I don't like being told off

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Many of us don't like being told off or shouted at whether its from our own parents or friends or teachers from school or bosses or colleagues from work or whoever but I seem to feel afterwards that it makes me feel and look bad and then I get angry and upset with myself about it and even tell myself off in my own head.

I'm the same. I get all jumpy and sensitive when I'm being told off, even if it's not personal. I don't feel so vulnerable if I'm not the only person being told off (like if I'm with other people and we're all being told off). But being told off alone makes me feel embarrassed, sad and even frustrated. It is why I got so anxious going into stores during the pandemic last year when everything was strict. I know it's nothing personal when being yelled at because of accidentally getting too close to someone (I can't always hear very well so I had to stand fairly close if I was interacting with a shop assistant), but it still triggered my anxiety. I remember in March 2020 when the pandemic was all new, I had trouble adapting to the new rules, and as I was paying for shopping I was trying to stay positive by chatting to the cashier, but she just looked annoyed and interrupted me by motionlessly telling me to stand behind the yellow line that was taped on the floor. I worried after that in case I might have been the only customer stupid enough to not notice a bright yellow line on the floor and she might have hated me because of it.

Sorry, might have gone off-topic a bit there...

Nobody "likes" to be "told off".

But it happens to everyone once in a while.

Sometimes you're guilty of what the person is telling you off about, and sometimes not. Either way you have to roll with it.

I think I am a little traumatized by a bad experience I had when I was a child when being told off by the teacher one time. I caused an accident in the classroom, totally unintended, that physically hurt another member of staff, and the teacher shouted at me so loud that the whole class went quiet. She shouted at the top of her lungs at me and pointed her finger in my face, and I was walking backwards feeling absolutely terrified. I was too little to explain that it was just an accident, but I knew it was. But ever since then I was scared of breaking any school rules in case a teacher would do the same again, and the fear has still stuck with me today.

Although I know that being told off sometimes is part of life and all that but I still can't help feeling sensitive when it occurs. My anxiety rises and I have an urge to cry.

I don't know what other people's experiences were but my experience as a kid was that often I didn't know what I was being told off for. I was just doing what I thought was right/normal. People just seemed to get angry randomly.

It's left me very uncomfortable with anger as an emotion, I usually experience a massive adrenalin dump when people around me get angry, even if its nothing to do with me. I don't like the adrenalin sensation at all. I spend a long time thinking about these events afterwards, trying to decide what went wrong, how I could have behaved differently - I'm rarely happy with the way I behave in these situations because I'm in fight/flight mode and I'd like to be able to stay cooler under that sort of pressure.

In adulthood, I've found it difficult to asses who has the right to tell me off. Some people just assume authority and I sometimes forget to question that. Equally I will question the authority of people who clearly have it.