Inferior
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Eleanor Roosevelt is once reported to have said something along the lines of "no one could make you feel inferior without your consent."
It's a nice, pat way out, methinks. To an extent it's very true, but I think, like with most such solid-seeming quasi-axioms, it has a boundary. I think it's very simple to make someone feel inferior, rejected, or replaced in the way one replaces something very disposable. I think that bruising the ego is a lot more easy a matter than dear Eleanor would want us to believe by the statement above - and I don't think there is somehow a fault to be found in someone who does feel lower because of something another person did or said, or didn't do or say. (2025 06 11: Especially when it comes to children. You can wound a child and damage them permanently so easily, and they have no free will in that.)
If it were so simple to turn one's back on the insults and slights of others, we wouldn't experience such acute pains, nor would we have generation after generation of people who partake of therapy because of abuses, slights, and so forth.
Certainly, you don't have to let every Tom, Dick, or Asshole get the better of you every time, but that line I mentioned above, that line exists. I've looked at it more times than I care to mention.