Taking offense to someone's words is completely and totally your own choice. Being offended is essentially admitting your unability to regulate your own emotions. It is a sign of emotional weakness and insecurity to choose to be offended. Basically you oppose someone else's view because it upsets you or hurts your feelings. Grow up. Being offended only hurts you, no one else is effected by your decision to take offense. Yes, people are going to say mean things, but you do not need to allow them to ellict an emotional response from you.
Choosing to be offended is a sign of emotional immaturity. People who are truly mature are able to brush off the offensive remarks of another person, not allowing them to trouble them or cause them to harbour ill feelings in their hearts.
It is ridiculous how so many people try to subdue or alter their words in hopes of not offending anyone. No matter what you say, people can choose to take your words as offensive. Like I said earlier, people CHOOSE to be offended. So do not worry about trying to censure your words to avoid offending someone, because no matter what you say someone could decide to be offended by it. In no way is it your fault if you offended someone. They chose to be offended. All of our words are left up to individual interpretation and everyone seems to interpret them differently. Someone could have misunderstood what you said, twisted its meaning in their minds and then decided it was offensive to them.
Let's try to be a little bit more mature and less controlled by our emotions. When our emotions are in control they can cause us to quickly jump to the choice to take offense. Odds are the person did not even intend to offend you.
If someone is intentionally trying to offend you, it becomes even more ridiculous to choose to take offense. Basically you are confirming to them the assumption that you are emotionally insecure and can be manipulated by your emotions. You admire that you are irrational and ruled by your emotions. In this case you are granting the person intentionally seeking to offend you exactly what they want. You do not have to give in to these pathetic attempts to ellicit an emotional response from you. You hold the power, they don't. When you take offense you basically hand them the power on a silver platter. Take the high road the next time someone attempts to offend you and refuse to let them get a rise out of you. Taking offense when none is intended is foolish, and taking offense when it is intended is even more foolish. Let's choose instead to not allow anyone any power over us or our emotions.
