But it may be the most rewarding skill we can learn

I’ve been ‘in therapy’ for almost two decades. For about one-third of my life, I have sought help from others to heal my emotional wounds. I’m not weird or special. According to SAMHSA, over 50 million Americans received mental health treatment in 2022.

Over the past twenty years, I learned how I integrated (or failed to integrate) things that happened to me. I’ve learned how my past shows up in the present to create more suffering than the average human should endure. I’ve learned that much of this suffering is caused by things I do to myself.

During my education, a tiny book of wisdom, “The Four Agreements” by Don Miguel Ruiz, appeared on my radar.

This little tome contains the biggest bang for the buck out of all the self-help books, articles, and podcasts I have consumed. It’s simple, precise, and succinct. My pathway quickly led to overwhelm, and I found myself looking for a simpler approach to healing. I often returned to Ruiz’s book of Toltec wisdom.

While I can follow a couple of the agreements fairly closely, two of the Four Agreements, Don’t Make Assumptions and Don’t Take Anything Personally, remain challenging. Though hard to implement, the agreements provide solutions to my problems. It is as if I can boil all my mental health work down to these two statements.

Self-help is Not Self-Centered

Not making assumptions is about communicating with other people. If we don’t understand something, we can ask for more information. We can learn to communicate better with our partners and loved ones to improve our relationships by reducing ambiguity. This is a universal truth and a common theme.

All Four Agreements are found in one form or another in many thought systems and religions. They are mostly common sense. But just because something is obvious doesn’t mean it’s easy.

Another common theme among belief systems, including the Toltec lineage to which Don Miguel Ruiz belongs, is the concept of interconnectedness. Rather than existing as rugged individuals, humans are a part of everything. We breathe air, exhale carbon dioxide, consume water, excrete urine, etc.

We are necessarily and obligingly connected to everything else. The universe is a bunch of molecules that move around, change shape, form things, and dissolve back. This isn’t speculative.

But it is formidable to remember that we are not separate. Existing as separate individuals working within a collective is confusing. Modern evolution has increasingly led us to focus on individuality and away from the collective. But we would not have evolved this far if we did not consider the whole. Something changed in the recent past that is leading us apart. I believe this is why so many of us are suffering.

It’s Not About Me (or You)

Focusing on ourselves, the individual, is increasingly common. This recent departure from a more collective evolutionary path is destructive and maladaptive. We would not have survived this long in isolation from one another. Self-centeredness explains why we struggle not to take things personally. The increasing focus on individuality is killing both the individual and the collective. Yet it is so hard not to do.

Not taking anything personally starts with remembering we are less apart than we are together. The whole (species) is greater than the individual. We knew this once, and we can again. Religions, communities, families, and even governments can help us rediscover our connections. That they have failed to do so in recent history does not mean we can’t do it.

The complex human nervous system is adapted to facilitate healthy societies and solve the cognitive dissonance between the individual and the community. We know how to balance these two inherently. All we have to do is remember.

The Hardest Thing I’ll Ever Do

My mental health education has taught me that I take things personally. I have discovered this causes nearly all my ‘extra’ suffering. When I was young, taking things personally meant understanding what people wanted from me. As an adult, when I take things personally, I create more problems than I solve. Not only do I not feel more loved, but I also push people away. Many of us do this. We commonly refer to it as people-pleasing or codependency.

Why do we take things personally? Why are we the central characters in our life stories? Why can we not let go of it being about us?

I can’t answer these questions, but it doesn’t make evolutionary sense. Humans evolved because we cooperated and focused on both ourselves andour group. Somehow, however, this awareness has been lost in recent times. This movement is probably a result of Modernity, increasing group size, governmental structure, and shifting values.

While the cause of our increasing individualism is unknown, what is clear is that increasing self-centeredness is killing us. We have shifted away from our evolutionary path. While our exceptional neurological gifts are beneficial, they are also costly. Our ‘advancement’ is coupled with forgetting that we are obligately connected to ourselves and the Earth. No one knows exactly what happened, but many agree we have made a wrong turn.

Perhaps my struggle with self-centeredness will help explain.

My Story: Trauma, Old Beliefs, and Maladaptive Schema

Like many, I am a hypervigilant, empathic, people-pleasing empath. Because I did not receive enough information from my parents and family of origin, I developed ways of elucidating my world. I became a mind-reader. I spent nearly all my energy trying to be who I thought people wanted me to be. I believed love was unconditional, and that I must behave this way to feel safe and loved.

As an adult, this belief system caused trouble in my relationships. I was the pursuer of my partner’s retreat, driving them away. I became a doormat. I sacrificed my needs and wants and tried too hard to make my family happy. Eventually, I lost the sense of who I was.

