The thinner the skin, the deeper the wound

Aik TC SG

The thinner the skin, the deeper the wound

Susan Schwartz, Montreal Gazette September 27, 2015

No man lives without jostling and being jostled, observed the 19^th-century Scottish philosopher Thomas Carlyle. “In all ways he has to elbow himself through the world, giving and receiving offence.”

It takes hardly takes anything to make me feel disregarded, disapproved of or wronged. I bristle at criticism, even when it’s expressed as observation or suggestion. I take offence even when I suspect none is intended. I’m thin-skinned and take almost everything personally – except compliments, which I dismiss, sometimes gracelessly. Among my character flaws, I’m impatient and quick to anger. It can make for a volatile combination.

When we take something personally, it’s usually related to some form of rejection, says Elayne Savage, a California-based workplace and relationship coach and psychotherapist (queenofrejection.com). Often it stems from early experiences with peers, teachers, siblings or family.

That rejection segues into a sense that we’re being judged, criticized and made fun of, Savage told journalist Heidi Brown in a 2009 story in Forbes. For Brown, who has been called “too sensitive” and “prickly,” the feeling of being left out probably goes back to when she and her two younger sisters were children, she writes. Her sisters, only a year apart, were very close; as their older sister by a few years, she said she often felt excluded.

Psychologist Rachna Jain told Brown about a patient whose mother had criticized her in childhood for the way she cleaned house. The woman had married a fastidious man and when he’d say things like “You left a dish in the sink,” she heard “you’re a horrible slob.”

Another patient had grown up poor, without money for nice clothes. She wore an outfit to school one day that she thought looked good, a student picked on her – and the class joined in. Fast forward to adulthood. When the woman wore a new outfit to work and a co-worker remarked that the shade of blue did not flatter her the way another outfit she’d worn recently, she shouted at her co-worker not to comment on her clothes, that her clothes were her business.

Certainly her co-worker could have been more diplomatic – I believe some people hurt the feelings of others without even realizing it – but the shaming the woman felt as a schoolgirl had endured. I believe also that a snide remark or a judgmental statement says more about the person uttering it than about the person to whom it is aimed. But that makes it no less painful for those of us who are exquisitely attuned to perceived slights.

I wonder whether the alacrity with which we take offence is not a comment on the human condition. As the humourist Mark Twain observed: “When people do not respect us we are sharply offended; yet deep down in his private heart no man much respects himself.”

Emily Joffe was at a comedy club when a mild-looking woman stepped up to the microphone and opened with “It’s a good thing I don’t own a gun, because I would shoot everybody.” She got a laugh because “everyone understood the desire to respond to daily insults—a rude store clerk, an aggressive driver, a disparaging co-worker —with extreme prejudice.”

Joffe cited the comic’s observations in an extensive article on taking offence which she wrote in 2008 for Slate, where she is the Dear Prudence advice columnist. Study the topic of taking offence, she wrote, “and you realize people are like tuning forks, ready to vibrate with indignation.”

She cites Leviticus, which urges us to “Love your fellow as yourself,” and the Golden Rule, spoken by Jesus in his Sermon on the Mount: “So in everything do unto others what you would have them do to you.”

But a recurring source of offence for people “is that while people can easily live with the fact that they fall short on ‘doing unto others,’ they often find it intolerable when others are not properly doing unto them,” she writes.

We’re skilled at detecting the flaws in others, says Joffe. But as Jonathan Haidt, a University of Virginia psychology professor and a leading theorist in the field of moral psychology, has found, we’re blind to our own flaws. “Haidt says we think that our perception of events is the objective truth, while everyone else’s version is deluded by their self-interest,” she writes.

Some researchers recommend that becoming a little bit Buddhist could help when it comes to taking offence, says Joffe, citing Stephanie Preston, head of the University of Michigan’s Ecological Neuroscience Lab, who observed: “The more attached you are to your sense of self, the more you see forces trying to attack that self. If you have a more Buddhist view, and are less attached to self, you are less likely to see offence.”

In her book Comfortable With Uncertainty, Buddhist teacher Pema Chodron retells the Zen parable of a man in a boat at dusk. He sees another boat coming down the river toward him and is glad at first someone else is enjoying the river.

“Then he realizes that the boat is coming right toward him, faster and faster. He begins to yell, “Hey, hey, watch out! For Pete’s sake, turn aside!” But the boat just comes right at him, faster and faster. By this time he’s standing up in his boat, screaming and shaking his fist, and then the boat smashes right into him. He sees that it’s an empty boat.

“This is the classic story of our whole life situation,” Chodron writes. “There are a lot of empty boats out there.”