are ‘paranoid.’ The word is easy to laugh off  as impossibly eccentric, evoking people who  

insist that they are being tailed by the secret  service or watched over by an alien species. But  

the reality is lot more normal-looking and  far less comedic-feeling. To be paranoid in  

the true sense is to suffer from a repeated  feeling that most people hate us, that most  

situations are extremely dangerous and that some  kind of catastrophe is likely to befall us soon. 

It may not be immediately obvious what connects  up - for example - our impression that a colleague  

is taking us for a fool, with our fear of being  talked about unkindly by our friends, with our  

impression that the waiter has deliberately  placed us at the worst table and our dread  

that we’re about to be caught up in a scandal. But our sense that the world is permanently and  

imminently conspiring to belittle, attack and  humiliate us is most likely the outcome of a  

very particular string of experiences of  belittlement, attack and humiliation that  

will have occurred at the hands of just one  or two people in our formative years - and  

yet that will have been carefully submerged  and overlooked. And this will have been done  

because we have implicitly preferred to fear the  world rather than acknowledge the reality of the  

torment we underwent at the hands of characters  - who might also be our mother or father - whom  

we would have liked so much to trust and to love. It’s unfortunate that our minds need to discharge  

their toxins somewhere and that if they have been  blocked from doing so in the appropriate location,  

they will seek to do so anywhere that feels  remotely relevant: the office or the restaurant,  

the party or the newspaper article. The hatred  and viciousness we fear from colleagues,  

friends or social media is only a proxy for  what we once received from sources close to  

home - and which we have lacked the support  required to return back to their senders. 

Understanding who has crushed and scarred  us constitutes a critical part of adult  

self-knowledge. It is also - we should recognise  - an insight we may be deeply reluctant to secure,  

opting to be forever terrified rather than  raise arguments against our treatment by  

care-givers whom we have chosen to believe  are innocent. It may one day feel as though  

far fewer people are actually laughing  at us and that there is far less risk of  

a scandal soon - once we understand that the  mockery and shaming we anticipate for tomorrow  

already unfolded in our heartrendingly  anguished and unexplored yesterdays.