that the only time you really hit back is when someone gets to your core...touches a raw nerve or hits where it hurts.... This is also the only time when you feel real rage and a kind of anger-mixed-with-pain-and-hurt-and-humiliation.
You hit back because you feel threatened...you are vulnerable and don't have the tools to attack or foil the attack, and you feel as if your very existence is being called into question.... All that you hold dear, what you believe in, your ideas, everything that you stand for is being trashed out of hand, and your very person is in danger...imperiled as it were...
At this time it is very difficult to do what the wise tell us - 'you know who you are....don't let words - any kind of words, from anyone - question that'....but since we feel as if we've been 'felled' we crumble.
Since this deals with our core and we are allowing the negatives that we hear to get to us, we therefore need to keep letting ourselves hear good things too..tell ourselves that we have the divine spark in us..that is, we have to love ourselves and make allowances for our shortcomings, forgive ourselves for our mistakes, and praise ourselves for the good things we do.... The rider here is that we have to do this all the time for ourselves, so that it becomes a strong enough force to foil the power with which the negatives attack us...kind of like a shield which deflects the arrows shot at us so that they don't pierce us...
At the end of the day, you are left with only you...and you are responsible for that 'you'...