Agreement No. 2 to make with yourself for the new year!

Way back in September, I wrote a blog about The Four Agreements. It was primarily about the agreements: Don't make assumptions. It was particularly about not assuming that someone got your text or email or other communication unless you have heard back from them.

Through the years, I imagine that there have been lots of hurt feelings and misunderstandings when someone did not receive another person's letter/communication. Recently, I heard of someone sending an apology letter that the other person never got. Sadly, the friendship ended permanently.

Another of the four agreements is one that I wish someone had taught me in my youth and explained to me what exactly it meant, for I have wasted a great deal of time with this one. It's don't take anything personally.

Wow, through the decades, I have taken so, so many things personally--when they have had nothing--absolutely nothing--to do with me! For example, my father was bi-polar, and I took this personally. What I mean by that is that I hid his illness from others (because my mother told me to) and because I thought that it would reflect badly on me (us). Also somehow I thought that it was my job to fix him.To figure out what would be the perfect treatment or medicine that would "cure" him. What a burden that was on a child and on a teen/young adult! I wish that someone had told me, "Your father is sick, it is not your fault, nor is it your responsibility to fix him (period)."

Also for most of my life, I took my older sister's behavior personally. From her years at home on through her three marriages, she kept me and my family turned upside down much of the time. In my 20s and early 30s, I stood ready to go at a moment's notice if  my parents should need me to help them with Lynda and her latest antics. She tried to control me (and everyone else), treated me poorly, and often made me feel bad about myself, even told a therapist that she "could destroy me." Finally in my 50s, I figured out that she was truly a narcissist, and then all of the pieces fell into place.

With my mother, I commiserated and thought that I could somehow help her with her sadness about my father and my sister and her own sadness from her early life.

Even my parents' not getting along, I took personally, felt somehow responsible for their misery, and thought that I could help them, so that they would be happy.

What illusions on my part! Or as one therapist asked me, "Who died and made you God?"

By the time I met and married my second husband, I thought that if only I were prettier (for by that time, everything for me had become boiled down to that issue), he would love me more and come home to me. Then after discovering that he was an addict, I thought that I could "fix" him.

After writing much of my memoir piece by piece here in my blog, I now understand myself and my family better than I ever have. I clearly see that I was so enmeshed in them and in their dramas that it would have taken a wiser person than I to extract myself from their lives sooner than I did. I'm just pleased to have now learned not to take their stuff personally--because it helps me not to take anything personally from anybody today, and that makes me a much happier person!

Of course, sadly all of this family stuff set me up to take things personally in the workplace too. That, along with my inability to communicate tactfully, caused some problems, dramas, and some unnecessary sadness for me among some of my co-workers, students, and their parents. But that's a story perhaps for another day.

Now with my daughter, my son-in-law, my friends--old and new--, my granddaughters, my neighbors, I try not to take anything personally. Of course, it still creeps in sometimes, but now I can say to myself, "It's not about you."

Because as Don Miguel Ruiz said in The Four Agreements, very little of what others "do is because of me. What others say and do is a projection of their own reality, their own dream. When you are immune to the opinions and actions of others, you won't be the victim of needless suffering."

Boy, have I suffered needlessly. And played the victim way too many times! But I've learned and am still learning. I'm changing my mindset, looking at things differently. Rising above hurt and victimhood.

Ruiz further tells us, "Don't take anything personally, even when a situation seems so personal, even if others insult you directly. It has nothing to do with you. Their point of view and opinion come from the programming they received growing up. When you take things personally, you feel offended and your reaction is to defend your beliefs and create conflict. You make something big out of something so little because you have the need to be right and make everybody else wrong."

Now when I find myself feeling offended and trying too hard to prove my "rightness," it's a sure sign that I'm taking something personally! So I simply take a deep breath in, and let it go, let it go, let it go with the out breath--as many times as necessary. Try it. Conscious breathing is a step into mindfulness, into the present moment, into sanity.