I can handle myself socially, and have been told I’m very gregarious and easy to be around and talk to. I just always think about the absolute worst case and long chains of events that might happen from my input. Combative or argumentative situations are the worst, especially in lower trust situations.
In a way, it boils down to “not feeling confident about words I say”, but the problem is I seem to overvalue bad outcomes, or at least think about them deeply rather than assume the very likely path will happen. Some of it is lack of a quick-witted theory of mind mapped to others (asd, add, who knows) and some is past trauma where many people I knew growing up did a lot of hurtful things. The weights on how must one feels they can trust the average person are very slow to change - and the what-ifs seem to come on nearly automatically.
Coming from childhood trauma, I empathize and agree that it can be frustratingly hard to control the feelings and anxiety caused by it even decades after the fact.
I also have had problems with being too trusting in the past and lately I've been having social anxiety I thought I'd solved return because I've been trying to make conscious changes to my social behavior and it leaves me feeling lost sometimes when I have to ignore my instinctual response and then can't think of anything else to say.
It may comfort you to know that you aren't alone in feeling you need to reevaluate how much you trust those around you.
Social research in the last 3 decades has revealed that, in America, and thus probably other modernized countries, as late as the 80's, people when asked if they could trust most other people generally said that they felt they could. This is not the case anymore. Now, the average person will proclaim that most people are not not trustworthy. People are reporting less friends than ever. I personally have a quite small group of friends, after I carved out most of them after having 4-6k stolen from me in the last couple years from various people I once would consider friends.
Isolation and mistrust have been bred into our society in the last quarter-century, and it has had disastrous implications on our ability to open up to others. We are starting to feel the effects of this as, on a global scale, the isolation people are experiencing causes them to lose empathy and adopt zealous and hyperjudgemental attitudes.
Why has this been happening? What's the motivation? Well that's the homework assignment. ;)
In a way, it boils down to “not feeling confident about words I say”, but the problem is I seem to overvalue bad outcomes, or at least think about them deeply rather than assume the very likely path will happen. Some of it is lack of a quick-witted theory of mind mapped to others (asd, add, who knows) and some is past trauma where many people I knew growing up did a lot of hurtful things. The weights on how must one feels they can trust the average person are very slow to change - and the what-ifs seem to come on nearly automatically.