Video version available on YouTube:
Why indifference hurts
The advice to “never take anything personally” sounds wise and spiritual. But to me, it feels just a little too “easy-breezy” to not be suspicious.
There’s an experiment in psychology called the still-face paradigm. A mother is asked to give a long, unwavering blank stare are her infant — neither positive nor negative — just…still. The infant shows distress almost immediately and predictably, first trying smiles and charm to re-engage, then becoming upset and confused, and eventually withdrawing. The experiment powerfully and simply illustrates how human beings are wired for reciprocal emotional exchange — for responsive circular causality — and how when we cut off that responsiveness, it hurts relationships. The mother was essentially sending a single message with her still face: “I won’t respond to your messages. I will not acknowledge the circular causality here.” And even babies realize, apparently, that there is something very “off” about that.
When human beings are interacting with each other, they are continuously sending each other messages through behavior, body language, and words, and much of that feedback information pertains to the ways that they are experiencing one another. If we sever this loop of circular causality by dismissing the real time relational feedback coming in our direction as impersonal or “about them”, then — like the mother in the still face experiment — we’re putting up a wall of indifference that can lead to disconnection, unnecessary relationship damage, and even conflict.
What if we do something unintentionally unskillful, and don’t realize it, and the other party reacts to our side of the transaction? Are we taking responsibility for our mistake if we brush off their mistake by telling ourselves — or them — that they’re just “taking personally” something that isn’t personal? How do we isolate their misstep from ours, and assign responsibility where it belongs, if we dismiss others’ behavior as impersonal?
On the other hand, two grown adults in connection is not exactly the same as a mother and her infant either. The adults do have decades of prior conditioning that play into their behavior “impersonally” with each other, through projections, mannerisms, defense mechanisms, attachment patterns, core beliefs and schemas, etc. And so there is in fact some component of what occurs in every relational exchange that is “not personal”. And it’s also damaging to relationships — not to mention ourselves — to take blame and responsibility for what others do that really doesn’t have anything to do with us.
So the claim “nothing is personal” is wrong. But the claim “everything is personal” is also wrong. This is where “the subtle art of taking it personally” comes in: the serenity to accept what is not personal, the courage to face what is personal, and the wisdom to know the difference.
It’s always circular
When we claim to know which behavior is personal and which isn’t, we’re making quite an audacious statement. How do we know how connected what someone else is doing is to what we’re doing, or for that matter, how connected what we’re doing is to what they’ve done?
It’s not at all easy to tease apart what is “our stuff” to look at and what is the other person’s “stuff”, because of the way circular causality works.
Was there ever a single transaction that took place between us that wasn’t colored with the memory of many other prior transactions? Perhaps the very first transaction (one could argue) — the first time we shook hands and made eye contact, and one of us said, “very nice to meet you”. But not so fast — even in that first exchange there was a reciprocal feedback loop. Through the body language and facial expressions of both of us, in the very first few seconds of relating, we were already instantaneously and continuously sending and receiving visual, auditory, tactile, and olfactory signals that created circular causality. Whether there was nervous energy or confidence, warmth or coldness, seriousness or playfulness, judgment or acceptance, focus or distraction — we both felt it from the get go.
Our neurons, when active, typically fire at between 10 to 100 times per second. Multiply that by the average 86 billion neurons in the brain, and you might have a trillion signals sent per second on both sides. The feedback horse already left the barn before your conscious mind even registered what the other person’s face looked like the very first time you met them. There was never any moment that was truly “this is just me” or “this is just them”. It was always circular. And I’m supposed to believe this conflict, which happened 3 weeks later or 3 months later or 3 years later — after a few or a dozen or a hundred interactions took place — that this isn’t “personal”? That this is only “about them” or “about me”?
Whose problem is this problem?
A therapy client said to me once, “I know I’m not supposed to take anything personally”, while sharing anxiety about a conflict with a co-worker, as if she shouldn’t have feelings about a mutually painful feedback loop in an ongoing relationship with someone she’s seen and worked with every day for a year.
The meaning was clearly, “I know I’m supposed to believe that this person’s behavior has nothing to do with me and is all about them.” Moreover, she thought the wise mindset to have was that her feelings about the situation, by corollary, were also all about her and not the co-worker.
It hit me that just about everything that is talked about in therapy relates to this confusion: what part of this disconnection is mine and what part of it is theirs? This is true whether the relationship that we’re talking about is with a family member, spouse, friend, boss, co-worker, or even a stranger.
The lens “nothing is personal” views relationship transactions linearly rather than circularly, as I explained in part 2.2. It implies an exchange of two mutually independent and self-contained characters who are neither influencing nor reacting to one another with either their automatic reactions or their conscious decisions.
So when a problem arises within that frame, there’s a problem, which is: “whose problem IS this problem, if it’s not a co-created problem in the space between us?”
