How to NOT take things personally?

[Safari]

I get extremely angry by anything I can possibly view as a slight against me. Particularly from an individual in my band who has an unusually agressive and bad tempered. The one source of all his jokes is to put down anyone else around him, disguising criticism inside supposed humor.

I know enough to not react or start a confrontation on the vast majority of these, consciously deciding that they are trivial, they don't affect me, and that it's usually best to say nothing.

My conscious self-control is one thing, but what I want to stop entirely is the subconscious "fight-or-flight" response. It's distracting when I should calmly be coming up with deflecting humor, but worst of all it keeps the adrenaline high and stress a constant.

This also affects my interaction with women as I'm particularly sensitive to and tend to amplify anything that even seems slightly like rejection. So again, I reframe these ok, but I still can't shake the gut feeling which gets in the way. Is this possible to fix?

 

[Egoist]

hard to say, everyone is so different.

my parents raised me with "you can do anything you want, you are the best, nobody is better, etc" mentality so i never ever get bothered by other people. I have like the thickest skin when it comes to that. It just bounces off.

 

[spider_007]

i used to take things personaly too. And then i thought to my self; DOES IT REALLY MATTER

Now if i'm laughed at, i don't care, because IT DOESN'T MATTER.

 

[Safari]

That's the problem. I can tell myself all day it doesn't matter. But inside I apparently don't believe it if I'm still having the gut reaction.

 

[Warlord]

Safari, I believe you know exactly what you're doing because you've already acknowledged whatever your problem is.

Embrace your insecurities, and do what you're doing in this very thread by acknowleding your concerns and questioning the values behind it.