This post is the text of a video essay I’ve hosted on YouTube here:
Inquiries
How much do others respond to us based on their own personalities, moods, and contexts, rather than the energy that we put out, the words we say, and the behaviors that we exhibit? In other words, how consistently do people – including ourselves – feel, think, and behave independently of how we’re being treated?
To what extent do we, consciously or unconsciously, elicit reactions from others that are surprising, intense, upsetting, or unusually satisfying?
How accurately do we perceive the impact that we have on others and the effects that others have on us?
Why does it sometimes feel as though this vast planet that inhabits 8 billion other human beings will simply continue on unaffected without us, as if we’re a speck of dust on a glacier, and yet, we can see evidence of individuals, perhaps even ourselves, changing the course of human history on scales of all sizes, from the international down to our specific community?
How can we more accurately understand conflict on all levels of social complexity, from our own intimate relationships all the way up to the national and international dynamics we observe from our positions of relatively minor influence?
And what’s the best view we can hold of conflict with our loved ones or that we see playing out elsewhere in the world, that has the greatest likelihood of resolving it peacefully and with mutual benefit?
Those are some of questions I’d like to share my thoughts on in these next few videos, on the subtle art of taking it personally.
The common advice to “not take things personally” implies that the actions and words of other people are only a reflection of “their own reality”, and are “not about us”. But how does that orientation to others’ behavior toward us fit with the self-evident recognition that, if you were to ask most of us, we’d would tell you that a very substantial proportion of “our own reality” about specific other people is in fact shaped from their actual behavior that we’ve experienced, and their words that we hear?
Most of us would also say that the specific individuals that we come into contact with — whether they be family members, co-workers, the server at our favorite restaurant, or even parasocial contacts like our favorite podcaster or celebrity — continuously provide us with interpersonal experience that refines our predictive mental models and our intuitions of what we can expect from them in the future. And that those experience-based models that we then carry with us, highly affect how we behave toward those individuals.
We certainly wouldn’t admit to walking around the world conducting ourselves in ways that are totally detached from the empirical social data that we take in through our conversations and non-verbal exchanges with others – others about whom we dignifiedly form reputations that we wouldn’t dream of simply inventing, based on only egocentric projections and assumptions. How unfair that would be to others, to speak to and act toward them in a manner that wasn’t informed by their actual deeds and discourse, but merely by conditioned, unconscious patterns of ours. Not to mention how ungrounding and self-disparaging it would be to see ourselves entirely that way – as essentially blind to the interpersonal and psychological reality of the people right in front of us, who we replace with “our own reality”, which sort of sounds like form of madness, if we define that as a loss of contact with objective reality.
None of us could or should amble around believing that the perceived relational world in front of us does not map whatsoever onto the real social choices of the other people in it. That our fear of someone who has hurt people for example, or our admiration of someone who has achieved great things, isn’t “about them” and is thus “not personal”.
And yet despite these relatively obvious statements made from our own point of view, there’s a human tendency to reason that how others treat us “isn’t really about us”, or is “all about us”, perhaps largely depending on how positive or negative the conduct toward us is.
The often repeated wisdom to “not take things personally” doesn’t seem to be as easy to follow as it is to consolingly tell a friend who’s upset by a conflict at work or home, especially with a person who knows them well through shared and repeated interpersonal exchanges.
That being said, there are some good reasons that many resonate with the idea that nothing is personal. It’s also not easy or advisable to see everything that others do as only “about us” or having nothing to do with their past conditioning and their dispositional constitutions.
The simultaneous existence of both tendencies — to overpersonalize and to underpersonalize social and relational experiences — suggests to me some psychological depth here worthy of excavation.
The fundamental question of how personal things are in interpersonal affairs is an everpresent component in my work as a therapist and coach, not to mention relevant to the social life of any homo sapien, which, by the way, is Latin for “wise human”.
What I’ll be sharing here is informed by my education and experience working with clients, as well as my own introspective process in relationship over my 4+ decades. My intention is to be clarifying and even salubrious, hopefully, for improving the personal relationships of some listeners. I also want to help decrease some collective confusion and anxiety about why there’s as much disharmony and conflict as there seems to be in the world today, and how we can each make a small contribution to greater harmony by seeing interpersonal dynamics in a more complete way.
