Hell is Other People

In the last chapter, we talked about what happens if we don’t feel like we can trust other people – the benefits and pitfalls of expecting yourself to meet all your needs to avoid relying on others. 

This week, we’ll talk about the opposite case. What happens if we don’t trust ourselves, and feel completely reliant on other people?

Other people are really hard. We don’t know what they are thinking or feeling. We don’t control them. But we rely on them heavily to meet our needs. 

Therefore, building a model of other people is one of the most important, and hardest, tasks our brains have to do. 

Because we don’t have direct access to other people’s minds, psychologists believe that we use our own minds as the template from which to build our model of others. That means that if our model of ourselves is weak, unstable, poorly formed, or off in some way, it also makes it hard for us to understand others. 

If we don’t feel agency, we have a hard time seeing others as agents themselves, and find ourselves generally disinterested and lacking curiosity about their internal states. 

If we depend on others because we lack a strong sense of self, we therefore aren’t effective at modeling them - predicting how they will and won’t meet our needs. Occasionally, people let us down or do something surprising, and if we have been depending on them without any agency or sense of how our own minds work, then this state can be incredibly distressing, and – ironically – makes people hyper-focused and fixated on the behaviors of others without being able to really understand them. 

In this chapter, we’ll talk about interpersonal hypersensitivity – how it works and what problems it causes. When we depend on others and don’t trust ourselves, it can lead to challenges functioning in the world: 

➡️ Our relationships 

➡️ Our emotions

➡️ Our behaviors

➡️ Even our sense of reality