Fear of making friends

There will always be some friends around us in our lives, but friends do not fall from the sky, but are found through communication and discovery. In modern society, because of the importance of personal relationships, it is more beneficial to make more friends. However, some people cannot get out of their own hearts and develop a fear of making friends. So how should these people deal with this situation?

Social phobia is a subtype of phobia. Phobia was originally called phobic neurosis, which is a type of neurosis. The main manifestation is excessive and unreasonable fear of certain objective things or situations in the outside world. The patient knows that this fear reaction is excessive or unreasonable, but it still recurs and is difficult to control. Fear attacks are often accompanied by obvious anxiety and autonomic nervous system symptoms. Patients try their best to avoid the objective objects or situations that cause fear, or endure them with fear, thus affecting their normal activities. Common phobia subtypes include agoraphobia, social phobia, and specific phobia.

1. Generally there are no obvious or persistent psychotic symptoms. Neurotic disorders are mainly manifested by anxiety, depression, fear, compulsion, and hypochondriasis. These symptoms can exist alone, but most of them are mixed, especially anxiety symptoms; there are rarely obvious or persistent psychotic symptoms.

2. The lack of clear organic lesions is based on various organic diseases such as infection, poisoning, substance dependence, metabolic or endocrine disorders and brain organic diseases. Various neurotic symptoms may appear, but they cannot be diagnosed as neurosis. Diagnosis of neurotic disorders requires exclusion of organic diseases.

3. Patients often have painful experiences with their illnesses. Most patients with neurotic disorders maintain good self-awareness during the onset of the illness. Their reality testing abilities are usually not impaired. They can not only identify whether their mental state is normal, but also determine which of their own experiences are pathological. Since patients' experience of neurotic disorders is often very painful and the symptoms are often disproportionate to the actual situation, patients can often experience this deeply and their pain is aggravated, so they often have a strong desire to seek treatment. However, the diagnosis and treatment process that cannot find a clear cause may aggravate the patient's painful experience and have a certain impact on the patient's social function. Their work, study efficiency and adaptability are all reduced to varying degrees. The worsening of the disease and the chronicity of the disease may also cause a small number of patients to lose their self-awareness.

4. Psychosocial factors and premorbid personality play a certain role in the occurrence and development of neurotic disorders. Psychosocial stress factors are related to the onset of neurotic disorders.

1. Behavioral therapy is the preferred method for treating phobia. Systematic desensitization therapy and exposure shock therapy are effective for social phobia. The basic principles are: first, to eliminate the conditioned association between the fear object and the anxiety-fear response; second, to counteract the avoidance response. Many patients have learned during the course of the disease how to avoid the objects and scenes that cause them fear without affecting their daily social functions.

2. Systematic desensitization therapy is widely used, and it can be divided into real-life desensitization and imaginary desensitization. The first stage is relaxation training. In the second stage, the patient is asked to list the situations that induce social phobia in order of the severity of the fear response. Then, starting with the situation that causes the weakest fear response, the patient is asked to put himself in each of the situations or imagine himself in these situations. Each step is done until the patient adapts and feels completely relaxed, and then moves on to the next more stressful situation until even the most intense situation does not cause fear.

First, “the problem has lasted for more than half a year.” That is, our symptoms, our serious psychological conflicts have lasted for more than half a year.

Second, “impaired social functions”. It refers to the inability to successfully complete normal social, work, study, life, etc., that is, the inability to make correct responses to information in these occasions. For example, when someone asks you if you have eaten, you will fall into a state of thinking about how to answer. You are worried that your answer will make others have a bad impression of you. A simple greeting turns into a conflict on your end. Unable to work normally, often distracted and unable to concentrate.

Third, “symptoms become generalized.” That is, you initially have a conflict over just one thing or one person, and then it evolves into conflicts over multiple things or multiple people. For example, people with social anxiety disorder start out by being afraid of teachers, which then develops into a fear of all teachers, then a fear of classmates, and finally a fear of everyone.

Fourth, “have complete self-awareness”. This is one of the important criteria for distinguishing whether you have social phobia or a more serious psychological problem beyond the scope of neurosis. Self-awareness refers to whether you know that you are sick, have psychological problems, or have a mental disorder. People with schizophrenia have little insight. Nash, the protagonist of the movie "A Beautiful Mind", is a patient suffering from schizophrenia. He overcame schizophrenia through his own efforts and won the Nobel Prize. While studying for his doctorate, he created a virtual interpersonal relationship for himself, a roommate whose personality was completely different from his own. Then after he got married and was diagnosed with schizophrenia, he still believed that this roommate existed. This shows that he has no self-awareness and does not know what state he is in.