(July 29, 2018 at 3:50 pm)Aroura Wrote: I think that sometimes, people find that I am overly sensitive to criticism. And it's completely true, I can't deny it. But it wasn't always true. I used to be good at taking criticism in my job and even personal life.
(July 29, 2018 at 3:50 pm)Aroura Wrote: I still feel the need to socialize, which is one reason I still come to AF. But I feel I am growing worse at human interactions. My circle of RL friends has shrunk to 0, and I can hardly look at anything in the digital world without getting upset.
I thought I was ready to come back and interact again. But now I'm not sure. Has anyone else dealt this this sort of thing?
Are you finding that you are stuck in your apartment all day in Germany? My husband had trouble learning German left to his own devices and ended up stuck in the apartment all day wasting away and losing all motivation to get out and make a life for himself. It's a Catch 22 because you need to get out and socialise to learn the language, but you need the language to be able to socialise. It's difficult but what you need to do (and I couldn't) is be willing to just talk without caring about how bad your German is.
This actually led to problems in our marriage because I'd come back tired from work and walk into this wall of passive aggression. My husband would be overly sensitive about something to the point where I just wanted to spend the rest of the evening away from him. Except there was nowhere else to go so I hid away in the bedroom getting bored and wishing that I could relax in the evening after a tiring day. Maybe I had used a tone of voice once a week earlier that he had perceived as being too sharp, and being home all day with nothing to focus on it would be blown out of all proportion in his mind and he felt that he had been criticised when I honestly had not intended to communicate that.
The problem is that the brain normalises things. It habituates. So if nothing else is happening in your life then small things become big things. Conversely if you are experiencing a period of real tragedy then you just aren't going to care about something trivial.
It took about a year after moving back to Scotland to turn him around and force him outside again. First by sending him off to do charity work when he couldn't find work. I tried to get him out doing volunteer work when we lived in Germany but it was a bureaucratic nightmare, as usual, having to register to be eligible for to do it.
Even if you are working at home then not meeting people can destroy your social confidence, and with it your self esteem making you more sensitive to criticism.
Before I moved to Germany I was working at home for about 2 1/2 years and going to a meeting every second Friday. My social confidence has never been that high anyway but it plummeted after being at home by myself for too long.
We didn't know about the scheme at the Volkschule when we moved to Germany where integration courses are really cheap. When we first moved there I paid for him to go to an ordinary commercial language school for a month and he is still friends with one of the women he met there. If we were going to do it again first thing I would do is send him to the Volkschule, and also get cable television so we could watch German TV and immerse ourselves in the language. And make sure to get him out socialising with other expats so he doesn't feel alone. There are groups of expat spouses who meet up. I think the one I saw advertised on toytown called themselves accidental housefraus or something.
