In a couple of months from now I will be turning 18. I have a career goal of going to college and working as a psychologist, and for the past couple of years I have noticed something about me. When I meet someone new, I try and analyze him in terms of body language and their psychosynthesis and make an assumption of that person. **But**, I have noticed, I can ask deeper questions to complete strangers -or to friends of friends that I meet for the first time- more easily than my own close/best friends. I am all ears about your opinions on why this may be happening.
9 comments
You care about your close friends’ opinions of you but not strangers?
Because you know you won’t see the strangers again. No reason to hold back. The best conversations I’ve ever had was with people I knew would never meet again.
You’ll never see that stranger again, and so have less of a concern that you’ll say something that might damage their opinion/relationship.
I experience this too. May be an emotional intimacy issue, may be nothing
You have less to lose. If you upset a stranger, you lose nothing. If you upset a friend, you might lose a friend.
You have to be able to give and take in communication. You have to care about their feelings in the moment, and not rhetorically demand that they accept/believe whatever you’re saying. In short, you have to value their opinion, regardless of whether you believe it to reflect the truth or not.
This might seem difficult, but I think it’s self-evident, especially if you accept the fact that you are not the end all be all font of correct information.
The strangers should be your friends, and your friends should be strangers.
This comes up in r/solotravel sometimes and most agree that you tend to feel safe to be your authentic self around total strangers because there’s no downside. I’ve had some of the most intimate conversations with people I’ve met travelling and never even knew their last names, just first name and the country they’re from.
Could it be that you can be more open with strangers? What do you think your friends’ reactions would be if you tried similar conversations with them?
Because the chances of you ever seeing those people ever again is next to 0. So you have nothing to really lose by doing so. And why would you want to burden your friends with the thought that you are not okay.