Welcome every body to embellish my You can not control it on purpose untill other affairs take the place of your mind. When it becomes illness,it becomes terrible devil.
It is some like obsession. The more you want to control yourself,the more you can't hold.
At first we may be sensitive to somebody's eye.Subsequently may to the opposite sex,to the same sex,to someone's body,even to other things such as tree,cup,anyhow every thing you touched.
Hi gaogwl,
You write: 'It is some obsession. The more you want to control yourself, the more you can't (hold)' and - 'At first we may be sensitive to somebody's eye'
...I think that this is accurate. What do you notice when your mind is not preoccupied with staring and offending people with your stares-?
...Do you notice that you do it less often and don't get people thinking you are strange-? Because I think that you started off very sensitive to little things and small gestures, emotions etc of people around you, and over time you have become even more hypervigilant (this means that you worry, to the point of obsessing, about not doing something that is socially unnacceptable).
I have read that in Asian culture, what is considered an acceptable time to stare at others is different from Western cultures. And also, people who struggle making 'correct' contact, specifically those who look away and whose eyes avoid meeting those of others, are interpreted as untrustworthy. THis is probably why people thought that you were a theif.
You've identified that the more you worry and focus on eye contact, the more trouble you experience with this and the more people react badly towards you and think you strange/untrustworthy.
So, firstly, you need to learn how to stop worrying so much about this.
Bur before you can change the underlying fears behind your trouble with making calm eye contact with others, you probably need to simply learn how to calm your self and stop worrying. I recommend learning meditation. This can help you to simply stop the cycle of worrying continuosly and obsessing -by just learning how to be calm when you want to, you can already in part achieve better eye contact.
Why do I say that -notice what you wrote: the more you try to stop doing the wrong thing, the more you do it. This is because you focus too much on it. Eye contact is easy when people do not focus on making it. You focus so much on it and on doing it properly that it becomes more and more uncomfortable and strained for you.
So you need to learn strategies in simply calming yourself. Meditation is one way of just making yourself calm when you want to and of letting go of repeated thoughts that become obsessive in nature because you cannot detach from them. ...In meditation, the strategy of 'stopping' thoughts is actually by letting them 'run through you' and simply focussing back on being calm and NOT THINKING.
In your state of anxiety, your thoughts are moving rapidly through your mind. BEfore you can deal with changing these thoughts, you need to just drop them. It is like you are trying to solve a puzzle but you are stuck doing the same thing. When you study for an exam, if you find your mind hits a brick wall, the smart thing to do is stop studying and go for a walk or do something completely different that doesn'y involve thinking.
Do this first.
THen after this, when your mind is calmer, you can look into what may be causing you to obsess over making eye contact.
I suspect that you are highly sensitive to small details of others behaviour and are more easily prone to becoming preoccupied with details and to losing your sense of perspective and calm.
The catch-22 of being attentive to details is that the great focus that this goes with, also brings with it problems with having perspective and seeing past these small details.
I also think that on top of this high sensitivity to and focus on details, because you then lose your perspective more easily as a result of this, on top of this is a sense of shame. This is part of the dis-ease in making eye contact. You believe your self to be odd because you have some discomfort making eye contact and in turn this makes you even more uncomfortable making eye contact and makes you feel more ashamed... and you're stuck in a loop.
So for now, find ways to simply calm your emotions and slow down your thoughts. When you have successfully done this and feel calm, you'll find that you experience your trouble less. Then you can look into what thoughts are behind your fear of making eye contact (really it is of making a mistake with your eye contact) and address them. For now, cut the cycle of worrying. Think like this: If you were studying for an exam but could not understand a maths equation; you'd stop trying to understand it and give your mind a break. Let it relax by doing something that doesn't involve thinking (like meditation) and when you go back to trying to understand the equation, your mind will be calm and will find it much easier to solve.
