Dear sossi:

It is my understanding that you perceive people in your every day life to be predatory (“humans are predators”) when it is probably not the case most of the time.

I understand that your workplace is competitive and that there really may be some bullying and unfair practices taking place there, but I do not believe that the moment you step  out of your home, you are encountered with predators (“I step out of the house I am always alone and humans are predators”).

“I feel that I am targeted a lot because women here are very jealous and possessive… yesterday, a woman stepped out of her apartment building on the phone and started laughing loudly saying ‘oh! you should see the scene out here today!.. (she) meant to make me feel bad.. Sometimes my neighbours talk about me when I’m out on my balcony… When I was out with my ex, I noticed people would really stare at us. Strange women would come sliding up to him trying to get his attention.. I think I was so happy around him, that they wanted some of it to rub off on him”-

– reads to me that you imagine that you are the center of attention wherever you go, that people, particularly women focus their attention on you, talking about you, feeling jealous of you, especially if they see you happy, and that they purposefully go about trying to take away from you whatever it is that made you happy.

Wikipedia has an entry on paranoid personality disorder that reads that it is “a mental illness characterized by paranoid delusions, and a pervasive, long-standing suspiciousness and generalized mistrust of others”, that people suffering from this disorder are “hypersensitive, easily insulted, and habitually relate to the world by vigilant scanning of the environment… They think they are in danger and look for signs and threats of that danger.. not appreciating other interpretations or evidence“.

Here is an example of “other interpretations or evidence”. You described the incident when you were walking on the street and you saw a woman on her phone, saying something about a scene: “you should see the scene out here today!”. Your first, immediate interpretation was that she was referring to you as some kind of an undesirable scene, and that she was trying to hurt you.

But the first, immediate interpretation we form about what is happening in our environment, is not always the only interpretation or the correct interpretation. In this example, maybe the woman was referring to a scene in a movie she watched, and you misheard some of what she said to mean that she was referring to you. She may have not been talking about you at all. If you listened further to what she was saying on the phone, maybe you would have heard her talking about a movie, and that would have provided you with evidence in favor of a second, different, accurate interpretation.

anita