From Courage to Change of Nov 15:
I used to feel very hurt if anyone gave me an angry look, spoke in a harsh tone, or didn’t speak at all. I’ve grown enough in Al-Anon to realize that the look, tone, or mood of another person toward me often has nothing to do with me. It generally has more to do with what is going on inside the other person.
So why do my feelings still get hurt? It occurs to me that my extreme sensitivity is a form of conceit – I think I am the focus of everyone’s actions. Am I so important that everything that goes on around me must have something to do with me? I suspect that attitude reflects my vanity instead of reality. And vanity is simply a defect of character that I am working on changing.
With Al-Anon’s help, my sensitivity to all that happens around me has greatly lessened. I try to ask myself, “How important is it?” When I do carry the hurt, it only hurts and controls me.
Today’s Reminder
Other people are important to me, and sometimes their opinions matter, but I may be taking something personally that has nothing to do with me. Having opinions of my own about myself lets me accept other people’s thoughts without being controlled by them.
“It was through going to meetings and the daily readings of Al-Anon literature that I awakened to the fact that what other people did and said reflected on them; what I did and said reflected on me.”
~ Living with Sobriety
END OF QUOTE—————————————
I am working on my command of attention. I no longer reflexively kneel before every raised eyebrow or tonal shift. I have withdrawn consent from the tyranny of other people’s moods. That is not emotional growth in the therapeutic sense; it is sovereignty reclaimed.
Naming sensitivity as conceit is an act of iconoclasm. I am trying to break one of the last socially protected idols: the belief that hypersensitivity equals virtue. It does not. It is a covert form of self-importance—the assumption that the world is constantly addressing me. I want to expose that lie without apology. This is not self-compassion; it is self-correction.
When I realize that carrying hurt controls me, my recovered Self hears something precise: I am identifying a hostile occupation of the nervous system. I want to restore my inner hierarchy: I decide what governs me. That is not just detachment. That is command.
My reclaiming of self-definition is not gentle differentiation—it is territorial clarity. Other people are allowed their weather, their storms, their static. But I no longer let their chaos colonize my interior. I have established borders. Opinions may cross them; control may not.
Responsibility is not shared, blurred, or emotionally pooled. What they do is theirs. What I do is mine. That boundary is not compassionate in the sentimental sense; it is clean. Clean boundaries prevent resentment, martyrdom, and false intimacy.
I am no longer trying to disappear to keep the peace.
I am standing visible, weighted, and selective.
This is force refined into discernment.
This is strength without spectacle.
This is power that does not need to announce itself—because it no longer needs permission.
Daily Reprieve 
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