This is a powerful lesson I learned (or re-learned) recently:

Though it’s fine and natural to need my friends, my partner, and an occasional boost in confidence, to crave and/or demand validation from everyone I come into contact with is a recipe for diminishment, self-doubt, and instability. Also, it closes me off from learning and growth. I potentially reject every message that hurts my feelings and miss all the good parts.

I get and learn a lot more from this world when I put myself in an open position of intelligent and discerning reception rather than a constricted position of need. I think that the more I need from others, the more I warp what I receive as good or bad, welcome or unwelcome.

The lesson is not that I can somehow control defensive feelings from arising, but that I can be patient with those feelings, temper my reactions, put it all into context, and hopefully still be open to a potential lesson—whether it comes from the other, or from my own self-awareness.