The Truth About Why You're Really Fighting #relationships #selfawareness

What people do to you is not personal. People have a very hard time with that going, "Well, what do you mean it's not personal, Robert?" Well, what I mean by that is when somebody says something malicious or cruel or they're not really aiming it at you. They're having problems from their own past. They're aiming it at their parent. They're aiming it at a sibling. They're aiming it at a previous boyfriend or girlfriend. They're aiming it at a colleague at work that did something to them. It really isn't personal about you, in particular. It's about them and their problems. So, if you take the angle that I'm not going to get emotionally involved with this this because it really has nothing to do with me. That is incredibly liberating thing to develop. I'm not saying it's easy, but that should be like the end game of of a lot of our kind of self-help. >> I mean, that's a pretty well-known truth in psychology. They call it projection, that people aren't really reacting to you, they're reacting to something going on inside of them that you're triggering or reminding them of. But, what I think is useful is to flip this and to think about the fact that we do this to other people all the time. And to ask ourselves, how many of our relationships are authentic, meaning where we're actually responding to the person that is sitting across from us, and how much of it is that they're reminding us of our own issues, and we're not even giving them a chance. Now, we all do this because it's human nature. But, with self-awareness, you can start to catch yourself. And one way to actually apply this is just to slow things down. Just to notice what you're feeling, and instead of responding right away, like, let's say your spouse says something that makes you really, really mad. Just stop for a second and ask yourself, okay, I know I didn't like what they just said, but is the intensity of my reaction, meaning the proportion of the reaction, is it really all from the here and now, or is it because in my mind it's connected to something which is maybe even connected to another thing which has a lot of emotional weight for me. And if you can catch yourself doing that in the moment and sort of lower the intensity level, we give each other an opportunity to have genuine reactions, to really be with the person that you're with, and not responding to them as an avatar that represents all types of other issues that they have nothing to do with.