![]() When times got hard, she found herself turning to strangers for comfort and “to stave off the loneliness,” she told me. This form of connection changed her life. Today, Nic has a name for these types of conversations: “Greyhound Therapy.” As she uses it, the term literally refers to talking with your seatmate on a long-haul bus but can apply to talking with strangers anywhere-at a restaurant, at a bus stop, in a grocery store. Read: Why do we look down on lonely people? They were actually sources of comfort and belonging. She found that, contrary to what she’d been raised to believe, these strangers weren’t dangerous or scary. She was anxious about these encounters, wired for fear and expecting the worst, but they always went well. “Maybe I’m not gonna die if I randomly talk to them.” So she took more trips and connected with more people. “If people in Europe randomly talked to me, then maybe I’m not so bad,” she figured. At 17, Nic visited Europe for 10 days with her high-school classmates and noticed that people began starting conversations with her. As she grew older, she began to travel to seek new people out. Nic’s fear isn’t uncommon in a country where valid lessons about “stranger danger ” can cast all people you don’t know as threats to be feared, but she recognized it was unhealthy, so she took steps to engage with the world. (Nic asked to be referred to by only her first name to protect her privacy.) ![]() “My primitive brain was programmed to be afraid of everybody, because everybody’s evil and they’re gonna hurt you,” she told me. The combination left Nic fearful and isolated. She was raised by a volatile father and a mother who transferred much of the trauma she’d experienced onto her daughter. ![]() Nic spent most of her childhood avoiding people.
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