The more emotionally intelligent you become, the less you take things personally.
You start to see that the way someone treats you is a reflection of their relationship with themselves- their self-awareness, emotional capacity, and nervous system state.
You learn that someone's capacity to meet you has nothing to do with your value, and everything to do with their own.
The Mirror Effect: Behavior as a Reflection of Inner Depth
Emotionally intelligent people understand a fundamental truth: **people can only meet you as deeply as they have met themselves**.
This concept means the level of empathy, vulnerability, presence, or authenticity someone can offer you is limited by how far they've explored their own inner world. If they've avoided their shadows—unresolved pain, suppressed emotions, limiting beliefs—they simply lack the "bandwidth" to fully see, hold, or reciprocate your depth.
- **Projection in action**: When someone is hyper-critical, nitpicky, or quick to judge your choices, it's rarely about your actual flaws. More often, it's their own loud inner critic leaking outward. They project because confronting their self-judgment feels too painful. The mirror shows their relationship with themselves, not your worth.
- **Common defense mechanisms as clues**:
- Rudeness or sarcasm → Often a shield for deep insecurity or fear of vulnerability.
- Ghosting or sudden withdrawal → Frequently stems from underdeveloped conflict-resolution skills or an overwhelmed nervous system that defaults to avoidance (flight response).
- Passive-aggressiveness → A way to express anger without risking direct confrontation, usually because the person hasn't learned safe ways to feel and express difficult emotions.
**The liberating "why"**: Their behavior is diagnostic data about *their* internal landscape—their self-awareness, wounds, and emotional maturity—not a verdict on your soul, character, or lovability. When you internalize this, rejection stings less because you stop translating it as "I'm not enough."
Over time, this awareness shifts your response from defensiveness or self-doubt to compassionate detachment: "This is information about them, not evidence against me."
### 2. Respecting the Nervous System: Biology Often Trumps Intent
"Not taking it personally" isn't just a mindset—it's a neurobiological reality.
When someone's nervous system is dysregulated (in fight, flight, freeze, or fawn mode), the amygdala (the brain's alarm center) hijacks the show. It floods the body with stress hormones (cortisol, adrenaline) and temporarily dials down the prefrontal cortex—the region responsible for empathy, perspective-taking, impulse control, and logical reasoning.
In that state:
- An "angry" outburst might actually be an overwhelmed person in fight mode, perceiving threat where none exists rationally.
- A "cold" or distant reaction could be freeze or dorsal vagal shutdown (self-protection via emotional numbing and withdrawal).
- Someone snapping or stonewalling isn't necessarily choosing cruelty; their higher brain functions are offline, and survival wiring is running the show.
This doesn't excuse harmful behavior—it explains it. Understanding the biology helps you respond with boundaries and de-escalation instead of matching their energy with counter-attacks or people-pleasing.
**Practical application**:
- Pause and ask: "Is this person regulated right now?" If not, trying to reason or connect deeply is like asking someone with a broken leg to run a marathon.
- Protect your own nervous system: Use co-regulation techniques (slow breathing, grounding, stepping away) rather than absorbing their activation.
- Set compassionate limits: "I can see you're upset/overwhelmed. Let's talk when we're both calmer." This honors biology without personalizing the dysregulation.
### 3. Decoupling Worth from Connection: Compatibility ≠ Value
The deepest freedom comes from realizing **compatibility is not a referendum on your worth**
"A key can be perfectly made, but it won't open every lock. That doesn't mean the key is broken; it just means the fit isn't there."
You might be a high-quality, emotionally available, self-aware person (a well-crafted key), yet someone else lacks the internal "lock" mechanism—the capacity, readiness, or wiring—to receive and reciprocate what you offer. Their inability to meet you doesn't devalue your "price tag." It reveals their current limitations: emotional bandwidth, healing level, attachment style, or nervous system capacity.
As emotional intelligence grows, this truth becomes intuitive:
- Rejection or mismatch stops feeling like proof of defectiveness.
- You stop chasing people to "prove" your value through their approval.
- You recognize that someone's capacity to love, see, or stay with you reflects *their* self-relationship far more than your inherent worth.
**Signs this shift is happening**:
- You feel disappointment instead of devastation when someone pulls away.
- You no longer inflate or deflate your self-view based on how others respond.
- You attract (and choose) people whose "depth ceiling" matches or exceeds yours, because you've stopped settling for shallow mirrors.
### Bringing It All Together
The more emotionally mature you become, the less you take things personally—not because you're numb, but because you see clearly:
- The way someone treats you is a mirror of their inner world: their self-awareness, unhealed parts, emotional capacity, and nervous system state.
- Their ability (or inability) to meet you has almost nothing to do with your value and everything to do with where they are on their own journey.
- This perspective frees you to respond from wisdom rather than wound: with boundaries, compassion (for them and yourself), and unapologetic self-respect.
Ultimately, the goal isn't to never feel hurt—it's to feel it without letting it rewrite your self-concept. You remain whole, regardless of who can (or cannot) meet you there. And paradoxically, that grounded presence often draws in the rare people who *have* done the inner work to meet you deeply.
Important takeway: NOBODY ever experiences YOU. Only you do that. Everybody you encounter experiences you through the prism of their own consciousness. That is a very different experience.
I like to think that I am the Gadol Hador in one area.
Me.
Nobody has ever been me like me.
Or as Dr. Seuss had it: There is nothing truer than true that there is no one you-er than you! [LOVE IT].
So YOU TOO sweet friend are the Gadol Hador in being you.
So don't take things personally.
It is literally never about you.
Never.
[Note: That doesn't mean that you should discount what other people say. Sometimes people can offer very contructive criticism. I am refer to affronts and insults].
