ANXIETY IN THE MIND: DIFFICULTIES WITH FRIENDS
Anxiety often shows itself in difficulty in our interpersonal relations. We feel that we are no longer at ease when meeting people, strangers, and even those whom we know quite well. Oddly enough, it is usual for us to be noticeably easier in our professional and business dealings with people than we are on social occasions, even when the social occasion is quite casual and of no consequence. The reason for this is that in our professional and business dealings both we and the others have something definite to do; we have an allotted role, as it were, and we know what has to be done; but small talk and polite conversation on a casual social basis is much more difficult. Tension makes us awkward. It seems hard to establish friendly communication. We tend to become self-conscious, and aware of what we are doing and saying, whereas in a healthy state of mind our conversation happens naturally and spontaneously without any great conscious control on our part. Things seem strained. Any pause in the conversation worries us. Silence becomes unbearable, so we feel we must keep talking at all cost. Because of our inner tension we lose our easy flow of thought, relevant subjects elude us, and we become aware that pur conversation is mere chatter. We are prattling, jabbering; and we try to pull ourselves together to keep our tension from those about us. On other occasions there is a poverty of speech, and we are embarrassed because we cannot say anything. Our silence is caused by the overactivity of the inhibitory process making an attempt to damp down our reaction to our anxiety. But it goes too far, and we find ourselves so inhibited that we cannot say anything. A tenseness comes between us and our friends. They in turn come to sense that we are not fully at ease, and as a result they tend to behave towards us less freely and in a more guarded fashion. The social occasion which we used to enjoy becomes a kind of nightmare—something to be avoided at all costs.
Recently, I saw a lad whose main symptom was his difficulty with his friends. To be more accurate, I should say his difficulty was with those around him, as he was fast losing all his friends.
He is a nice lad, quite a gifted university student, and a good athlete as well. But he is incredibly tense and extremely rigid in his way of thinking, so once he gets some idea in his head, whether it be good or bad, there is no shaking him from it.
His tension and irritability were so great that I could easily see that there would be no fun for young people in the company of a lad like this. His former friends had left him for the simple reason that his tension made them feel uncomfortable.
This difficulty in interpersonal relationships resulting from anxiety may come between husband and wife so that they almost become strangers to one another; with young lovers an invisible something comes between them, cutting off the free interchange of their emotion. In a similar way the anxious mother may become separated from her baby; and try as she will, she is unable to re-establish their harmony together because the infant, in animal fashion, senses her tension and reacts to it.
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