Severe trauma makes you care a lot about what others think and here's why
I'll be using my personal experience as a list of examples. Be prepared for my life story. To start, my parents are still, to this day, abusive assholes. Any potential diagnosis either of them may have are irrelevant because literally anyone is capable of abuse, even neurotypicals. Of course, I was raised with the rhetoric that I was bad in every way and deserved any and all mistreatment they inflicted on me. And they worked really hard to slander me ever since I was a small child. In school, I exhibited behavioral issues due to my bad home life but my parents were able to convince just about every teacher I had that I was that way for no reason other than a desire to be disrespectful. Because of this, as early as elementary school, I was wrongfully punished instead of helped by these adults and a couple teachers I had even enabled my classmates to bully me. They said it was to "teach me a lesson." I learned very early on that even children are incredibly enthusiastic about mistreating someone when they're told they can.
My parents even did this with other family members, mainly the adults. As a teenager, I had frequent breakdowns due to their sadistic abuse and my parents would call other family members to tell them I was "acting up" for no reason and they'd hand me the phone to be lectured on how to "better respect" them. Both parents talked major shit about me to extended family constantly, so family gatherings often consisted of me being told I was the problem and I needed to act right. I was denied support for years because of this. The verbal, emotional, mental, and physical abuse was so much for me to handle at such a young age. The only family member who was on my side was my Aunt Becky (not her real name for privacy reasons) who I wasn't allowed to talk to until I became an adult. She told me all the heinous things my mother would say about me as far back as me being in diapers and how she'd tried to defend me. She said my mother would tell her to "shut the fuck up" if she tried to defend me at all.
In school, I settled for a shitty friend group because I just didn't fit in with most of my peers. By that point, my self esteem was already in the gutter so I didn't even feel worthy enough to interact with anyone else. Well, one of my so-called friends decided she wanted to spread rumors that I was bullying her. That I made her feel fat, ugly, and worthless. I know I didn't do this and supposed she was just making the decision to compare herself to me in her head. It didn't matter what the truth was, I still had people I didn't even know harassing and even physically harming me at school. Even teachers believed her and said I should "know how it feels." Needless to say, I have nothing to do with that bitch anymore. I became horribly cautious around others, tiptoeing around their sensitivities for my own self preservation. I now experience low empathy, as I was taught that good deeds are done to keep yourself safe instead of for the good of others.
In one workplace, I was reserved and to myself, only talking to a few coworkers I thought were cool. Apparently, this didn't sit well with the other employees and they somehow got the idea that I was stuck up and "popular in high school". (A common assumption about me when I became an adult) They decided I needed to be knocked down a peg and I was repeatedly harassed and assaulted once at work because of false assumptions. I stayed at that job for months because I was barely stable as it was, being thrown into the adult world with no self esteem or reason to live, and quitting meant taking a lower paying job that wouldn't pay my bills.
That's not all of it but I'll stop there. The only people who say "just don't care about what others think," are clearly lucky enough to have not experienced abuse or harassment due to others' opinions. I have curated multiple personas to blend in and avoid the hostility neurotypicals are capable of. The trauma responses are really debilitating because I always feel I'm in danger when I'm in a public space. And when I've opened up about my experiences, I was told I'm the problem and I needed to change somehow.
This is also why I hate the stigma around Cluster B personality disorders, especially NPD and ASPD. Because neurotypicals convince themselves that only "Psychos", "Narcissists," and "Sociopaths" are capable of abuse. I don't know if it's to perpetuate an illusion of safety amongst them or to tell themselves "I'm normal, I can't be abusive." It is my experience that neurotypicals are often the most heinous individuals I've ever met and have literally built a society that perpetuates and excuses abuse.
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