Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.
Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.
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Notes -
Needing liquid courage to reveal anything about yourself is no way to live.
I'm pretty sure that exposure therapy is not the best way to go either, because you'll be exposing yourself in different ways than the exact nature at the core of your issue.
You need to get at the root of it. It's usually something unresolved, unspoken. It may be totally hidden from your conscious life and yet it controls your internal and external behavior. The influences that you can't even see are the most powerful ones.
Like what, some [happening] I've never been able to get over with? Can't really conceptualize it, I've been this way most of my life, in fact it used to be even worse, in high school I was occasionally gently taken aside to ask if I was abused at home due to how I looked/behaved. (To be clear, I wasn't.)
I've seen your mentions of meditation downthread but, with all due respect, this doesn't seem to me like a problem caused by a lack of introspection.
Might be worth talking to a therapist. Therapists (psychologists) can be hit or miss depending on the issue, personality matches and their competence, but I think it might have some value here. The reason for this is that you need someone competent with the ability to locate and point out your blindspot and help find the root cause.
What I'm not sure about is that I think a lot of personality traits (even extreme ones) can just be temperament related (eg your genetic personality predisposition) and they're hard to track. Coping mechanisms might be different if you can't resolve the 'root cause' because its an intrinsic part of you.
For context, I talked to a therapist once that thought that some of my traits were as a result of something that happened to me when I was 'pre-verbal' (eg an infant with no conscious memory). I've still got no idea if they were onto something, but I've gotten a hold of most of my issues as I've worked on them over time.
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Doesn't have to be a discrete happening, could also be a life situtation, a kind of 'this is my life now' at some point in your upbringing. Maybe you picked up on secretiveness and being overly private from others, or maybe you just used your own intelligence to figure that it was probably a good idea. Genetics may play a part too.
Introspection is necessary for healing, because only looking and acting differently outwards will in many cases be an adjacent effect at best and orthogonal at worst. I didn't say that the lack of introspection was what caused the secretiveness issue.
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