The Second Agreement

Quotes and Notes from reading The Four Agreements by Don Miguel Ruiz.

Don’t take anything personally.

Even when it is directed at you, “You are so…” Pretty. Nice. Funny. Humble. Shy. Selfish. Annoying. Ugly. Loud. Insufferable. Cliche. Cringe.

This is the issue of people-pleasing. There is a belief people-pleasers carry and it is that everything is about them; the praise, the rejection, the apathy, and the interest.

If people are mirrors, then don’t I deserve the acceptance or rejection I receive?

You take it personally because you agree with whatever was said. As soon as you agree, the poison goes through you, and you are trapped in the dream of hell. What causes you to be trapped is what we call personal importance. Personal important, or taking things personally, is the maximum expression of selfishness because we make the assumption that everything is about “me.”

The people-pleaser believes the reactions and treatments they receive are a reflection of what they’re putting out and that they are deserving. This belief enables an excessive turn inward on themselves, once taught as a characteristic of the wise and humble and considerate, that blinds them to the more resounding truth we have all heard:

No one thinks about you the way you think about yourself.

We are all behaving as the main characters of our own experience. This means that everything directed toward me is laced with the beliefs, values, preferences, moods, projections, and conditions of someone/something entirely apart from me. This includes the attacks, as well as the kindest words and acts.

They trade their security in self for another person’s ever-changing preference and mood. They trade something invaluable for a reaction that is entirely superficial and biased. The people-pleaser’s identity becomes the mirror, and everything is personal because they believe they are responsible for everything. “It’s always me. It’s always my fault.”

Don’t Take Anything Personally is the key to freedom.

It is a reprieve from the constant internal analysis of why and how everyone’s opinions, beliefs, and behaviors about them is to their credit. The people-pleaser makes other people’s problems their own. Detaching from personal offense to others’ actions and moods releases the people-pleaser from the burden of ingesting the same poison as those driven by insecurity, judgment, and boredom.

You eat their emotional garbage, and now it becomes your garbage. But if you don’t take it personally, you are immune in the middle of hell… When you take things personally, then you feel offended, and your reaction is to defend your beliefs and create conflicts. You make something big out of something so little, because you have the need to be right and make everybody else wrong. You also try hard to be right by giving them your own opinions.

What about feedback for character growth?

You can still be open to feedback while understanding that their observances are infused with projections.

Understanding yourself is the path of character growth.

How to understand yourself? By developing discernment.

How to develop discernment? By observing whether your beliefs create the outcomes you desire.

The challenge is sifting through past events that contain suppressed emotions. These suppressed emotions are big influencers on your beliefs, which are influencers of your desires.

For example, your desire for love is motivated by the memory of neglect which holds your fear of rejection. Everything you’ve done to “win” love has been by avoiding situations that make you vulnerable to rejection. This means you manipulate your actions and words to the point of getting what you want but because those things are counterfeit, they do not last.

Love requires authenticity to last. Authenticity requires vulnerability: to make yourself see your strongest and weakest points, and not condemn yourself to a life of self-loathing and resentment. Vulnerability requires courage. Courage is engrained when you understand you can act separately from your fear.

Courage is always intentional.

Personal Responsibility.

…it is not what I am saying that is hurting you; it is that you have wounds that I touch by what I have said. You are hurting yourself. There is no way I can take this personally. Not because I don’t believe in you or don’t trust you, but because I know that you see the world with different eyes, with your eyes.

What about the people who use this agreement to continue their hurtful behaviors and opinions? What about the narcissist?

Firstly, I am no one’s savior.

I am not responsible for finding their solution. I will not eat their emotional garbage (falsely understood as “empathy”) to find the solution for them. Even if I found the solution, it would be a solution for myself and not for them.

Secondly, are their behaviors not a reflection of their own agreements?

They may know the agreements. They may have used this specific one to separate themselves from personal responsibility through the manipulation tactic called Gaslighting:

“Coming to me with a boundary means you take what I say personally. I didn’t hurt you, you hurt yourself. The problem isn’t with me, the problem is with you. You’re making this about me when this is about you.”

It is clear they hold this agreement, but this is why they remain in a living hell:

They have neglected the first agreement: Be Impeccable With Your Word, and their attacks toward you reflect an agreement to their own continued suffering. Their attacks on you are the same attacks used on themselves. If they have shown patterns of playing catch-and-release with you (love-bombing and abuse cycle), they are simply craving company in their misery; someone just as addicted to suffering as they are.

Thirdly, it is not their responsibility to make sure I don’t get hurt by them.

Just because I won’t take what they say/do toward me personally does not mean I will remain in their line of fire. This is all I can do.

Mentorship

You are the main character of your movie, they are the main character for theirs. That is the fact that is unchanging, even in a space that promotes non-transference (unless that mentor has devoted the time and effort to educate and practice the skill of non-transference).

For those in mentorship positions who have not learned this concept, transference is likely no matter how well-intending they are.

Their role and the role they’ve given you in their movie is according to the agreements they have made. If they give you advice, it is to help steer you toward making the same agreements as them. But you don’t know where these agreements came from, and the only way they are accepted is through indoctrinating yourself in them. They didn’t help you reach this place. They simply heard you, maybe asked a few questions, but they already made up their mind on their response to you, and pointed at it saying, “Here you go. There it is, the answer to your problems. My opinion about this is reality, therefore my solution is unshakable. Listen to me. You deserve whatever happens if you do it any differently.”

This is what is meant by “your own truth.” Only your perspective is truest to you, because it directly reflects your unique set of agreements. When others agree with a belief you have, it does not mean you hold the ultimate truth. It simply means that they have adopted the same agreement as you.

Personal agreements explain how two people will go through the same thing and reach different conclusions, and how two people will go through contrasting experiences and reach the same conclusions. We are all in control of the agreements we make with or without damning experiences. This means no path is the same, and there is no copy/pasting solutions to scattered timelines.

Don’t take anything personally. Judgment, advice, praise, rejection.

Humans are addicted to suffering, and we support each other in maintaining this addiction.

Humans agree to help each other suffer... If you have the need to be abused, you will find it easy to be abused by others. If you are with people who need to suffer, something in you makes you abuse them.

To knowingly place myself in the line of fire is asking for justification for my suffering; it is asking for someone to reinforce my addiction to self-loathing (which is the opposite side to the same coin as self-infatuation, better known as narcissism).

If someone is not treating you with love and respect, it is a gift if they walk away from you. If that person doesn’t walk away, you will surely endure many years of suffering with him or her. Walking away may hurt for a while, but your heart will eventually heal. Then you can choose what you really want. You will find that you don’t need to trust others as much as you need to trust yourself to make the right choices.