I learned most of this after my first wife left me for another man. In therapy, I realized that my contribution to that divorce was my loss of self. I became very uninteresting; a clingy, needy, shell of a man with no redeeming qualities. Maybe I was an attentive father and ’nice’ husband, but I was miserable. Years of denying my needs made me exceptionally resentful of everyone, including the people I loved the most.

Although this behavior was protective when I was a child, it became maladaptive in adulthood. I learned that trying to meet other people’s needs to make them love me was manipulative and unkind. Who was I to think I could read people’s minds, or to do so without their consent? How could I possibly know what people were thinking, anyway? Wouldn’t asking them be a better approach than thinking I was clairvoyant or omniscient?

My fear of abandonment made me incredibly self-centered. The illusion of altruism didn’t fool anyone but me. I forced my will on people without their consent, determined their thoughts, and based my behavior on these observations. And if that sounds crazy, well, there are a lot of crazies in the world. This article summarizes some people-pleasing statistics and suggests nearly half of us behave like this sometimes. So before judging me, look at those around you — and yourself.

Though I am on a healing path, I sometimes fall back on my old beliefs. When I experience conflict, disagreement, or somehow perceive that a loved one is disappointed in me, I can be triggered into automatic people-pleasing behavior. I take whatever they do or say personally, and implement my old strategies based. I become afraid, subconsciously, that I will be abandoned or worse. I lose my sense of self, forget my needs, and do whatever good things I think will make the other person happy. I am getting better, but I still miss the mark.

The Way Out is In

Despite our belief that we are doing good things for our loved ones, people-pleasing behaviors can be manipulative and coercive. The behavior also leads to loss of self, anxiety, and depression. Rather than protecting us from abandonment, it can be a cause, as my experience illustrates. The fears we are trying to avoid come true.

Luckily, there is a simple solution, though it isn’t easy. Many therapeutic strategies tell us that ‘changing our minds’ is all we have to do. Or if we stop believing that our people-pleasing behavior will protect us, we can start being more selfish. But if it were that easy, half the self-help industry would collapse overnight.

Teasing apart our old protective strategies for healthier ones is perhaps the most difficult thing one can do. I’ve been divorced, quit nicotine after a 30-year addiction, and given up a career to be a better parent. Like most of us, I have had my fair share of challenges in my life. Sure, I have a ton of privilege, but I would estimate I am an average representative of human challenge. Changing beliefs is difficult for all of us.

And it’s easy to understand why. We spend most of our lives reinforcing old beliefs. During moments of childhood trauma, we adopt whatever strategy we can think of quickly to protect ourselves. These strategies don’t have to make sense, they only have to reduce the pain.

A classic example is the sad clown who uses humor to escape bullying or feel safe in their family home. They grow up making people laugh, but never address the trauma inside. They are depressed when they are alone, but happy in public. They believe they have to make people laugh to be loved.

The problem is, we generate mounds of evidence over time. Thousands of instances where we insert the maladaptive behavior and get the desired result. It is a massively repetitive cycle of

fear → maladaptive behaviors → safety

that strengthens with each iteration. We not only believe the belief works, but we feel empowered. Even when the cycle doesn’t work, we can use this power to convince ourselves it did. The fear is so strong that we double down on the only strategy we have.

The bottom line is that maladaptive schemas, like people-pleasing, are incredibly hard to change because we believe they keep us safe.

Shifting From Involuntary to Intentional

Our learned belief systems are so ingrained that they are automatic. When a fearful event or trigger happens, the behavior is implemented more quickly than we perceive. This mechanical response is powerful, protective, and penetrative. We are miles down the path of people-pleasing before we realize it. We don’t feel the fear, but we react automatically. Not being afraid, of course, was the original point in building the belief. We repeat the behaviors because they have helped in the past.

The first step is learning to see what is happening. Viktor Frankl describes this most eloquently in his oft-quoted “Man’s Search for Meaning”.

Between stimulus and response there is space.
In that space is our power to choose our response.
In our response lies our growth and our freedom.

I can’t love this quote enough. Frankl describes what I have learned from meditation, awareness, and a feeling of connectedness with the world. The stimulus is the fear or trigger, the response is our choice.

Realizing that our response is a choice is perhaps the most powerful healing. What follows is recognition of our responses. Why do we react the way we do? Have we ever even noticed? We assume it is a result of some external force. It is someone else’s fault. In truth, the reaction belongs to us and is under our purview. It may not be under our control, but we are the only ones who can do anything about it.

We can shift from an involuntary automatic response to a voluntary choice. The key is to learn to recognize what is happening, learn a new skillset, and apply the new strategy repeatedly. Simply shifting from being a victim of our circumstances to the leader of our experience can be revolutionary.

