SOMETIMES IT IS ABOUT YOU

Notice what happens after somebody says "don't take it personally."

The subject changes. Whatever was being discussed - the thing that was said, the thing that was done - is no longer on the table. What is on the table now is your reaction to it, and your reaction is a much easier thing to find fault with.

That transfer takes about four words and it is almost never noticed by anybody in the room, including you.

THE ARGUMENT

Most of what happens is genuinely not about you. This book says so repeatedly, because it is true and because a book that said otherwise would do harm.

But a blanket rule applied to a mixed population produces two errors, and the genre only ever discusses one of them.

Error one: taking it personally when it was not. Well described, widely written about, costs you your evenings.

Error two: NOT taking it personally when it was. Almost never discussed. Costs you years.

The reason for the asymmetry is simple. Error one is visible - the person is obviously distressed and gets offered advice. Error two looks exactly like coping extremely well, and nobody offers anything, and people look back from five years away and cannot account for how long it went on.

FIVE TESTS

Not a rule. A way of telling.

1. COMPARISON - does it happen to others in the same position, from the same person? Observed over a month, not recalled.

2. PATTERN - write the instances down. Dated, one line, no adjectives. Six weeks, then stop.

3. GOOD DAY - does it survive when you are rested and nothing else is going on?

4. WITNESS - has anybody said anything unprompted?

5. CAMERA - strip every adverb and every claim about intention. What is left?

Score it. Nought or one is noise; let it go and mean it. Two is unresolved; wait. Three or more is real, and continuing to explain it away is now the error.

SIXTY-TWO SHORT CHAPTERS

Which error are you, and how to tell. What to say when the phrase is used against you by the person who just did the thing. How to tell whether you are the difficult one - and the four questions to ask somebody who will actually answer. A boundary and a grudge, and how to convert one into the other. Why anger sometimes carries information. Family, partners, friends, siblings, money, an ageing parent, strangers. The words that got captured. Who benefits from you being unbothered. What to teach a child instead. And three worked examples, one of which comes out against the reader.

AND WHAT IT REFUSES TO SAY

That forgiveness is compulsory. That serenity is the goal. That caring what people think is a defect - it is how you learn to be a decent friend.

It also says plainly when this is not the right book, and what to do instead.

Not therapy, and it says so. But if you have ever been told to let something go and could not, and concluded that the failure was yours - sometimes it is. And sometimes the reason it will not go is that it should not.