How not to personalize?
We have a tendency to personalize things and people in our lives. We take things into our mental ownership that actually don’t belong to us. We personalize relationships, careers, care-giving, parenting and many other areas.
But what does personalize mean in specific? It means you make things and people in your life about you. If you didn’t get a job offer, its about you. If you failed in some business, it is your fault. If you went into argument with your spouse, it must be you. That is what we mean by personalizing. You make it so personal in such a way you come out of your presence. You lose the sweet taste of life living. You miss the joy of experiencing life. Why? Because you are in the heads of other people, taking their mental trash, fixing their thoughts and manipulating their feelings.
You can easily lose track of time and living when you are in that route. It is sad when someone reaches the end of their life realizing they haven’t really lived life because of the excessive worrying and overthinking.
This trait didn’t come randomly out of no where. It has a beginning. Go back to the early days of your life. What happened there? How did you reach to a point where you had to personlize things and people? What happened to you? From where did the self-blame actually start? What incidents happened that forced you to point your finger back to you as someone to blame and fix?
After gathering and writing down all those past senarios, now think for yourself for a moment. Was it really your fault? Was it your duty to fix the situation? If the love was conditional, was it really your responsibility to rationalize it and justify it?
It can be very shocking and traumatizing to realize you have been taking on a mental baggage that actually doesn’t concern you. For a moment, you may think: Oh my god. I will lose everyone in my life if I let go of my personalizing behaviour.
The truth is: do we really own people in our lives? Are they going to be there for us permanently? Are we supposed to live together clingy, needy and entitled? What if we treat each other as equals, not higher or lower? What if we perceive each other as the same, as human beings, as guests in this earth hotel. We live here temporarily knowing our checkout can be any day?
Personalizing is only a perception, a thought and an idea that we picked along the way. It can be reviewed, revisited, reanalysed and processed. No harm in that. But living daily without rechecking our internal dialogue can lead to living unfulfilled and unhappy life.