A Solution That Is Working for Me

Volition. Intention. Attention. Direction.

Honing our awareness is necessary to heal ourselves and form new beliefs. We used to do this automatically, but the skill has been lost as an artifact of Modernity. Technology increases our efficiency, but it also promotes apathy. We no longer need to pay attention. As more and more of our daily needs were met, we stopped paying attention altogether.

The phrase ‘pay attention’ suggests that we actively spend our energy. This makes sense because we focus our thinking on the targets of interest. But it also suggests that our attention is budgeted and decided. Attention, then, can be conscious or subconscious.

Consider when you arrive at your destination after a long drive, having forgotten parts of the journey. Habitual skills like driving may become so automatic that we don’t need to pay as much attention. We do lots of things using this kind of passive attention. Like inserting our old beliefs or choosing how we want to react.

Awareness and Meditation

Becoming aware of our attention is the critical first step. There are likely many ways to accomplish this, but I only know how I have done it. A combination of therapy and meditation worked for me. Therapy helped me understand how my past relates to my beliefs, but others may already understand these things. Similarly, mindfulness meditation has taught me how to take the observer perspective and control my attention. Others may find their way to these abilities via different routes.

Meditation teaches us to use our awareness. Meditation is the practice, like playing scales on a violin, that facilitates daily mindfulness, like playing a concert. We meditate so that we can be aware of what is happening in our daily lives. Meditation requires discipline, repetition, and habituation.

Meditation is also not what most people think. Many believe meditation requires a quiet mind, a sense of calm, chanting, or being completely isolated. In truth, Tibetan meditation is simply about awareness.

Meditation and mindfulness can be defined (in the Tibetan sense) as learning to bring our attention to the present moment and simply seeing what arises without bias or judgment.

There are a few key words in the definition above that deserve more explanation:

Learning implies a process rather than a destination. Even old monks are still learning to meditate. There is no accumulation, no badges to be earned, and no levels to reach. Each meditation is an individual experience.

The present moment implies staying in the moment. Humans tend to worry about the past (depression) or the future (anxiety). Mindfulness suggests that those periods do not exist and that only this moment is real. Meditation teaches you to be in the moment, and being in the moment helps you catch yourself when triggered.

Simply seeing what arises tells us that there is no manipulation. We aren’t trying to be quiet, or calm, or enlightened. We aren’t trying to do anything. We are simply being, sitting, and observing.

Without judgment or bias is an interesting part of the definition. Like I said before, there is no leveling up. There is no goal to reach. A meditation session cannot be good or bad. We are not advanced or beginner meditators. Simply meditation is all there is. Letting go of placing value on meditating is critical.

Attention and Mindfulness

During sitting meditation, we sit and ‘pay attention’ to our breath or some other target. The breath is an excellent target to place our attention. When we become aware that our attention has drifted away from the breath, we note ‘thinking’ and return to paying attention to the breath. That’s it. It is that simple.

Practicing meditation makes it easier to be mindful in our daily lives. Mindfulness allows us to be more present and aware of our place in the moment. Being aware of the present moment means we can observe ourselves. This is how we learn to find the moment Viktor Frankl refers to: the moment between the trigger (stimulus) and our maladaptive reaction (response).

Learning to observe this pause means we have developed the power to choose.

Freedom might be defined as the power to choose how we react. This could be the secret to life. It is most certainly a pathway to healing. It is how we take control of our reactions and become more peaceful.

Making Real and Lasting Change

Having agency in our human experience transforms us from a passive existence to active awareness. The only way to change our limiting beliefs is to replace them with better systems. This involves breaking the cycle of:

Fear → Maladaptive Behaviors → Safety

Some self-help gurus tell us to have courage. Some say we can do something different. Others say we can find safety in other ways. Maybe if we could change our thoughts, we would feel better. I haven’t been able to do most of those things. Potential solutions include cognitive behavioral therapy, exposure therapy (desensitizing), and somatic healing. I’ve tried most of them with less-than-satisfying results.

Undoing the Agreements

Our limiting beliefs are agreements we made with ourselves. In the sad clown example, the clown agreed that they must make people laugh to be loved. Doesn’t this sound horrible? Why would a person make that sort of agreement? Simple. To protect themselves.

Learning to break an agreement you think has worked for most of your life is challenging, to say the least. It might be harder than breaking an addiction to nicotine. Trying something new is risky, and the fear of being unloved, abandoned, or isolated has real and evolutionary origins. We are adapted to belonging to groups. Other agreements and beliefs have similar power to help or hinder our needs.

