According to generally accepted canons, isolation is considered an unattractive character trait. Those with this quality find it difficult to establish social contacts, find friends difficult, and have difficulty studying and moving up the career ladder. Closed people are shunned, their opinions are not taken into account and they are given an inconspicuous, modest place on the fringes of society.
But how does isolation arise? For what reasons does it merge with a person’s character, subordinating his way of life? Psychologists distinguish three types of isolation: constant, situational and due to mental disorders.
Characteristic
Closedness has such signs as the inability to establish not only close relationships, but also contact with others in general. If someone pays attention and turns to such a person, it will cause him a lot of tension, anxiety and sometimes even fear. If these are innate character traits that symbolize closedness, then he does not know how to establish affection and be close to another person, receive his support and attention. Because there is a subconscious fear that his personality will be absorbed and destroyed, and he will cease to exist as separate and unique.
If he acquired it during his life, being subjected to a series of disappointments or betrayals, or becoming a participant in a traumatic situation, he will simply be afraid to open up to the world again. By avoiding relationships, he will avoid pain. Because there is an illusion that life becomes easier this way. But human psychology is such that he is a social being and simply needs intimacy and communication. I recommend reading the article about communication skills.
When communicating with introverts and schizoids, you will be able to notice that they rarely look you in the eyes, for fear of “colliding glances.” After all, this threatens that they will have to experience some feelings that, for various reasons, they do not want to feel. For example, out of inability to handle them, or out of unwillingness to feel them again. And sometimes, so that you don’t notice what they are currently going through.
When you try to have a sincere and heart-to-heart conversation, you risk running into a wall of intellectualization. After all, it really helps not to feel, as a result of which the conversation does not arouse interest and desire to continue it further. Inhibition is another sign that helps answer the question: “how to recognize a withdrawn person?” Yes, it’s inhibition, because the inner world is so captivating that it’s not always possible to switch quickly, and most often you don’t want to. In a company, he will be isolated, somewhere nearby, watching the others, as if “looking closely” at them.
How to start communicating correctly
Having dealt with common mistakes, you can move on to effective methods of overcoming shyness. They require work on yourself, but the result is worth it.
Do what you love
One of the main secrets of an open person, communication with whom is a pleasure, is his genuine interest in any activity. It's simple: an enthusiastic person straightens his back and shoulders in the literal and figurative sense, his eyes light up, and everyone around him feels this high spirits, which, by the way, is just as contagious as a bad one.
Immersed in a favorite activity, a person, even the most reserved one, stops thinking about how he looks, concentrating on trifles and being shy about people - the focus of his attention shifts to something else. In addition, do not forget that the strongest friendships and the most valuable communication are established between people engaged in a common cause. This includes military service, being in the same team, and even regular walks with children or pets.
Feign self-confidence
At first glance, this is very strange advice: how can you depict something that does not exist? However, psychologists recommend not giving up this model of behavior, but trying it on yourself, temporarily shifting the focus from “being” to “appearing.” Nobody talks about pretending, let it be an easy game that will only benefit you: you need to evaluate your posture, manner of communication and facial expressions.
As a rule, closed people are characterized by perfectionism, which should be directed from the negative channel of constant self-criticism towards positive changes. You can copy the behavior of confident, sociable and pleasant acquaintances. Characters from your favorite books or films will also work. The main thing is to maintain individuality without blind imitation, adding a little someone else’s confidence to it, or better yet, creatively reworking it. Gradually, self-confidence will become a habit, and then even become a character trait.
Smile and speak more slowly
With the exception of professional speakers, few people pay attention to such simple points as speaking pace and smiling. Meanwhile, they have a huge influence on the subconscious of their interlocutors.
To be heard
Rapid speech, firstly, is difficult to perceive, can be slurred and illegible, which means that the interlocutor will have to listen to understand it. Subconsciously, this will cause irritation in a person, because he spends double effort: first, to disassemble, then to comprehend and understand. Secondly, an accelerated pace of speech immediately reveals a person who is insecure and nervous, which also reduces interest in what he is saying.
