Sensitivity viewed as character flaw

My anxiety's been under control for a while - I rarely take the medication anymore, I'm getting restful sleep, I have  more energy than I've had in a while, I'm losing weight.  So I thought that I could watch a BBC program about spies in France during WW2.  Normally, I don't watch anything really scary - I feel too anxious!  (OK, this is probably taking sensitivity  and empathy waaaaay too far, but that's just the way I am!)  So I've been watching it for a while and although I sometimes have to walk away from it, I can usually go back and finish an episode.  So I was watching it the other night and I had this sudden and overwhelming anxiety -  pounding heart, difficulty catching my breath, sweating... (Definitely not spy material myself)   It was the strangest thing and I couldn't figure out why now, why all of a sudden...  My world is not stress-free although it is becoming N-free, which helps a lot!  I am going to the States for the holidays, but I get to see only the FOO that I love (although not all of them, alas...) and I don't find traveling particularly stressful, even with a disabled husband.  So what is it?  I think it might be that I KNOW the characters more now and am therefore more worried about them - isn't that slightly crazy?  Do other people feel this way?  Am I really "too sensitive"? 

When I was much younger, I remember having a conversation with my brother-in-law, not the most sensitive of men, about a movie he had seen (It was about Vietnam, but I can't remember which movie we were discussing.)  He had seen the movie and, being how he is, therefore thought that EVERYONE should see it.  I told him, foolishly it turns out, that I didn't think I'd be able to watch that kind of movie, that the very thought of it made my stomach hurt, that all of that pain just seemed  too much to watch on a big screen.  He was livid!  That I was such a "coward", that I was "hiding my head in the sand," that I wasn't willing to "look at reality."  It was such a forceful attack that I was really taken aback.  This was about a movie that was about a war that was long over, a war that I had protested.  Looking back at that incident, I'm even more confused - why on earth would you attack someone who just really couldn't bear to watch that much pain in the context of a movie?  And why on earth can this man and his wife, Winkie One, not see the pain that is constantly caused by WWW and her Flying Monkeys, something that he actually COULD do something about?  So I'm the coward for not watching something I have no control over and he's the hero because...  It's no wonder I'm having trouble getting through all this crap..