Candice Cook
Sep 6, 2018 · 2 min read

My best friend has the same problem. She will start a job and be thrilled about it, it is the best job ever…etc, but as soon as something happens…like maybe someone questions her about something she is doing out of genuine interest or offers unsolicited advice just trying to be helpful and for whatever reason(typically their choice of words, tone of voice or facial expressions based on my personal observations and her description of the events afterward) she perceives that action as them passing judgment on her performance. Then, she starts to doubt her ability and convinces herself that she must not be performing well enough so she tries harder and harder to do a better job, but now she isn’t able to improve her performance because she isn’t able to focus on her work since she is overthinking everything from what she’s doing to what other people are thinking about what she’s doing. This continues to spiral until she’s no longer performing well at all and everyone IS starting to notice her erratic behavior which just reinforces the false conclusions she’s already drawn about the situation. By now, she is struggling tremendously to maintain and every effort anyone makes to try and help is viewed as a negative event or insult. She can’t get these events out of her head and it is all she thinks or talks about. She starts being rude and unfriendly to everyone then accusing them of disliking her for no reason and asking to work with someone else. This goes on until she starts to become consumed with it to the point where she’s convinced herself that every person that glances her direction or happens to be talking or joking with a friend as she walks by is judging her or talking about/laughing at her. During this stage she’s so depressed, distraught, and completely miserable…cue the self sabotage and she starts lashing out, acting strange and being late/missing work so often until she’s gotten to the edge of termination which sends her over the edge and she has a breakdown. It’s always awful and I feel terrible for her and worse because there is little I can do to help her until it runs its course. Thankfully, after a few days it gets better, but the damage she does until then is pretty difficult to tolerate let alone undo afterward. I can’t imagine what it does to her internally to live that loop. I am happy to say that she’s finally heading down a better road since her diagnosis though and hopefully she’ll stick with it. I think the validation of her reality and realization that all of it was beyond her control instead of her just being a failure at life made a huge difference.