I had an argument with a therapist once. I had said I didn't believe in this New Age nonsense of how we're all responsible for our own feelings. "That's bullshit!" I said. "If somebody's yelling in your face it's going to affect how you feel!"

Looking straight into my eyes, she said, "Somebody could be yelling in ~my~ face and it wouldn't affect how I feel."

In that instant, I knew she was telling me the absolute truth. I surmised that if that happened, she'd be thinking, "Wow, this man is really angry! And he's trying to take it out on me. He's lost all control of his emotions and is venting pure rage. This has nothing to do with me, of course--- it's all his own toxic, irrational ideation and emotion."

Fortunately for me, I ~got it.~ I saw she was right, and I then devoted all my energy into forcing my own evolution away from the position I had held all my life, and toward a place where I stopped giving other people the power to affect how I felt. It didn't take long to effect the transformation because I could see the truth of it, the rationality of it.

When I read the quotation by Marcus Aurelius above, I instantly recognized that it was the same lesson I had learned all those years ago: we have the "power to revoke at any moment" our habitual investment of emotion into a thing, feeling that it is simply a "natural reaction." What that results in is, of course, our losing command of ourselves.

A good example of this is the "your mother wears combat boots!" phenomenon. You're arguing with somebody and suddenly, he disparages your mother. "Your mother wears combat boots!" (Whatever that's supposed to mean.) "Your mother sucks cocks in hell!" "Yeah, I fucked your mom last night! I was balls deep in her ass!"

Hearing our mother described so crudely, we "see red" and attack. We feel perfectly justified in doing so because, hey! It's your mom they're talking about! The sane response, of course, is to think, "My mother obviously doesn't wear combat boots. She's not in hell, a place that doesn't exist. And this guy clearly did not have sex with my mother last night. These are all irrational statements intended to cause me to lose my moorings---and that's not going to happen. I don't allow anybody to direct my feelings like that! That really would be crazy. So... let me figure out how I'm going to sort this guy out. Do I really give a shit what he thinks of me? Fuck, no. Is there any objective in this situation so valuable that it would be worth me fighting the guy for it? No? Well, then... this is just stupid."

The very opposite extreme of not letting other people affect your feelings is the ridiculous crap happening on college campuses these days. All somebody has to do is say "Trump 2016!" and that's enough to cause adults to feel so wounded that they are (they believe) actually traumatized, requiring trauma counselors and "safe spaces" with (no joke) balloons and coloring books, pillows, soothing music and videos of puppies. People have allowed themselves to become so weak that they require "trigger warnings" about words which --if merely heard spoken-- would "trigger" a full-blown trauma attack.

yeesh!