Anxiety Crisis: Family and Friends Visiting

A cousin and an old friend of mine came over to stay with me for a period of time. My cousin is starting a new business in the city and ask me if he could stay for a period of time (couple of months maybe), and so my friend, she comes from another country and decided to come over to "start a new life", that is when we think we can run away from ourselves, I mean, some times we think we can go some where else and things will change, like Confucious said: "No matter where you go, you'll still be there".

I have been living alone for quite a period of time in my life now, I am used to it, and I enjoy it, so having people at my house now has created some type of an anxiety crisis. Most of all it has to do with my friend, she came over in some type of a crisis too, the difference is that I am many steps away from her: I have my own place, I have a job, I take care of myself, I exercise, I have a healthy lifestyle, I am in therapy every week, I have projects, I have a life...

My friend is just going to start her own process, I wanted to help her because in a way I feel she did it with me when I needed it, so now is the time for me to try to help her. But this has created a crisis in me, she has been here with me for a few days now and she just gets on my nerves. I am offering a free place to stay, free meals, and the basic things you need in life, but she doesn’t show any sign of doing anything for her life, she has to start to look for a job, that is the most important thing right now, but I don’t see her doing it, or at least to start preparing herself for the process, she has to start looking at newspapers, classifieds, asking questions about it, etc. But all she does is watch TV and chat on the Internet.

That has me very anxious, I just don’t know how to handle the situation, even though I try to understand her crisis and what she is going through right now.

So I am trying to be patient and calm myself down, wait for a few more days and see if she has a positive reaction and starts doing what she has to do, else I am not going to stand for this anymore, I will sit down with her and talk about the situation with her and how it is affecting my own life.

Difficulty making friends all my life

I have been asking myself about the difficulty I have making friends, has been like that all my life? Or is it just in the last couple of years when it really has become more conscious.

I mean before I didn't really realize the complexity of it, I was just living my life, was most of the time with my family, had occasional friends (never had any lasting relationships), people came and went out of my life.

I think that one of the problems with social anxiety is that one is over conscious of things that happen around, I am always thinking too much over things like if somebody looked at me, why did this person looked? Is this person laughing about me? Is this person talking about me? And on and on and on, my mind goes into creating a whole “movie” with my thoughts, and then I start to feel really anxious.

I am always thinking people wants to hurt me, or that people is talking bad about me, or that they are planning things to upset me, that is why I am scared of getting close to people. It has been like that most of my life, just that it was not as conscious as it is now.

How to stop my exaggerated thoughts about others wanting to hurt me? Why does my mind goes into those thoughts?