In order to enjoy greater trust from others, speakers recommend practicing at home: trying different pitches and tonality of your voice, looking for a suitable tempo. You should start by reading newspapers or books, and then move on to impromptu situations. Anyone who, having practiced in calm situations, learns to hide his excitement and express his thoughts beautifully, will certainly expand his circle of acquaintances.
Show friendliness
A smile is not typical for reserved people, but this is the best way to win over your interlocutor. At the subconscious level, a smiling person is perceived as friendly and confident. In addition, smiling helps you relax and cope with inner anxiety.
People often have complexes because they don’t know how to smile. Most likely, this erroneous conclusion was made on the basis of photographs that do not convey the dynamics of the situation, but only one moment. But even if the smile really isn’t good enough, you can practice at home in front of the mirror, changing your facial expressions and gaze. It’s worth spending time on this exercise, because a pleasant smile is an important touch in the image of a confident person.
SHY, WITHDRAWN, INTROVERTS
Sociability is an important social skill, without which today it is difficult to imagine a successful career or a happy personal life. In order to overcome shyness, you need to constantly work on yourself, striving to see a range of new possibilities and emotions in communications.
Causes
- Remember when I told you that there are different types of temperament? If not, look here . So, a child is born with a certain type, usually phlegmatic or melancholic. He’s simply been much more interested in himself since childhood, his inner world is much more fascinating than his outer world, so there’s no need to sound the alarm and try to change it.
- Why does a person become withdrawn? Yes, because in adolescence I failed to cope with the task of development due to conflict situations or misunderstandings with peers. As a result, having experienced a lot of feelings and not finding support, I decided to become invisible so that everything would not happen again. Shame literally paralyzes you when trying to act casually in the company of strangers.
- If parents do not pay due attention and care in childhood, the child, not feeling supported, can become a deviant, or, on the contrary, withdraws into himself, since adults ignore his problems, he decides that others will not need him either. You can see what the word “deviant” means in this article.
- The negative experience of being born in an aggressive family, where every movement is devalued and punished. Whatever the child does, he doesn’t like it. Over time, every attempt to stand out and show up will be accompanied by guilt, shame, horror, fear and other feelings. This usually happens in families where one of the parents, more often the father, has an alcohol addiction and becomes violent every time he drinks.
- As I said at the beginning, a person often becomes closed due to a traumatic situation. For example, if your husband cheated or your girlfriend betrayed you, your psyche may not be able to withstand the stress, and in order to preserve your personality, create such a defense mechanism by directing attention deep into yourself. Such a person may well deceive himself, believing that there is simply no need for others anymore. In fact, this speaks of pain in him, which is covered with indifference and pomposity. It is much easier to devalue the importance of those around you than to admit that you have begun to avoid them out of fear and a sense of vulnerability.
Situational isolation
Most often, withdrawal is a reaction to certain situations that a person encounters in his daily life. In such cases, it can be very useful, because it serves to protect the psyche from unnecessary stress. Sometimes a person deliberately closes himself off in conditions that are uncomfortable for him and thus protects himself from negative emotions. Unfamiliar companies with an alien, unusual atmosphere, meeting unpleasant people or being involved in an incomprehensible conversation of a narrow professional focus are the most common causes of temporary awkwardness.
Fatigue, bad mood, depression also become common reasons that encourage people to withdraw into themselves. In these cases, having isolated himself from the outside world, a person allows him to relax and rest his nervous system, which, in peace and quiet, can more easily cope with the troubles that have befallen it.
People whose professional characteristics are associated with continuous communication with people are often susceptible to situational isolation: teachers, salespeople, social workers, journalists. The nervous tension they experience from their work leads to a conscious desire for solitude. Also, temporary isolation is characteristic of people who are completely focused on the task they are doing at the moment. Immersed in the work process, they do not notice anything around them.
Recommendations
1.Do not insist
If there is a loved one in your environment who has such a closed character due to their temperament type, do not put pressure on him. Don’t create unnecessary stress by forcing you to go to a noisy company, trying to introduce someone, etc. With these actions, which look violent to him, you will only increase resistance and the desire to quickly hide even deeper so as not to bother him.
