This is pretty typical of people who’ve been criticized a lot as children, especially by relatives. It gives us a kind of ‘performance anxiety’ as soon as anyone watches us do anything.
Like, I share the reaction to being watched while I cook too, and that’s because I was always criticized while I cooked as a kid and teenager, and if my own mother is around while I cook , to this day, I get anxious and wish she would go away because I’m always anticipating criticism about how I do anything and everything in the kitchen.
When I was a kid, my father got so mad at me because of how I was passing the vacuum that he literally ripped it out of my hands and very aggressively swung it around while hissing at me :’‘No, not like that, like this! IN. STRAIGHT. LINES.’‘ And since I had always known that he has a volatile temper, this sort of thing was terrifying, because I had no idea if he would get even more aggressive…
Its a survival tactic to want to avoid being watched, because it triggers our instinctual fear of being seen or watched by predators in the wild that our ancestors learned the hard way. And our brains react to being watched by other people the same way it reacts to being watched by a dangerous animal.
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