personally.” This well-intentioned advice often reflects what would be the reasonable thing to do in situations in which you feel criticized. However, the usefulness of this advice seems limited as it lacks to provide help on the most challenging part, which is HOW not to take things personally. People mostly do not walk around saying, “Well, I think it makes perfect sense that I take things personally. I really should just keep doing it.” Instead, people are usually very aware that it would be helpful to distance themselves from how they receive other people’s acts towards them, but they feel “too sensitive” to achieve that.
Being sensitive means being able to detect signals that are very weak. In social situations, the concept of sensitivity entails the idea that other people send out information about us and that some very unfortunate people receive all of those signals and other more fortunate ones are just lucky enough not to receive them. In this case, the advice “Don’t take it personally” would make as little sense as asking a person to “Stop hearing so well.” How should we change our senses?
But maybe sensitivity in social situations is not about the senses but about expectations of what to find in another person’s behavior. While socially sensitive people expect (and often fear) to find valid information about themselves in conversations, socially non-sensitive people usually expect information about the person interacting with them. If a person seems distant and shares few words, a sensitive person may detect that the speaker is bored or angry about something this person has done, while a non-sensitive person may read that the speaker probably had a rough day and is tired.
Hence it is often true that people who quickly take things personally detect very subtle messages in conversations. But so can people that do not take things personally. Being a socially less sensitive person does not necessarily mean having inferior senses but having different expectations. Therefore, if you want to become less sensitive, do not try to detect fewer signals but start questioning the core expectation that you will find valid information about yourself in the way other people behave towards you. Instead, strengthen the expectation that whatever a person communicates says much more about themselves than about you.
So, the answer to how not to take things personally is not to become less sensitive to other people’s signals but instead use your sensitivity to detect what the other person is communicating about themselves. As a result, not only will you start to feel less anxious in social situations but also improve your relationships. Because as you shift your attention in social situations away from yourself and towards the other person, the urge to defend yourself will drop, and you will have much more capacity to react with empathy towards the other person.