2. Don't hold back your emotions
Over time, this will not only lead to various diseases, but will also complicate communication with others. Learn to pause and notice why you don't like someone or why you're angry at them and don't want to cross paths.
Awareness of the root cause will help in the future to free yourself from accumulated negativity and establish contact, and, importantly, the perception of other people. Have you noticed that, for example, when you felt lonely, you envied your happy colleague, and didn’t understand why she annoyed you so much?
3.Give yourself a chance
How to stop being withdrawn after the betrayal of a loved one? Yes, just give yourself a chance to live a full life, sometimes it is important to be able to let go of grievances and disappointments, although they are painful, they are useful because they give you the opportunity to reevaluate your life, realize yourself, your resources and limitations. And it is very important to take a step towards development, no matter how difficult it may be, but feeling even negative is much better than insensitivity.
Believe me, in insensitivity you deprive yourself of joy, happiness, pleasure... And this over time will lead to deep depression, which often ends in suicide. But how to deal with depression, look here.
4.Comfort zone
If you feel that you are not as sociable as before, try to get out of your comfort zone, and still force yourself to go to groups, to parties, where there will be a lot of overlap. Over time, your tension will begin to ease with each acquaintance, because everything we do turns into a skill. And in order to find out how to discover the talent of a sociable personality, I recommend reading this article.
5.Self-esteem
And don’t forget to work on your self-esteem, because lack of confidence in yourself and your strengths often prevents you from taking a risk and taking the first step by meeting the girl you like or talking to your boss about a promotion. Having learned to accept yourself for who you are, having initially gotten to know yourself, being aware of your actions, reactions and character traits, it will be much easier for you to defend your interests, communicate freely and enjoy it.
Five obviously losing tactics
On the way to sociability and self-confidence, you can make typical mistakes by following the advice of “well-wishers.” So, what you definitely shouldn’t do in the fight for the attention of others:
Throwing yourself headfirst into the pool
Many practitioners advise immediately going to great lengths: overcoming yourself every day, making new acquaintances at every step, enrolling in public speaking courses and paying compliments to passers-by... In fact, this advice is more likely to give the opposite result, if it does not lead to neurosis. Sociability is a skill like any other: before creating culinary masterpieces, you need to start with the simplest dishes. And before you become the life of the party, you need to become interesting to at least two or three friends.
Trying to please everyone
This advice is also deliberately aimed at losing: people consider those who are too keenly interested in everyone around them to be insincere or even upstarts. You need to calmly accept the fact that it is impossible to please everyone, and heroes that everyone around is delighted with are only found in not very good TV series.
This also includes another “bad advice” that is so often given to shy people: compliment everyone indiscriminately, especially the opposite sex. It is worth noting that this technique will most likely work in one out of ten cases: the ability to give an appropriate compliment is not an easy one. Impromptu, as you know, must be carefully prepared, and memorized cliches only cause irritation and a desire to distance oneself from the interlocutor.
Focus on shortcomings
One of the reasons for isolation is the habit of not only seeing one’s shortcomings, but also exaggerating them. Meanwhile, reflection is good only as a starting point for working on mistakes. Whereas endless self-examination and self-flagellation not only harm self-esteem, but also prevent you from seeing the strengths in yourself and others.
Don't feel the context
Everyone has troubles or a bad mood. It will not be possible to communicate with a person on such days: at best, he will respond sluggishly or remain silent, at worst, he will bark or be rude. Understanding the mood of your interlocutor is a very useful skill that will help both at work and in your personal life.
By paying attention to facial expressions, gaze, gestures, we can draw a conclusion about a person’s mental balance. Having learned to feel the mood of your interlocutor, you need to complicate your task and study a group of people: what topics are discussed in it, what jokes are considered appropriate, what is the accepted distance in a conversation.
This is extremely important now, when people communicate in messengers not only among themselves, but also in general chats: colleagues, parents of a class or kindergarten group. Feeling the mood of such a community and the context of its discussions, you can make many pleasant acquaintances or, on the contrary, become persona non grata.
