I have many patients who tell me that they desperately want to be with people when they are alone, but when they are with people, they want to get away from them. We are social creatures, and the pandemic deeply disrupted our natural social abilities, leaving many people feeling painfully lonely.
Their situation is made much worse by their lack of confidence in their own social skills, and their inability to accept social interactions in all their messy, confusing, and chaotic glory.
Making this far worse is a single maladaptive coping mechanism: alcohol.
