Dear Joe:

“I wonder if its possible, if one day I’ll be able to live peacefully regardless of what people think of me”- yes, it is possible. No one likes to be disliked and thought little of, so that will never feel good, but you will not be ruminating about it all day long, instead you will notice when this or that person does not like you or expressed a lack of appreciation of you, or a negative opinion of you (true or not), and you will let it go and move on.

Notice that unless a person tells you what he or she thinks, you don’t know. You can’t read the thoughts inside another person’s brain just as others cannot read or hear your thoughts.

Sometimes when a person smiles at you, you get a clue about what they think, the smiling person, if the smile appears sincere, may mean she is thinking: I like Joe! When a person looks at you with an angry face, facial muscles being tight, he maybe thinking: I don’t like that Joe!

But not necessarily, a person may be looking in your direction, at you, but is thinking about someone else, another person, not you. And as they think of the other person, their face is relaxed if their thoughts are pleasant, or tight if their thoughts are unpleasant.

Also, as you go about your day thinking: what is this person thinking about me, that person is likely not thinking about you and may very well be thinking: what is Joe (or someone else)…  thinking about me?

We all have that inner critic that is telling us, within the space of our brain, in between our ears, what others are thinking of us.. while all along, these thoughts supposedly taking place in others’ brains are all happening in our own brains. And as the inner critic talks to us, we don’t hear what other people are actually saying to us, their actual voice drowns in the noise of our inner critic.

Regarding the fluctuation, you wrote: “The good days I would think about how funny they must think I am, or how good looking I am. But the bad days I get very self-critical… It feels like social anxiety on occasion and in others I feel like I am overly confident… I feel like my state is always fluctuating”-

– we all need to feel good and we all don’t want to feel  badly. So as you feel badly for a long time as you imagine others are thinking badly about you, your brain takes a break from time to time and imagines people are thinking very well of you, and in imagining that, you get to feel really good. It is a way the brain compensates you for feeling badly for too long.

Our inner critic, the part of our brains that rain-on-our-parade of life, is most often the mental representative of a critical parent. Is it so in your case?

anita