Don't learn small talk
The relaxed manner of communication has played a cruel joke on many: it is not so often that you meet interesting interlocutors, conversations with whom do not boil down to ordinary chatter. Against this background, even rare but appropriate comments from a not very sociable person are well remembered. But the art of good conversation, like any other, needs to be learned.
The main rule of small talk is the desire to please the interlocutor and demonstrate your sincere interest. Practicing such a conversation is not always easy, especially for shy people, but by practicing this skill over and over again, you can make it a habit and achieve great success in communication.
Speakers recommend choosing general topics for conversation: weather, cooking, the intricacies of the profession, sports or cinema. Religious and political topics, as well as health problems, should never be discussed with anyone other than loved ones. In addition, small talk does not involve discussing gossip and rumors.
How is prosopagnosia diagnosed?
If you notice signs of prosopagnosia in yourself or your child, you should consult a doctor. Adults - see a therapist, children - see a pediatrician. The specialist will issue a referral to a neurologist Face Blindness (Prosopagnosia): only he can make an accurate diagnosis. First, the doctor will collect complaints from the parents or the patient himself, then conduct examinations.
Your doctor may suggest taking the Benton Visual Retention Test Benton Visual Retention Test. Its essence lies in the fact that a person looks at a card with an abstract figure for 10 seconds. Then he tries to draw what he saw from memory.
There are several more ways Prosopagnosia: face blindness after brain injury to determine prosopagnosia. For example, a specialist may show the patient images of famous people and ask them to tell who they are. Some people are asked to describe the similarities and differences between two photographs of unfamiliar faces.
Behavioral cues
“Withdrawal” does not happen suddenly.
This is the result of a long and unnoticed internal conflict. The child begins to behave differently, signals arise that need to be paid attention to: 1) the teenager comes to his parents less often “just to talk”; 2) interest in hobbies disappears, the teenager may stop participating in a club or section; 3) communication with friends is reduced to a minimum; 4) lack of interest in events in the family; 5) aggressiveness may increase, or the child no longer shows emotions to parents; 6) school performance deteriorates and behavioral difficulties begin.
The sooner the signals are noticed, the easier it is to correct the situation and prevent self-isolation from getting worse.
How to get feedback
Staying in touch with your children without turning into an intrusive adult is an art. First, you need to understand that it is absolutely not necessary to extract all the information from him at any cost and try to delve into all the vicissitudes of a teenager’s life.
Start conversations with your child with your stories and experiences. Contact him for advice, share situational stories and talk about the decisions you made, how you came to them and what they ultimately led to .
This way, you are more likely to receive feedback, and also show by your own example what words can be used to talk about feelings and experiences. In addition, parents who build communication in this way make it clear to the student that his opinion is important to them, that it is interesting to be with him, that they value and respect his advice and listen to criticism.
Such gentle communication will not frighten an already very wary teenager, unlike dialogues where parents endlessly ask their child questions. This interaction reminds students of an interrogation from which they want to hide.
By the way, one of the most common complaints from mothers and fathers of teenagers is that their child willingly communicates and shares experiences, for example, with a teacher or the parents of his friends.
This behavior is easy to explain. A teenager is attracted by the fact that an “outsider” adult does not condemn his actions (appearance, judgments) and is more accepting of his words . While parents can immediately take everything to heart and create drama out of nowhere.
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An “outsider” adult is more restrained, delicate, does not judge and does not require frankness. That is, he doesn’t do what our children don’t like. Unfortunately, this teenage quality of trusting strangers more than family is often taken advantage of. Therefore, in order not to push your child towards dishonest adults, you need to try to become an understanding friend to your child at this time, and not an eternally condemning and critical parent.
Example steps
It is so simple. Here's what you need to do:
- Create a visual feature that differentiates you from other people.
- Show it in a specific sequence.
- Remove this feature if you do not want to be recognized.
At this time, clothing is the easiest means by which you can create a distinctive characteristic of the lure. You can also use hairstyle for this purpose.
What is prosopagnosia
Prosopagnosia is a cognitive disorder. What Does a Person With Face Blindness See?
