What Does it Mean to Be Offended?

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There are many spiritual quotes out there that encourage the reader to not be offended, no matter what. When I first read about being offended, I came at it via all my conditioning & thought it meant to take something personal to the extreme. I didn’t look up the word in the dictionary. I thought I knew what it meant. Some friends of mine have expressed a similar translation of the term, so I thought I’d take a few moments to define it.

From the online dictionaries:

A.) Dictionary.com:  offend – to irritate, annoy or anger.

B.) Merriam-Webster:  offend – to cause dislike, anger, or vexation.

C.) Oxford: offend - caused to feel upset, annoyed, or resentful.

With this exercise, I also found the reason why so many of us have a much more serious definition of the word than is accurate. There is one of Biblical origin meaning to transgress moral or divine law, or in other words, to SIN. No wonder we took it to such far extremes before.

By using the first few definitions of non-Biblical origin, this means to get offended is the same as getting upset, flustered, aggravated, irritated, and the like. It does not mean you have to be so angry you are ready to kill someone or think someone has personally come up and cursed your mom. It simply means something caused you to become off kilter.

Why does this happen? We choose to get offended. It’s a reaction taken when someone/something does something we perceive to be personal, such as wasting our time, slowing us down, invading/crowding our space, polluting our air, ignoring us, endangering our lives, etc. We get angry, indignant, self-righteous, irritated, hateful, argumentative, etc. – all offensive reactions. Most of us think the other party’s at fault, when in reality it’s OUR problem, not theirs. We chose to react to them. They didn’t do what they did TO us, they just did it, no matter what our head might want us to believe.

Every situation is completely & utterly neutral. Our thoughts surrounding it tell us a story about it. Our egos tell us something like “How dare they drive so slow!” or “Don’t they see how busy I am?”.  Or our egos will tell us a story about our partner’s intentions, like “He meant to ignore me all day.” These stories are all untrue egoic reactions stemming from taking something personally & then getting offended by it. Until we become willing to believe every situation is neutral, we will continue causing harm by walking around being offended by things. Mostly, that harm is in the form of harsh treatment of others, which then comes back to us as harsh treatment. We then wonder why people treat us badly. Well, there ya go! But, I digress.

If you’ve never tried NOT being offended, I challenge you to do it. For one full day, don’t react by taking offense of any kind to a person, place, thing or event. It’s that easy. Choose to have no reaction. Choose to be calm both inside & out. It’s not personal, so don’t make it that way. Do it & report back. It's a challenge.

"Become a person who refuses to be offended by anyone, anything, or any set of circumstances." - Wayne Dyer