stop getting offended, literally nothing is personal || ego, detachment, projection, insecurities

In this episode of Things We Say in Therapy, we break down why we get offended and why, in reality, nothing is ever truly personal.

We explore the psychology behind taking things personally, how the ego tries to protect our self-image, and how projection shapes the way people see each other. You’ll learn how to emotionally detach without becoming apathetic, build inner peace, and stop wasting energy on other people’s opinions.

Through self-awareness, empathy, and emotional maturity, you can begin to respond rather than react and finally stop letting external validation or criticism control your peace.

If you’ve ever felt misunderstood, overly sensitive, or easily offended, this episode will help you understand why and how to change it.

🎧 Listen now if you want to learn how to stop getting offended and start living freely...

See links below to support the show!

Transcript

Hey everyone. Welcome back to your regularly scheduled self-reflection. I'm Tash. This is things we say in therapy, A place for you to come to feel seen and heard, and to learn new things. We usually focus on the lesser spoken about sides of mental health. Things that I don't hear about much

that I think are important to talk about.

If this information speaks to your experience, I'm so happy you are here. Thank you for listening. If not, I hope it's valuable for you in the future. Everyone's story is different and that's perfectly fine.

Okay. You'll have to bear with me today 'cause I'm having a weird, oh, there's a fly on my ring light. I'm having a weird day where I feel like I don't look like myself, like I'm struggling with I.

Seeing myself clearly, so looking at myself in a camera's a bit weird, but we keep pushing through. today's topic, I [00:01:00] think is very current, I think is very prominent today. I think it needs to be spoken about, and that is. How to stop being offended.

In this world, it's very easy to feel personally attacked. It's very easy to feel misunderstood.

It's very easy to feel offended. There are a lot of opinions floating around. There's a lot of main character syndrome. What if we could walk around without taking things personally? What if nothing really affected us?

What if we could feel like nothing could sway us? No one's opinion comments or negative energy could sway us.

personal attacks are an illusion. Everything that someone says to us, Every kind of feedback we get, every kind of criticism is all a projection of the other person. People don't see us as us. People see us as them. They project their thoughts, feelings, how they feel about themselves, onto us, onto everyone, or to other people.

Same with [00:02:00] us. Every piece of advice we give, it reflects something about ourselves.

so in this episode, we're gonna talk about.

Why we get offended.

We're gonna talk about how to see past that offense, how to see through the illusion of a personal attack and, what to do to stop feeling that way.

By the end of this episode, you'll learn emotional detachment without being apathetic. Learning to emotionally detach doesn't mean lacking empathy. It doesn't mean isolating yourself from everyone else. It just means

you will no longer take anyone else's opinions, feelings, thoughts as a personal attack.

So in the current state of the world, there's a lot of, what about me is people feeling offended because their thoughts and feelings aren't represented by everyone else. with social media, there's a lot of main character energy, people thinking that they're being watched all the time.

People unable to see things from a wider range of perspectives because

there's always [00:03:00] someone on social media that's backing you up, right? It's easy to get that validation and so people don't feel the need to sort of think outside the box and see things from other people's perspectives.

There's a lot of people thinking that someone else having a different opinion to them is a personal attack on them because someone else feels a different way about something that they're passionate about.

People think that an attack on their character.

Now, when you haven't heard the things that I'm gonna talk about today, when you haven't learnt why you're feeling that way, why you're feeling like it's a personal attack and not knowing what to look out for. It's very common for other people's behavior to feel like an attack, but the reality is that it has absolutely nothing to do with us.

And this episode is about why.

Taking offense to things is the ego's way of self-protecting. It's a way of defending your self image.

But absolutely nothing is personal. Nothing. Everything is a [00:04:00] projection. Now. I love this teaching that nothing is personal. it's a very Buddhist way of life, learning to detach from taking things personally. This isn't a religious podcast at all. Um, I do love spirituality, but I love Buddhism because

it's all about personal development and enlightenment learning to be who you truly are and learning to live at peace with yourself. And others,

and you dedicate your life to that as opposed to dedicating your life to worshiping someone else. You are dedicating your life to yourself. I absolutely love that concept, and a lot of Buddhism is about the ego

and learning that having attachment to things is the reason for unhappiness. but back to psychology. So in episode seven, I mentioned a bit about the biological origins of psychology. When we think that someone doesn't like us or someone disagrees with us,

these social cues are perceived as potential threats because of evolution. Being excluded meant you were [00:05:00] gonna die. Being excluded from a group meant you were gonna die 'cause you're on your own. and so being offended is the modern way of that survival instinct.