That’s an important question with significant implications for the health of our relationships, for our self-awareness and maturational growth, for setting boundaries that are neither too soft nor too rigid, and even for how accurately we perceive the social world around us.
The many psychological protections of circular causality blindness
So why then IS the advice, “never take anything personally” so “sticky” and alluring?
There are all kinds of psychologically self-protective reasons that we might feel an instinctive pull to make the black and white, simplistic decision that what’s going on in a conflict is either “about them” or “about us”.
Protection from shame. In all of us there exists some tendency to repel blame for self-protection against shame. If we tell a simple linear story that someone repeatedly wronged us, when in fact we were also participating in the conflict, we don’t have to feel blame or shame. We can locate all of the badness in the other person and carry on feeling clean and virtuous.
Protection from rejection. Or, we can do the opposite and choose to believe that the whole relationship problem is due to us, in order to avoid rejection from the other person. A part of us thinks, “don’t risk challenging them, they might leave us”.
Avoidance of conflict. We can also choose to believe it’s either all on them or all on us to avoid conflict. Only one side — either us or them — actually has something to take a look at. So what is there to talk about?
Protection from powerlessness. Or, we can take all the blame to avoid feeling the powerlessness of limited influence. If others are simply reacting to what we do and not the other way around, then all we have to do to control everyone is to sufficiently change our own behavior. In cognitive therapy this as been called the internal control fallacy. The nuance of circular causality means that we’re only one part of a larger system: we have some power but also don’t control everything.
Protection from power/freedom. Finally, there is the inverse of the internal control fallacy — the external control fallacy. If we ignore the ways we are affecting others and only see their influence on us, we unburden ourselves from the weight of choice, freedom, and responsibility. We can roll like a tumbleweed in the winds of social destiny and along the bumps of other’s foibles. Sometimes it feels easier to see our relationships as bad luck rather than something we’ve co-created. The cost of freedom is the effort to pioneer an uncertain outcome, and to risk disappointment despite our best efforts, knowing we had a choice.
The evolution of circular causality blindness
I think that part of the reason that the advice to never take anything personally is seductive is that selective circular causality blindness has been adaptive during the evolution of our species.
If a trait helped us survive, evolution selected for that trait, even if it meant that we’d lose some contact with reality and truth. Those who belonged to tribes that unwaveringly believed themselves to be superior, moral, and justified in their decisions probably outcompeted those who took an objectively strict look at themselves before hoarding resources or seizing new territory on the grounds that their gods desired it to be so. In order to conquer, pillage, and dominate, we needed to dehumanize rivals, not compassionately consider the circular causality occurring between us in disputes. Human civilizations might have routinely accepted the emotional and spiritual costs of suppressed moral depravity in exchange for acquired land, resources, and power, by choosing the path of self-interest and exploitation. And this dynamic still happens today, sadly. So the behavior of peacefully yielding to competing tribes with altruistic intentions and thoughtful self-reflection may have had a pretty rough go of it during most of the “gene olympics” of human history.
In other words, it’s likely that a high awareness of circular causality — despite giving us a more truthful view of reality — decreased our survival, and maybe even happiness, in the ancient world of disjointed and isolated tribes, where most of our social and cultural evolution occurred.
The cognitive biases that blind us to ethical symmetry and blur the pain and inner lives of outsiders are the neurological underpinnings of tribalism and individual self-interest, which are both part of our evolutionary story.
Tribal thinking doesn’t scale
However, the presence of a trait due to natural selection, doesn’t mean that the trait continues to be adaptive in today’s world, or that the trait leads to happiness on an individual level at this period in our evolution.
Our species and planet have reached unprecedented levels of interconnectedness. Our economies, cultures, and shared resources like air and water and soil are increasingly integrated. Attempting to hurt or wipe out a rival group today isn’t as simple as it was thousands of years ago. The spoils of victory from domination don’t automatically offset the relational costs or even the economic costs as they did in paleolithic times. More often than not, violence or indifference toward other groups now tends to become a karma boomerang that flies along a u-shaped path of interdependency until it heads back in our direction. The degree of benefit from pushing other tribes off the map and coercing other individuals into win-lose transactions has been steadily decreasing, and our collective consciousness struggles to catch up with this reality. “To the victor go the spoils” is a mindset of diminishing returns in an increasingly interdependent world.
Circular causality blindness as an adaption for survival may have outlived it’s evolutionary usefulness, even to the most dominant individuals and tribes. Adopting a more acute awareness of circular causality looks increasingly necessary for our survival as well as our happiness, because of the increasing degree of interconnectedness as our world “gets smaller”. When the allies of an enemy are also our allies, or we depend on rivals for crucial supply chains and trade, and we now have incomprehensibly powerful weapons that ensure mutual annihilation if we use them against each other, it changes the calculus of domination and ignoring the needs of other “tribes”.
It’s increasingly less likely that win-lose transactions — which are not informed through the lens of circular causality — lead even to greater survival, let alone psychospiritual happiness.
