I'm always afraid of and anxious around people I don't know. I use to have a fantasy of being at a meeting and all the other people knew one another and I was the "subject" of the meeting, they wanted my opinions, ideas, and point of view. One of the people would be my therapist, who, of course, knew me but whom I didn't know in the same way.

I would do a lot of logical reasoning and rearranging in my head; these people knew my theapist and I trusted my therapist and knew she wouldn't hurt me, therefore, these other people probably wouldn't hurt me. These people did not know me like my therapist knew me so they wouldn't know yet what could hurt me and they'd have no reason to hurt me or try to "trip me up" because they didn't know me or care about me yet! That kind of reasoning.

It works well in the real world sometimes, remembering the extent to which people know one? I, myself, don't generally hate people, if someone bothers or deliberately hurts me, I moved away from them; "once burned, twice shy" or whatever that saying is. That's another thing; I don't deliberately hurt other people or hate them so other people are probably similar and aren't likely to deliberately hurt or hate me? If a misunderstanding does occur and the other person moves away from me, usually I don't like/care about them enough that it is more than a "surface wound" to me and my pride.

I do have a good friend I've been friends with for 25 years and we had a problem 2-3 years ago that has never been fixed and got worse when we tried to patch over it without mentioning it. But our life circumstances have changed too; we don't live close together anymore or have the opportunity to see one another as often so we have/would have drifted apart anyway so it's not as painful to me as it was.

At work I sometimes use to think people were talking about me; I worked in the front office but was not very high on the totem pole with the owner/bosses and would be left out of some meetings, etc. Fortunately I value myself well enough so whatever "they" decided still had to go through what I wanted and was thinking :-) I was an "expert" on some fields they were not so if they came up with "hairbrained" ideas, I could see that and respect my judgment against theirs and would try to explain to them what was wrong with their decisions (they had made without me :-)

But often I have felt like "Maria" in the Sound of Music with everyone trying to "solve" me. But I also love the lyrics to Joni Mitchell's "Trouble Child":

So why does it come as such a shock
To know you really have no one
Only a river of changing faces
Looking for an ocean
They trickle through your leaky plans
Another dream over the dam
And you're lying in some room
Feeling like your right to be human
Is going over too
Well some are going to knock you
And some will try to clock you
You know it's really hard
To talk sense to you
Trouble child
Breaking like the waves at Malibu