It's our brains saying,

if people don't like us, then we're fucked, basically. That's why we were people pleased. That's why we, we. Try so hard to feel understood by people because if we feel understood by people, we won't be discarded from the group.

So today that instinct comes from things that aren't actually dangerous. It's just your ego.

 So let's move on to the psychology behind taking things personally. Learning these and understanding these helped me to notice more when it was happening to me.

And acknowledging those things is the first step to helping reduce them. So the first one is. Being the mirror

when we already have a wound or insecurity within us. If we think that someone.

 Has spotted that or,

or does something that touches [00:06:00] that wound that's already within us.

We tend to get offended even if it's not a direct attack. For example, if I had an insecurity that I was not smart

and somebody corrected me on something, I may react and get offended at that person correcting me, because to me that's was them saying, yeah, actually you're not smart. Even though. To them, that's a massive overreaction because not once did they say, you are not smart. They just were correcting me on something that I had misinterpreted or whatever it was.

It confirms in our minds that that insecurity is true.

And that's painful. That hurts us. And so we get offended by that even when it's not been directly pointed out.

It triggers a defensive mechanism in order to protect ourselves. Like I said before, the ego, it's us trying to stop. Stop ourselves from being hurt. Stop the pain from happening.

I really urge you to reflect on this because it's [00:07:00] so easy to do if you have unhealed wounds or deep insecurities about things that you haven't acknowledged. It's very. Or even if you have acknowledged them, if you haven't worked on it, it's very easy to react to those things because it's instinctual, it's automatic, it's subconscious.

So I would really encourage you to do some introspection. Think about things that you are quite maybe insecure about. Think about times when you may have reacted or overreacted to something that didn't warrant that because of your insecurities.

Comment below times where you've had a mirror put up to you and it's caused you to react in a certain way. It's very important to reflect on these things.

And when you work on these things when they no longer are a deep insecurity to you, you'll no longer be phased, even if someone does personally attack you about those things.

Someone who's confident about their intelligence doesn't get offended if someone says they're not smart because they know that they are.

But if you secretly doubt your [00:08:00] intelligence, if someone calls you stupid, it will bother you. Second psychological aspect is projection.

This is the main reason why you shouldn't be taking anything personally.

People's reactions, criticisms, moods, opinions are all a reflection of their inner world. It's all a reflection of the experiences that they have lived,

not yours. A majority of the experiences that you have lived, people know absolutely nothing about 'cause they're not you.

So undoubtedly you are gonna see the world in a different way.

 People don't see you as you are. They see you as they are. They see you from their perspective. They see you from the things that have happened in their world.

The way that they see you is not an objective truth. a rude comment that someone makes about you is often representative of

their pain, their stress, the things that they're jealous of, the things that they wish they had and not about you.

Before I realized

what projection was, or what it could do to you. I used [00:09:00] to always internalize my friends' problems. I was very codependent and I would care a lot more about their issues than my own because I, it was a distraction from my own life when they would tell me about their problems and I would give them advice,

and they didn't follow that advice. I would get personally offended because I then thought that they thought that my advice wasn't good enough. I took it as a personal attack. It was not, I was projecting onto them. I was projecting onto them what I would do from my perspective, if that happened in my world.

Their experiences and what works for them is different to what works for me. They were dealing with it in their way. They were dealing with it in a way that felt safe to them. I wasn't aware that they're simply just a different person learning lessons in their own way. It had absolutely nothing to do with me. I was a side character in that movie. I didn't realize that at the time. I had main character syndrome. It [00:10:00] all came from a place of care.

It all came from a place of wanting what was best for them, but I don't, I didn't know what was best for 'em at the time. They did, they were working it out themselves. It doesn't mean that my advice was redundant. It doesn't mean that my advice wouldn't have helped.

They just didn't live in my world.

So let's dig a little bit deeper into the ego.

The ego is very fragile. The ego fears rejection and craves validation.

