Contents:
We think we can ignore pain until we realize pain from past events influencing our behavior in the current day.
People attempt to appear strong in the face of pain to their detriment down the line. They ignore it, drink it away, only to then unknowingly project it, allow it to damage their relations with others and corrupt their lives.
Becoming an overly private individual is a common reaction to life’s more painful moments.
This article is written to warn people about the pitfalls of overusing privacy to save themselves from future pain.
Privacy and Pain
Though not always, the act of labeling yourself a private individual often stems from past pain you decided to privately harden yourself with rather than openly suffer from.
Who knows what the right move is whilst facing hardship; channeling pain to harden yourself may in fact be the right move to make. Suffering is a state too vulnerable for those who elect to suffer privately. Privacy cloaks their vulnerability.
Those who have trouble believing in authentic help from others coming their way seldom allow themselves to seek it. Privacy prevents the gut wrenching feeling of seeking help and not receiving it. You won’t be rejected if there’s nobody around to reject you.
The individuals who collapse into seclusion rely on themselves to deal with pain. They rely on things, not people, to bring them comfort. Coming to terms with trauma is best done privately, they tell themselves.
People try their best but they’ll never feel our pain. They may be there for us but they’ll soon be gone as they attend to business of their own.
Privacy becomes an only consistent ally when we’re dealing with our pain. It becomes a good enough friend to make us think that it’ll save us from painful moments down the line.
Those who’ve used privacy to deal with pain in times past tend to fall in love with its protective qualities. Past regret, trauma, and pain encourages those who’ve discovered privacy to adopt it as a personality trait.
Your Personal Philosophy Can Turn Into a Personal Attack
You’ll notice yourself withholding information as you scout for moments in your social interactions which can be used against you down the line.
The tidbits you tell your significant other in bed at bedtime are risks you take because they can be used to stab when the relationship turns sour. Vulnerable information that we share carries with it risk. Should we tell our neighbors how much we earn at work? Will it be used against us when it’s time to build a new fence between our respective homes?
Risks are taken because they can bring forth rewards. The reward in taking the risk of divulging information you deem sensitive is the betterment of a social relationship.
Sharing information about ourselves builds trust as someone’s mental profile of you grows longer. They deem you to trust them, even if the information you divulge isn’t significant by nature. Above all, they recognize the mutual perceptions of the relationships you’ve built together to match. Through the divulgence of sensitive information, we feel out how close we are to others and how close they consider us to be.
As you try limiting future pain with privacy, you’ll find yourself overthinking the smallest details. Previously inconsequential information about yourself begins to seem risky to divulge. You’ll begin guarding information that makes little sense guarding.
You’ll begin skipping social gatherings at work, and you’ll keep conversations short with members of your social circle. You’ll always be “good” and everything will be “same old” with you.
The sensitivity with which you perceive traditionally inconsequential pieces of information will be the downfall of your strategy to limit pain. You’ll forget to recognize that others around you don’t perceive what you ate for breakfast to be consequential information.
Your act of trying to sidestep normal dialogue by taking your desire for peace and privacy too far will begin insulting those around you.
The reason it’ll be insulting to others is because they wouldn’t have the same perception of the information at hand as you would. You’d thereby allow your sensitivity for others to potentially hurt you to encourage you to hurt them first.
They’ll begin questioning their understanding of the relationship you’ve mutually built when they recognize you to not trust them with simple conversation topics. They will question whether they should approach you with new topics at all, and will begin to second guess whether they’ve hurt you in the past.
More often than not, those around you will come to the presumption that you’re an overly sensitive individual who should be tiptoed around and not expected meaningful dialogue from.
Your love of privacy will become a burden if it remains unchecked. The burden will be one of others giving you too much of what you asked for by reciprocating your behavior toward them.
Bad Investments Aren’t Easy to Recover From
Your beloved sense of privacy will turn to loneliness as you learn about a concept called social reciprocity.
It’s easy to be private, mysterious, and low key when information about the world around you keeps flowing your way. Those around you aren’t ignorant of information’s value however, and will soon adjust their behavior toward you in accordance to behavior you exhibit yourself.
As people perceive you to be distrusting of them with the information you withhold about yourself, they’ll realize the disadvantages in spilling their beans for you to enjoy without reciprocating. People around overly private individuals become sensitive to the information they allow those private people to learn about them.
Why should they tell you things if you don’t want to share information similar in scope about yourself? Private individuals encourage a development of competitive feelings in regards to the sharing of information in any relationship. The feeling of not being trusted by private individuals develops resentment toward the fact that they’ve seen more of us than we’ve seen of them.
You’ll recognize the returns of your investments into relationships you have with others begin to dwindle. People will reach out less and will assume you to be unrewarding in your interactions with them. They’ll begin telling you less as they fail to taste reciprocity in your reactions to the things they tell you.
Being an overly private individual when others assume you to trust them encourages malnourished relationships. Paranoid individuals are considered to leech from the relationships others work hard to maintain with them. They offer little in informational reciprocity, and are quickly labeled as not worthy of being shared information with.