Allowing People To Hurt You

The was a fashion twenty years ago in psychology - I associate it strongly with the UNH nursing instructors and the Antioch College psych department - that what other people did does not make you feel a certain way, you choose to feel it, or allow yourself to feel that way. I take the point, that you as the receiver retain ultimate control. It is also good to learn that your retain agency, and it is good to teach yong people that they retain agency and to not have to respond in a certain way. 

But to suggest, as these instructors did, that the person acting on you is responsible for zero percent of the "making" is just silly.  It is very similar to what CS Lewis was pushing back against in Abolition of Man. When we see a great waterfall, it is not something entirely arbitrary to think it sublime. To see it as sublime is entirely proper.  To fail to see it, in fact, suggests that there is something missing in you as a human.  When someone pops you in the snoot, or says something nice about you in public, or takes something from a small child, makes you at least initially feel a particular way. (In context, if the the punch is from a toddler, if the compliment is from a weasel, etc.) To not feel something for the child is to be missing some bit of humanity. To be indifferent to someone's compliment is to not quite get the rules of social interaction...

Or to have dismissed the person to such an extent that their opinion means nothing to you, and this is where the subtler rules of humankind start to emerge. 

When someone can hurt us, it is because we have allowed this vulnerability, yes. But that is a great deal of what it means to love and to be human at all. If we are beyond (we will call it above) being hurt, we have in some way left the building. It is an odd imbalance when we are not able to hurt someone who retains a power to hurt us, but it is actually very common. One of us is likely wrong, A for moping around B who no longer cares, or B for denying a bit of their humanity but cutting off A from consideration of affection. Some of us may make ourselves vulnerable to too many people, others to too few. But at the extremes there is a problem.