How do I stop taking small things personally?

Hello Ash:

You asked a good question. Many people feel the way that you do. What expectations do you have for others? What meaning do you assign to your life experiences? What choices are you making based on your expectations of others and the meaning you assign to your experiences? The answer to your questions come to surface when we examine those three questions a bit closer. 

People are entitled to their feelings. Feelings come and go. Therefore, people can react differently to different experiences. Just because someone acts differently than what we expect does not always mean what we think it means. The reason is because we could be assigning an inaccurate meaning to that person's intentions. The person you feel ignored you could be asleep (if you are referencing not getting a response by cellular phone, the internet, or social media platform), having a delayed response, or hyper-focused on meeting a deadline. The person who yells at you could be having a bad day, and unfortunately has decided to express him or herself through anger. You are not responsible for another person's behavior. Likewise, you do not have to take another person's behavior personally. You do not have to own the person's behavior and make yourself the reason why the person feels the way that they do, or acts the way in which you perceive they are acting. 

Sometimes, we take things personally when we assume that everything is about us. More often than not, the other person is unaware of the meaning you have assigned to their behavior. Everyone is different. There is a concept in therapy that could really shed light on your question. That is the concept of cognitive distortions. 

Everyone has a cognitive distortion, or some sort of fleeting experience with a cognitive distortion. Cognitive distortions are irrational thoughts. Cognitive distortions are thought errors that affect how we perceive and give meaning to our life's experiences. All-or-Nothing thinking (where we see things as black or white), Jumping to Conclusions, Should/Must/Ought statements, and Emotional Reasoning are all examples of thought errors. 

In their extreme form, cognitive distortion can affect how we interact with others. These irrational thoughts can happen automatically, and they can cause us to experience lots of distress in our life. When we have lots of distress in our life, that goes untreated and unaddressed, we can feel unable to live life on our own terms. 

Jumping to Conclusions, one of the cognitive distortions mentioned earlier, occurs where a person mentally fills in the blank when trying to make sense of an experience they have had. It can occur when the person engages in "mind reading" or the "fortune teller error" where you come up with a conclusion based off of emotions. You do not bother looking for, or applying, the facts to the situation before coming to a logical conclusion. An example of this would be, concluding that a friend rushed off the phone call because s/he was bored with you. If you failed to check the facts with your friend, then you could erroneously conclude something that is far from the truth; the truth being that your friend rushed off the phone to grab the pot off of the hot stove. With the fortune teller error, you anticipate that things will turn out for the worse, and you feel sure that your prediction is an established fact.  

Many other types of cognitive distortions exists. Cognitive distortions highlight for us the duality of our thoughts. Our thoughts can be rational and they can be irrational. They can be irrational to the point where we feel weighed down. They can be rational to the point where we feel limitless. When we feel weighed down by our unhealthy and distorted thoughts, our mind can become a landfill of negative thoughts that can bring on anger, resentment, shame, depression, anxiety, worry, and even fear. Sometimes, we can project how we feel internally onto others, and then conclude that others feel just as badly about us as we feel about ourselves. 

You can debunk negative thoughts. You can debunk cognitive distortions. You can improve your view of self, so that other people's reactions to you do not affect how you see yourself. Instead of letting thought errors get the best of us, we can choose to have a more balanced perspective on our life's experiences by making logical, rational, and productive decisions in a timely manner. In order to do this, we can take some times to relax the mind. Take some time to do some deep breathing to relax your mind. Then take some time to weigh the facts against the emotionally-based opinions. After that, take some time to allow negative thoughts to flow. Allow them to flow to you. Then, allow them to flow away from you. We can release negative thoughts without acting on them, or making them a mainstay in our lives. 

We have the choice. We can allow negativity to sit in our minds, or we can do something about it. You can work towards developing a healthier mindset in therapy. Working with a qualified professional is a good step towards understanding cognitive distortions, self-love, self-esteem, and many other challenges that are interconnected to these areas, such as anxiety, depression, rejection, shame, guilt, and blame. You are making a good first step by reaching out to help and asking your question. 

Well Wishes, 

-Val