If that sounds useful to you, then let’s continue.
Relationship is circular, not linear
Circular causality is a term for describing the continuous and dynamic way that two or more people mutually affect each other.
In contrast, linear causality refers to simple cause-and-effect dynamics, in which one event triggers another in a straightforward and single-direction progression.
An image of linear causality is a series of dominoes knocking each other down. The last fallen domino in the line doesn’t then circle around and affect the first fallen domino and re-start the chain reaction (sadly, for those of us who love to watch domino chain reactions). The sequence of falling dominos is a one-time, linear chain, with a beginning (the first domino is pushed), a middle (in which we stand in delightfully anxious suspense while we wonder if some rogue domino won’t do it’s job and knock over the one after it), and an end (when the last domino in the series falls down).
Linear causality describes simple systems that don’t entail feedback.
- A boulder suddenly breaks off of a mountain side and rolls down to a stable state in a canyon far below, where it then rests for millions of years.
- Shiny iron atoms that are unstable lose electrons and settle into a more stable form as rusted iron.
- A computer program is executed with an input and gives an output after performing a sequence of instructions and then stopping.
These are all examples of linear systems.
The belief that “nothing is personal” applies that lens to human relationships. If the way that others treat us has nothing to do with us, then we’re like dominos waiting in a line of cause and effect, to be influenced by the one behind us, but not influenced by the one in front of us.
But in complex realm of human affairs, people act upon each other in a continuous and fluid “dance”. In dyads (systems of two people), groups, and societies, circular causality provides a more accurate understanding and more correct predictions of outcomes.
Why this is the case I hope will be made much more clear as we go on. But one concise and preliminary answer may be that humans are enduring, perceiving, and responding creatures, and so live in a reality of continuous social cybernetic feedback. We don’t simply vanish like an electron energy state after an interaction. We remain, observe and feel the ripples of what just transpired between parties, all the while processing it and making the experience a new part of us that feeds back into the next “dance step”, weather that’s a dance we’re doing with one other person or 8 billion people or any level in between those group sizes. As long as we live, every “dance” we participate in or even observe becomes newly integrated experience into how we dance with others.
So the subtle art of taking it personally requires that we recognize the circular causality in the continuous and dynamic dance of human transactions.
Unconscious circular causality and its discontents
One of my favorite images is from a family therapy textbook published in the 1970’s called Change: Principles of Problem Formation and Problem Resolution. It’s a simple drawing of a male sailor and a female sailor, each pulling backward with all their strength on the sail of a small sailboat in opposite directions, with the caption reading “two sailors frantically steadying a steady boat”.
I love this image and have showed it to many clients, because it illustrates fundamental circular causality in a relational system of two, and more interestingly to me, it shows the obvious blindness to the circular causality that humans are prone to when they’re part of a relational system, and also the ease with which the circular causality can be immediately spotted by an outside observer who’s not part of the system.
I assume that the choice to draw a man and a woman pulling in opposite directions, each doing so in response to to the other’s pulling, and thus each wasting their energy while accomplishing nothing besides possible destabilization of the boat, was because that textbook dealt mostly with marital and family dynamics. Some common examples of circular causality in marriages that I’ve noticed in my work include:
- withdrawing vs pursuing
- criticizing vs defending
- withholding information vs prying for information
- placating vs coercing
- overeagerness for conflict vs over-avoidance of conflict
- ignoring the other’s communication vs taking unilateral action
One way that problems in marriages can be seen, is as a failure of both partners to accurately perceive the ways that their attempts to meet their own needs actually hinder them by negatively impacting their partner, who is simultaneously foiling their own needs through their own well-intentioned yet counterproductive attempts to take care of themselves, often in perfect symmetry with each other. In other words, the martial problems exist largely because neither partner can see the circular causality that’s transpiring between them.
My hope is to make circular causality more apparent and understood not only when we look at interpersonal human systems from the outside as an observer, which helps human behavior make a lot more sense, but also when we look from within at the relational systems that we’re a part of, which helps the human behavior that we personally embody and evoke become more harmonious, effective, and satisfying.