When we get offended by things, we are not defending

truth.

we are defending an image that we have of ourselves that we want to be portray to the world. We're defending an image of ourselves that we think other people are trying to destroy.

Real maturity and emotional maturity and intelligence starts when you no longer need to protect that image when you no, no longer feel the need to prove anything to anybody because you are secure in yourself already.

When you are running on ego,

your self image is so [00:11:00] easily shatter able, the slightest little, bad opinion that someone may have of you

which again is projection and not an objective truth about who you are.

You don't want to be running on ego.

Loosening your attachment to that self image that your ego gives you, it can really help with when you hear feedback or nasty comments about yourself.

Because once you no longer feel the need to prove that you are a certain way to other people, those comments and opinions no longer feel as soul crushing. Do you no longer feel that anxiety associated with being so afraid of criticism, with being perceived or being seen.

So let's get onto discussing how literally nothing is personal.

Firstly, getting offended, wastes so much anger and so much energy.

Everybody is living in their own movie. Everyone is living in their own world.

And they can only perceive things from their perspective. It's the [00:12:00] same with you. As much as you try, people can explain things to you. People can try and understand you. You can try and understand them, but you can only understand someone else's perspective so much because you haven't lived their experiences.

Everyone's reactions to things. Everyone's opinions on things is born from their fears,

their traumas, their beliefs.

What they say and do is about them, not you.

When you are ego driven, you have this illusion of control where you think that. You can control how others perceive you, but you cannot,

nothing you do or say can control how someone else perceives you. They're just gonna perceive you the way that they perceive you

from their perspective.

When you stop needing other people to see you in a certain way, when you stop needing to prove who you are, you start to become who you truly are and you start to realize a lot of things.

You no longer feel the need to get upset when someone [00:13:00] perceives you in a different way to who you think you are.

If someone misunderstands you, that's no longer. An anxiety inducing, soul crushing, horrible experience that you need to fix. They just don't understand you.

Something else that's really important to understand here is that emotionally detaching from how others perceive you.

This doesn't make you apathetic,

refusing to take things personally. It's not being cold, it's not being indifferent to everything.

People tend to think that when you detach from things, it makes you a stoic person. It makes you hyper individualistic

and you stop having deep connections with people. But that's not the truth.

It just means that you can hear people, you can understand people, you can take criticism from people. Without internalizing their emotions and their opinions, because you already know who you are.

It means that you can understand [00:14:00] someone's pain without making their pain about you.

In other words, you can take someone's projection and understand that it's a projection,

and then you'll no longer take it as a personal attack. Lastly, following on from that point, noticing when you're taking offense,

When you start to notice that something has made you offended or made you upset, you can then observe that without reacting to it. Emotional maturity isn't about never feeling offended, never feeling upset,

you understand that it's hurt you for a reason,

 emotional intelligence is about learning how to investigate why that's hurt you.

So let's talk about some practical tools on how to stop getting offended, how to stop taking everything personally.

When you notice yourself upset about something, when you notice yourself getting offended, the first step is to name it.

Notice in your mind, say, I'm feeling attacked right now, naming it. It creates a space between

you and the reaction. You are then not [00:15:00] overtaken by this reaction. You're just noticing that it's there.

Can then ask the golden question, what is this really about? A lot of negative emotions have an underlying reason

or an underlying meaning. This could be a trauma response. It could be rejection, sensitivity, fear of abandonment.

It's important to learn how to notice the emotion that you're feeling and how to analyze it.

Knowing where these emotions are coming from is integral to understanding yourself And to stop that automatic reaction you get from that response.

So examples of where these can be born from is feeling misunderstood, unseen, undervalued.

Or fear of being wrong, I thought, uh, actually a lot of people don't talk about that.

a lot of people think that if you are seen as being wrong, that you've lost all of your status as if you're weak or something silly. Learn how to take accountability everybody.

[00:16:00] So

another technique to learn how to stop getting offended by things is coming at it from a place of empathy and understanding rather than

judgment. If you are feeling offended by something, if someone's rude to you, makes a comment that hurts you,

it's important to sort of understand that maybe they're going through something.

Instead of being like, what a fucking bitch, you say, maybe they're going through something. I'll check in with them later.