Changing beliefs, however, is scary. Learning to override the powerful impulse to protect ourselves sounds impossible. Our only hope is to develop and trust a powerful system.

I learned to meditate when I became a certified mindfulness meditation instructor. This course illuminated where I was wrong about meditation, and a passive side-effect was learning to become aware. Though it wasn’t my intention, I figured out what Viktor Frankl meant. After a short period of regular meditation practice, I could see myself in action. I felt the pause and gained the ability to observe myself in action.

Coupled with the years of therapy and the knowledge of my past trauma, the ability to witness — to take the observer perspective — myself has been a game-changer. Admittedly, I am at the earliest stages of what comes next, but I am too excited not to share.

My newfound ability to see myself in action, honed by a regular (nonjudgmental) meditation practice and informed by years of healing work, has created a real opportunity. Once I realized I had this ability, however, I didn’t know what to do next.

Enter the Toltecs and Don Miguel Ruiz

Though I developed an ability to ’pause’, I didn’t know what to do next. Hell, I hadn’t intended on learning this skill. As a result, I didn’t know what to do during the pause. Luckily, my healing journey led me, multiple times, to “The Four Agreements”.

As I learned more about trauma and healing, I realized I spent too much time intellectually analyzing myself and too little time trying to change. I knew what my issues were, but I couldn’t move forward into doing something about them. Even with the power to implement change, I was unable.

What helped more than anything was simplification. I have learned that the most obvious and basic solution to a problem is often the correct one. The parsimony of the Four Agreements can’t be understated. There are only four things to do.

Like I said, I found ‘Always Do Your Best’ and ‘Be Impeccable With Your Word’ less challenging than the other two. I often fail to meet the agreements, but I more easily adhere to these two regarding my actions and speech. You may find some agreements easier than others.

While ‘Don’t Make Assumptions’ and ‘Don’t Take Anything Personally’ are related, I found the latter more challenging. Not making assumptions is about communication. Speaking and listening effectively is critical, but difficult. I learned a lot about communicating from Marshall Rosenberg’s Nonviolent Communication. Not making assumptions is part of not taking anything personally.

Not Taking Things Personally

When we take things personally, we assume we know what the other person intends, but almost always, we don’t. Without communicating with people, we make up our minds, determine our reality, and decide what the other person feels or means. Following this method, it is impossible to be accurate. It is something humans can’t do. We aren’t mind readers.

When we don’t take things personally, we free ourselves from the responsibility to monitor other people. For people pleasers, we eliminate the need to know other people’s needs because it isn’t our responsibility. We free ourselves of hypervigilance. Instead of being responsible for others’ feelings, we let them care for themselves. If we want to help, we communicate. We don’t make assumptions, we ask questions. We stop filling in the blanks.

To stop taking things personally, we must accept that we can’t control other people’s emotions and actions. Until we realize we only control our choices, there can be no healing. Until we accept that we are not the center of the universe, we will remain in a prison of our creation. Before we can heal we must let go.

Letting Go

Not taking things personally is all about letting go. We think we can do these things, but we can’t. We believe so strongly in our ability to read minds, predict moods, and sense emotions that it is almost impossible to let it go.

Changing limiting beliefs is like quitting any other addiction. Possibly even harder because you believe this addiction keeps you safe. Maybe learning new beliefs is like training wheels on a bicycle. Before you knew how to balance, the training wheels kept you from falling over. But as you learned to ride, you no longer needed assistance. If you believe strongly that the wheels keep you up, taking them off would be incredibly difficult. You may even give up altogether.

Learning to let go of old habits that worked in the past has no true analog. This is a unique thing, which contributes to how hard it is to do. This process isn’t exactly about learning something new, it is more like forgetting something that used to be important. It is about trust.

Letting go is about learning to trust yourself and the world. We have to find faith and believe that not taking things personally will not create problems. Taking things personally worked when we were young because we believed it protected us from fear.

Changing our behavior means letting go of believing in our old ways. This is not easy, but it is required to create real change.

Summary

Incorporating the Four Agreements and changing limiting beliefs are among the most difficult things a human can endeavor to do. They are also part of the pathway toward healing. If we become aware of our limiting beliefs, we create the opportunity to observe our behaviors. We can then learn to trust that we no longer need to protect ourselves from our old fears. This trust allows us to feel safe when not taking things personally. The more we implement new choices, the more confident we become.

Not taking anything personally might be the strongest and most difficult habit a human can form. Doing so will relieve us of excess suffering and pain, connect us more closely with our families and environments, and facilitate a life of human flourishing.

I continue to take things personally, but I do it less and less. I hope you can be similarly victorious in your endeavors. If more of us learned not to take things personally, it would be easier to change the world.