The reason for taking things personally is because most of the time the act of taking things personally – wisps out all awareness of it. This is because we are conditioning our reactions to difficult case – to repress it immediately, it works like that; when we feel that the pain is trans passing the threshold of our awareness –it immediately becomes wiped out from our awareness, this is a learned response the initially comes to protect us, from pain when it reaches an unbearable level of stress. So it is completely natural that you don’t know when you take things personally.
Now, I think you would like to know what to do about this denial and about being completely unaware that you are in it.
Well, the direction I offer is to do with self-acceptance, and I will explain: people don’t know that they are in the midst of this terrible state, because they refuse to admit to themselves that they got crushed. We try to preserve our best self-esteem as much as possible, and anything which might spoil this self-image that says that I am ok and my life is ok (which all of us are in a powerful self-suggestion about it), or we believe that we are on the way to be free from such disasters. And admitting that I took something personally – damages our self-image, so we prefer to maintain a high self-image, and not let anything against high self-image – to be filtered in.
So, the first step in admission: most of the time you are either not sure that you are victim to it again, or that you are sure that it did not happen to you.
My suggestion is the opposite; instead of denying and hiding – whenever there is the most tiny suspicion that you don’t feel so good for no apparent reason – go to admit that you took something personally, even when in doubt about it – go to be more strict – choose admitting that you fall again, even id you completely not sure about it (but you know that you cannot trust your instincts in this dangerous matter) so when in doubt, after not feeling good for some reason _ then instead of denying and wiping it off the possibility of something more serious (taking personally) – go to the opposite direction, choose deliberately that you took personally. This admission will take out of the closet the repressed state, where it causes the most damage, when you do admission that again it happened to you, it is on the way out.
So no denial, and when in doubt – choose that you took something personal (which is the case only too often.
Finding the reason for why you took it personally is very difficult, there are many psychological blockages.
And the reason, (for the person) is beyond any possibility of comprehension, it hides itself so well, that it might be the last thing you would take into account.
At this point I would like to stress, that if you uncover the original cause, (which always lies in the domains of the unknown) – it is much more effective than the first suggestion about the importance of admission. When you discover it, not only you get out of it, but you get transported to a higher level…
So, now the question is: how to find what caused it?
Well, unfortunately it could not be done by oneself, the blockages and repressions are too deep.
The only way is to have what I call as: a detective dialogue, in which the partner of the dialogue asks you searching questions, in which at first you put across all the possible situations, that in one of them it began. Then when you find the zone and the territory of the cause, the next question of the partner would be to count all the possible reasons whiten the said territory, and hen he has to give a mark out of 10 to each possible reason, and the one that gets the highest points – is the original cause. And then you see that the fear of discovery what was wing – was more powerful than the peace and release of pressure that follows.
But this could only be done with someone who masters this area of uncovering the reason for taking something personally.
Gabriel