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shakespeare47
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Default Jan 17, 2018 at 12:38 PM
 
I've known about this for a while, but it never made sense to me.. until now. From Psychology Today.

Quote:
Don't Take It Personally

Even if you're pretty sure it's personal

You can also use cognitive reappraisal to reinterpret others' behavior toward you. You just make up a little tale about them that involves a less ego-trashing reason for whatever they're doing. Say somebody hasn't responded to your email. Tell yourself that they're probably slammed at work and really tired, not really tired of you. Picture them in a disaster movie, heroically fighting an onslaught of paper and flying file folders in a paper-clip hailstorm.
Of course, you are well aware that you just made up that "slammed at work/really tired" explanation; you can't know for sure whether it's the actual reason. Fortunately, that doesn't seem to matter. Energywise, like suburban McMansions, our brains are expensive to run. Psychologist Daniel Kahneman explains that the brain likes to take shortcuts whenever it can—going on autopilot instead of going to the trouble of thinking everything out. Or, put another way, our lazy-slob brains are suckers for a story, and once you give yours one that's at all plausible, it'll go with it and screw the fact checking.
Most helpfully, providing yourself with a less degrading explanation for somebody's behavior could keep you from prematurely dashing off some resentypants follow-up: "Can't even spare that precious two minutes while you're on the f*cking john to email me back?" That's important, because you'll really feel like an asshole if you get the reply that a journalist friend of mine eventually sent to an obnoxiously persistent publicist: "Sorry I didn't respond to your pitch; I was in a coma."

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