We all have been taught or trained to have emotional reactions to words.  And we have been taught to lie to ourselves and blame others for our uncomfortable emotional reactions.  

    For thousands of years, people have tried to encourage and teach others to take responsibility for their own reactions, and to practice not taking offense at what people say. It takes effort to re-train ourselves to not be emotionally reactive to what people say.  In my experience, few people have the desire or willingness to make the effort to overcome their conditioning.  BUT, it is possible to overcome the world’s influence on us IF we are willing to make the effort.

Thousands of years ago when people started talking about this they called this practice “watching”, but today we call it mindfulness.  It is just the practice of watching ourselves and our reactions to what people say and deeper than that is to watch our thoughts and our reactions to our thoughts.  Then it is about learning to relax or let go of those uncomfortable emotional reactions.  There are lots of “hacks” or shortcuts to learning how to relax if a person is open to them.  Seek and you will find…or ask me.