We know them. God help us, how we know them.
There are people among us who have developed the skills of a ballet dancer from all the walking on eggshells they do around a chronically offended person.
Everything wounds her. Every random behaviour of yours turns out to be a cruel display of inconsideration towards him. How could you? Have you no eyes? Have you no heart?
Calm down. You are not such monsters. Let me dismantle this particular mine for you.
First and foremost: every one of us takes offence sometimes, and that is fine. The mark of the chronic version is the absence of proportion between the alleged injury and the magnitude of the emotional response.
Do you want to know why the chronically offended person became like that?
I am not going to tell you. For two reasons.
One: I do not know. Each of these mental offenders has their own particular causal history.
Two: why did he become like that is not the right question. I always insist on the more useful question: what is he getting out of it?
So — what does the chronically offended person get out of being chronically offended?
I have to admit that in the short term the tactic is fairly effective and fairly logical.
At some stage of life they landed in a difficult position that I would not wish on anybody: they never managed to learn to regulate their own emotions.
Emotional regulation. How enormously important it is. You move about the world and mix with human beings, and neither the world nor the human beings are always adapted to your immediate wishes — and something has to happen inside you between the disappointment and your response to it.
For most people, that something is internal. For the chronically offended, it was never built, so the regulation has to be performed externally, by other people, continuously. That is what the offence is for: it recruits the surrounding population into managing a feeling they cannot manage themselves.
Which explains the two features that make it so maddening. It works — everybody does start walking carefully. And it never diminishes, because a capacity that is being performed by others on your behalf does not develop.
The practical implication is uncomfortable, and it is the opposite of what decent people instinctively do. Every careful step you take around them is another day their own regulation is not required to grow.