From role mates to soul mates
Closer to home, over the recently transpiring centuries, there has been a steadfast and gradual shift in the primary purpose of intimate relationships, from economic survival toward satisfying emotional and even spiritual connection. From being “role mates” to being “soul mates”. Economics still matter in marriage and love, but the balance of importance for most people has tilted toward emotional intimacy. This largely explains the high divorce rate. Fewer people are settling for less than an emotionally safe and nourishing bond, which is arguably harder to build than an economic collaboration.
The way we look at each other is slowly deepening as we spiritually wake up on a collective level. On the scale of centuries, character and depth are on the way in, and status and money are taking a back seat. Shallow physical hotness is yielding to deep attraction between two full beings. And that kind of real intimacy requires us to see the circular causality between us in relationship.
This shift from “role mates to soul mates” has been largely made possible by global trends of relative economic abundance, away from poverty — because poverty focuses our attention on mere survival, rather than the ways that we impact others and vice versa. I’m not talking about specific regions over the past decade — I’m referring the larger arc of human civilization on Earth over the past several hundred years. The greater freedom from abundance for the average Earth inhabitant has opened up the psychological space and time for better relationships with each other which, in turn, has fed back into productivity and abundance, because humans generally produce more when we’re in harmony than when we’re in conflict.
The awareness of circular causality facilitates win-win relationships and prevents toxic ones. Being aware of circular causality is like having our eyes open as we aim for a target, because we can see the interpersonal results of our actions on others. We’re far more likely to achieve harmony with a “soul mate” in a thriving relationship, or with another group of any size, if we remove the blindfold blocking our vision of how we and our side’s behavior affects how others respond to us. Circular causality awareness is a deterrent against vicious and destructive cycles and a catalyst for virtuous ones that lead to flourishing.
Separate and connected
I’m not saying that humans should, or could, immediately drop all selfishness and become kumbaya ultra-altruists in families or on the societal level. I think that view is unrealistic and can even be dangerous.
How much an individual, family, community, or state should practice pursuing self-interest vs pursuing prosocial reciprocity is nuanced, context-specific, and case-by-case. I’m not for blindly following ideological or simple rules in a complex world. I’m just in favor of doing what works — what creates the most positive results on the individual and the collective level in the long run.
Individuals and groups are both whole systems in themselves and also components of larger systems. Instances of a class like “person” or “nation state” have boundaries that separate them from other members of that same class. The boundaries of a person include our skin and the physical and psychological distance that we keep from others. The boundaries of a nation state are it’s legal, cultural, and geographical borders. At the same time, individual members of these classes have facets for interfacing with other individual members. Two people kissing or having an intimate conversation are ways that they lessen the physical and psychological boundaries between them. Nation states lessen their boundaries with each other through trade, immigration, treaties, and coalitions. At each hierarchical level of organismic complexity (such as cells, individuals, families, and communities), entities within that level remain distinct while also interfacing with other members of their category, in a yin/yang balance of separateness and connection. If that balance tips too far toward either separateness or toward connection, problems and suffering increase.
It seems that the human mind has a proclivity to idealize both directions of that polarity. Sometimes we idealize melding together into absolute oneness and unity, which veers into chaotic, suffocating enmeshment, dysfunctional co-dependence and inevitable conflicts between the individuals whose separateness doesn’t away. Or, we idealize absolute self-sovereignty and self-reliance which, when taken too far, regresses into stagnation, isolation, rigidity, and a drag on evolution from a lack of hybridization with novel outside inputs.
We’re a hybrid of prosociality and selfishness. Of tribalism and universalism. Of individualism and collectivism. Of “stay out” and “come in”.
Both sides of our nature exist as monuments of our evolutionary story, which enabled us to operate and grow simultaneously at different levels of complexity. Look around at the natural world you see — from bee hives symphonically collecting honey to the mother bear defending her cubs, to the lion pride hunting the zebra — and you are witnessing life’s indefatigable spirit of growing at every possible level of organization. Separate bodies pursuing their own self-interest, at the same time that they come together in groups of bodies which cohesively push upward on that larger level.
What seems apparent to me is that our incentives for cooperation and mutual compassion are gradually increasing, and our incentives for selfishness and tribalism are gradually decreasing, when we zoom out in time over centuries. Evolution — or God — beckons us down a path of higher understanding of the inner worlds of other people and groups. Not just for our survival but also for the happiness of our social hearts.
And as I watch the global “human family” drama unfold from the position of a marriage and family therapist, I can’t help but see that circular causality blindness is one of the our impairments that keep us isolated from, and scared of, each other. And that circular causality illumination would give us the confidence to drop the increasingly outdated survival strategies — minimization of pain and dehumanization of others — that more and more of us are finding unsatisfying.
A more interdependent world is a more personal and circularly causal world, and so a recognition of the circularity and the “personal” nature of human transactions is increasingly adaptive as we all try to be our best selves, families, and societies.