WELCOME TO PARANOIA -----

Paranoia is a tendency to see personal threats where none exist or to overreact to actual threats beyond the bounds that reason would dictate. In many cases paranoia is a self-fulfilling prophesy, because someone who thinks the world is already against them will often take preemptive actions which indeed alienate others and make their fear come true.

In an extreme case, we would think of someone as paranoid when they lock themselves in their homes, cover the windows with tin foil and hide under their bed trembling with the unrealistic fear that the CIA or alien invaders are coming to get them. More commonly, however, paranoia is expressed in a person who is outwardly sane but just plain nasty. In the course of our lives, each of us has come to know and profoundly dislike at least one truly paranoid character. In our childhood, there was the mean old lady down the street who would become furious and immediately call the police whenever our baseball happened to roll into her yard. It seemed to us that this woman did nothing all day but sit at her kitchen window waiting for an affront to happen. When it did, she was well prepared for battle and reacted with a ferocity far out of proportion to the actual offense.

To a lesser extent, paranoia afflicts all of us from time to time. Sometimes, we are hypersensitive to perceived slights and read into the acts of others a sinister and demeaning intent that simply isn't there. There are times when each of us has hidden under our bed to escape an imaginary foe or fortified ourselves for battle against enemies who were only in our minds. We may have lashed out at people we love or at total strangers on the assumption that we "have to get them they get us." Often, we find ourselves deeply embarrassed sometime later when we discover that the evil wolf whose shadow we attacked was little more than a startled rabbit who happened to approach us on our bad side.

Time may expose our most significant misjudgments. "I was paranoid," we admit. "I overreacted." We calm down and assess the damage. Sometimes it can be repaired, sometimes not. We recover as best we can and get on with our lives, vowing next time not to be quite so hot-headed.

That's not to say that our paranoia is over. It's still there, under the surface, in every one of us. Paranoia is not just expressed in angry outbursts; it can be quiet and invisible, a pervasive disease that eats away at our potential. The same skewed perceptions and flawed justifications that shape the enraged behavior of the lady down the street are also at work within each of us every day of our lives. In some form, irrational fears influence our every decision, especially our most important ones.

We like to think of our choice of career, romantic partner or current life circumstances as a thoughtful one based on logic, wisdom, luck and love. We like to see each life-altering decision as a movement toward some positive personal goal. We forget that what sometimes motivates us more strongly than logic or love is fear. Instead of some positive reward pulling us ahead, what causes many of our decisions is a stark terror of something else pushing us away.