, in which a person cannot distinguish faces. The disorder is sometimes called facial agnosia or face blindness. The severity of the condition varies. Some recognize recent acquaintances, others recognize close relatives. Some people cannot even recognize their own face in the mirror or in photographs. Also, due to the violation, it can be difficult to determine the gender, age and mood of the interlocutor. The condition is not associated with Prosopagnosia: face blindness after brain injury problems with memory or mental impairment. Moreover, people with prosopagnosia most often have normal acuity. What Does a Person With Face Blindness See? vision. They distinguish shades and see three-dimensional pictures. They understand where the nose, mouth and eyes are, but cannot “process” this information correctly.
Additional Helpful Tips
This particular method of becoming invisible only works if you're very good at training others to recognize you based on manageable attributes, and doesn't work for many other people (for example, some people always recognize others by their faces, gait, or voice - things that aren't obvious such as hair and clothing). Additionally, if your intended decoy resembles the characteristics of many other people you know, it will be largely useless, since people only rely on what makes you look different when they develop their internal methods of recognizing you.
If you find yourself in a situation where you need to immediately hide from other people, but the typical method does not work for you, then there are also other ways to do this:
- Take off or put on an atypical jacket/sunglasses.
- Wear a hat that covers your hair and head.
- Put a couple of stones in your shoes to change your gait.
- Don't wear makeup like you're trying to hide.
- Stick to large crowds.
- Avoid eye contact.
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What is prosopagnosia?
There are two types of Prosopagnosia (face blindness) disorder. They have different causes.
Acquired prosopagnosia
Appears if the fusiform gyrus in the right hemisphere is damaged Prosopagnosia: face blindness after brain injury, which is responsible for recognizing faces. This can happen due to injury or stroke.
Damage limited to one area is rare. Therefore, most often people with an acquired disorder also have other cognitive impairments.
Congenital prosopagnosia
There are only 2% of Prosopagnosia: face blindness after brain injury people in the world with this form of the disorder. It is not known exactly where it comes from, but scientists suggest that the main reason is heredity. There are families where several people suffer from the disorder at once. But the specific gene that is responsible for the appearance of the deviation has not yet been discovered.
Why is prosopagnosia dangerous?
This disorder seriously ruins Prosopagnosia (face blindness) life. Many people find it difficult to navigate the terrain: they simply cannot distinguish different places and landmarks from each other.
A person with prosopagnosia has difficulty following the plot of a film or television program. He sees no difference between the faces of several characters or speakers.
Some people worry that their personality makes them seem rude or uninterested to others. All of this can ultimately lead to anxiety disorder or depression.
A storm of emotions, or silence - a screen from the outside world
If a child does not respond the first time to your request to clean the house or carry out any other instructions or assignments, and also reacts irritably to any attempts to interfere in his world, do not be offended, angry, swear and think that your son or daughter has become indifferent .
At this time, the teenager is literally experiencing a storm of emotions. It is already difficult for them to cope with their emotions, because their lives change dramatically along with their body and perception of what is happening around them. Their childhood views and beliefs are crumbling before their eyes, making way for new ones.
In addition, adolescence is the period when a child first encounters the concept of “falling in love” and the exciting feelings that correspond to it.
All this, you see, is a good enough reason to want to be alone with yourself and your favorite music, which, among other things, is “armor” from the outside world and a screen from your parents. Unconsciously or consciously moving away from the people closest to him, the teenager tries to get closer to understanding his own “I”.
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At this age, the student begins to try a lot, experiences a lot of inconvenience, delight and uncertainty. But this “flight” is interrupted when mom and dad begin to “teach how to live.” Gradually he comes to the conclusion that silence in most cases is the best way to isolate himself from relationships with others.
Parents need to remember themselves at this age and treat such an intimate process as growing up with understanding. Of course, such behavior should not be allowed to take its course, but there is no need to deprive the child of the opportunity to form his own opinion, express and defend it . Give him the opportunity to think about his own decisions and live through his mistakes.
This is terribly difficult and will require incredible courage and courage from parents. That's why we noted at the beginning that adolescence is a transitional time for all family members.