Just because you are able to be empathetic with someone. It doesn't excuse rude or horrible behavior, but it does free you from that internal chaos of being like, why have they said that to me? Oh my God, did I do something wrong? Dah, dah, dah.

 coming at this from an empathetic place as well. It can help to nourish worthwhile relationships and weed out the fake ones because if you come at it like, oh, maybe they're having a tough day, and you sort of communicate that and try and speak to [00:17:00] them, if they're still rude and a dick to you.

It is probably a fake relationship and you should probably think about, you know, moving away from it. But, you know, communication is key. And so if you come at it with understanding and curiosity and they're like, yeah, do you know what? Look, I'm really sorry. I'd love to talk about this thing that I'm going through that brings a deeper meaning to the relationship, a deeper understanding between you.

Another one is the 24 hour to 72 hour rule. If something offends you wait 24 hours before reacting. By the time 24 hours is passed, usually that initial emotional reaction has subsided and you can see things from a bit more of a logical perspective, maybe notice projection that's going on, things like that.

Once you can think about that thing after 24 hours, I personally wait another couple of days before saying anything. I think that it, if it's still bothering you. By three days after, it is worth saying, saying something.

[00:18:00] Sometimes it is worth addressing, sometimes it's not.

It's worth taking time to think about whether addressing it will strengthen the relationship or not.

Sometimes people are just rude and you can just shrug it off. You know when you get better at noticing These sorts of things in people, or you know someone really well and you know that they act a certain way sometimes, and you're okay with that. Sometimes, you know, you can just shrug it off. It kind of depends on what works for you in the relationship that you have with this person.

Kind of carrying on from that rehearsing detachment. So practice not reacting to minor irritations and things like that. You do need to pick your battles If every tiny little thing is bothering you, there is probably something deeper going on there that you need to work on. I know that a lot of people like to project and think that if they're feeling irritated, it's on the other person for irritating them, but a lot of the time it does come from you.

That's something worth reflecting on.

But you do need [00:19:00] to restrain yourself at times because it can be harmful to relationships if you're constantly sort of picking on things that offend you.

Remember that it's not about you, but you cannot use protecting your peace or emotional detachment as an excuse to avoid accountability. If someone's coming to you and saying that you've done something to hurt them, or they wanna have a deeper conversation with you,

they still deserve acknowledgement.

I'm not saying this as a hyper individualistic practice, it's just a self preserving one. It's a self-confidence one. We all need community, and it's really important to nourish your relationships

whilst also prioritizing peace, but the right relationships will bring peace.

I absolutely had to learn to stop getting offended, and I absolutely had to learn that things aren't personal. I'm still learning. I'm not a mastermind. I like to educate people on things that I'm also working on as well, because I think they're [00:20:00] important. I'm not coming from a higher up place. I'm absolutely still working on it.

I still get way too invested in other people's emotions

and feelings about me and their opinions of me.

I think for everybody, it's always a work in progress. You just get better at it. Shit still happens. You still react to things.

We all need to understand that it's a, it's a continuous practice. But they get easier.

The more you do it, the more you see the benefits of implementing these things into your life. If you haven't. Ever done this before? it can feel difficult at first because you have to put mental effort into prioritizing your peace, and it can feel like you're betraying yourself. It can feel like you're betraying other people,

but taking nothing personally doesn't mean that you stop caring. It just means that you are seeing things more clearly now and you're not operating off of a subconscious reaction.

People can no longer control you. Your [00:21:00] emotions are no longer ever based on what's happening externally. You can control your peace, you can control

Who gets a reaction out of you,

you can control whether you want to emotionally invest or not.

So stop defending yourself and start understanding other people and yourself.

thank you so much for listening to episode nine of Things We Say In Therapy. Your support means so much to me. You don't even know if you've gotten this far in the episode. I'm so grateful.

If anything in this episode or any of my other episodes so far have resonated with you, I would love to hear about it,

even if it's something that I've missed or something you feel would be helpful that you'd like to hear about? I'm grateful for feedback. I want to improve and I want to give people advice and information on gaps in the wellness space currently. I, so you can email me or comment or message me on one of my social medias.

I would love it if anyone who enjoyed this episode would support me on buy me a [00:22:00] coffee or on my podcast website on buzzsprout. All the links are in the description.

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Please be kind to yourself. Please be kind to others, and I'll see you again. Bye.