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"In the ring, our opponents can gouge us with their nails or butt us with their heads and leave a bruise. But we don't denounce them for it or get upset with them or regard them from then on as violent types. We just keep our eye on them...
Not out of hatred or suspicion. Just keeping a friendly distance. We need to do that in other areas. We need to excuse what our sparring partners do and just keep our distance--without suspicion or hatred" - Marcus Aurelius
In our travels, as fighters and as human beings, we will meet other persons working at cross-purposes from us. In the ring, these encounters are very raw and easy to identify. For example, a training partner may want to prevent us from getting the upper hand in sparring or an opponent in a match may show us no mercy. As we work for our own interest, these battles necessarily lead us into conflict with others.
Nonetheless, it is quite useless to involve your ego in such situations. Taking conflict personally - ninety percent of the time - causes you to waste energy on psychologising an opponent who has no real psychic investment in the situation that is causing you grief.
When a conflict situation arises, it is vital not to take things personally. In the ring, you try to knock out the fighter in front of you. You are not considering that the girl in the other corner may be someone's girlfriend or daughter. You are not engaged with the fact that handing this person a loss may affect their mood or emotional system for weeks to come.
No - quite simply you are engaged in a scenario where all that matters is the objective (winning) for which both of you strive. To attain that goal you must go through the fighter that stands before you. And so you act on the person as you would on a object, moving, displacing or countering them as best you can to attain your goal. You have no personal battle with them. Instead, what the two of you have is a battle of position, or of opposing desires.
Conflicts in life often aren't that different. With co-workers or in a relationship, our goals are often as cross-purposes from the people we interact with. As a result, humans act out all sorts of behaviors that seem unfair, inconsiderate and/or inexplicable. In fact, it's entirely possible to spend the better part of your waking life psychoanalyzing the deep reasons for these frustrating behaviors (I am willing to bet that you most likely have a friend who does this as a favorite hobby)!!
But the temptation to delve in this way is a red herring. The twists and turns of another person's psyche are forever beyond our grasp, especially if we're dealing with a person with whom we have little intimate contact. Lack of information makes analysis exceedingly difficult and subject to flaw. Additionally, to give this amount of attention to an issue actually feeds it, making is seem more important than it actually is.
A more effective way of dealing with frustrating behaviors can simply be to treat the behavior without psychologising the actor. Whether someone meant to hurt your feelings, knock you out, or give you a sense of rejection is really beside the point. Ninety percent of the time, the person in front of you acts upon you as a cut-out at any rate, and does not treat you as an individual.
It is best, then, to simply "keep distance without suspicion or hatred", and understand that we have likely acted on others in similar ways in the past, leaving a trail of hard to interpret and hurtful behavior in our wake. Once someone gouges at you, mentally head-butts you or acts with some sort of incivility towards you, simply place them in "quarantine", and keep your distance.
In this way, you prevent their behavior from affecting you in the future. You also conserve valuable resources by not engaging in an emotional battle, where one is unnecessary. An inordinate amount of human behavior is actually very impersonal. But, because we take things personally, we fail to see the impersonal nature of others' motivations. Terrie Schauer
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