Many years ago, not long after I first got married to my wife, I worked in a retail electronics store for about 6 months while looking for work as a youth pastor. That included several months of Christmas retail sales. It was pretty genuinely terrible. I was often shocked at how angry and nasty the customers were as they were supposed to be preparing themselves for the joyous Christmas holiday seasons. I remember one guy, who had waited a long time to make his purchase because the store was really busy. When I finally rang him up, he was pretty irate to the point that he lost it completely when I asked for an ID to confirm the check he was writing. After the fact, I was pretty agitated at the treatment I received, but as time went on, and I had a chance to think about it, I came to realize that his behavior was totally out of proportion to the inconvenience he had experienced. It didn’t make sense. A little while later, I realized that it probably had very little to do with me. He was stressed, frustrated with shopping, and probably had a handful of other reasons to be in a bad mood. It’s easy to take those feelings out on store clerks. In the 25 years since that day, I have applied this observation over and over again. It has slowly developed into a rule: If someone reacts totally out of proportion emotionally to something you say or do, it probably isn’t about you or the situation at hand. People often allow their feelings to bleed into things that have nothing to do with what they are dealing with. When I worked with kids in mental health, this rule was confirmed over and over again by client behavior patterns. Kids would often lash out at staff or each other to express hurt or anger from their past or current situations. This meant that it never made sense to take it personally, because even though their anger was directed toward you, it wasn’t about you. There is a huge amount of freedom in this revelation.
If you are able to stop and recognize that another person’s behavior, when it is out of proportion to the situation, has nothing to do with you then you can put away personal insult or negative feelings. I’ve noticed this with people who act like jerks constantly. They are unpleasant for reasons that have more to do with their own lives than with you or anything they deal with on a day to day basis. To some degree, this becomes a reason to feel pity for them because they just aren’t particularly happy people. It also gives you a reason to not take anything they say personally. It is human nature to get angry or hurt when folks mistreat or take their anger out on you. Realizing that it might not be about you provides you with a new frame of reference for looking at their behavior. It can liberate you from feelings of hurt and frustration when dealing with others.
