House metaphor to explain behavior, limits and potential

In times of quarantine and social isolation because of the new coronavirus pandemic, a metaphor of agreement to explain behavior ...

Imagine that you can only move around inside your house, that you cannot go outside, ever. Your house has a balcony, three bedrooms, a backyard, two bathrooms, a living room, a TV, a corridor between them, a kitchen, reasonable in size, and a garage. All of this is where you can go. It is practically a house arrest. But, at least you have your own space. You have clear limits on how far you can move. But, there is a relative space for that. Others also have their homes or apartments ...

Now think of the house and the space within it as the limits and potentials of your behaviors. The limits of the house are equivalent to those of your comfort zone. The potential is as far as, circumscribed by these limits, you can reach, change or do within them. You cannot leave the house but you can choose where you will be staying in the morning or afternoon as well as what you will be doing. It is also worth mentioning that your house will grow in size, it will be renovated to a point where it will no longer happen.

Contextualized example to personality: shyness

A shy person, like me, tends to prefer family environments and a low density of people to be able to move. This is one of the limits of my personality. I know that my organism, especially my nervous system, tends to react badly, overload itself, in noisy places, and / or with little space, full of unknown people, especially if it is a type of people that I perceive hostility or difference regarding the my way of being. If I were just from the nerd tribe, maybe I wouldn't care so much about the density of people in the environments but more if most of them were nerds like me.

Shy people also often have a phobia of speaking to crowds as well as initiating trivial conversations with strangers. These are some of its limits contextualized to situations that we experience in our lives. Their reactions cannot be attributed solely to their environment, but also and especially to their intrinsic personality tendencies and memorized experiences.

 "When you leave your home", then, you are expected to experience discomfort reactions, and you may even run the risk of this being psychosomatized.

The behavioral pattern of shyness is repeated so much that there is no way to think of it as a mere attribute of the environment or how people react to you, but also how you respond. Shyness is an adaptive expression of escape from confrontations. It has its dose of logic. It cannot be defined as a pathology. Of course, its very intense expression is configured in a pathological picture, of imbalance, but more as a case of disorder than of illness, in accordance with my concepts for these terms.

We all have potentials and limits. Our potentials are not only our limits, how far we can go, but also what we can do "within them". For example, my way of dealing with my shyness or social phobia in the past 6 years. The fact that he accepted me as a homosexual at the beginning of my adult life helped me a lot to stop, even if weakly, trying

socialization with straight people, for having discovered one of the "tribes" with which I have more affinities, even if they are not significant, if I have always been an outsider. I could not have been able to go beyond my limited limit of sociability, but I managed to expand it in quality due to this awakening that I had about myself, failing to insist on following an artificial path, redirecting me to

one of the true ways where I can live more freely or naturally.

One question: where did my shyness come from?

If I draw on my oldest memories I can only conclude, even without being able to prove in the most scientifically possible way, that I am more averse to random human contact since early childhood, even though I remember, at that time, being less. Moving to another city when I was about 8 years old, a cold and variably hostile reception in the new location and the decline in my family's standard of living, which lasted for a long time, until recently, affected me significantly, helping to shape my strategies of existence (and resistance). My stuttering and my homosexuality also had an important impact so that I decided to exile myself as much as I could / I can from human coexistence, knowing that it is expressed by the predominance of frictions, conflicts and irrational hierarchies. I have used the tactic of self-conscious prey that recognizes potential predators and starts to establish strategies of social isolation and behavioral restraint, when the first is not possible. That was the most logical way and I also think that, rationally, to react or survive a world that has changed a lot and is less inviting to me.