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Why We Should Talk to Strangers More - The Atlantic

theatlantic.com · 2,371 words · saved by 1 readers

So many of us have been raised to see strangers as dangerous and scary. What would happen if we instead saw them as potential sources of comfort and belonging?

Nic spent most of her childhood avoiding people. She was raised by a volatile father and a mother who transferred much of the trauma she’d experienced onto her daughter. The combination left Nic fearful and isolated. “My primitive brain was programmed to be afraid of everybody, because everybody’s evil and they’re gonna hurt you, ” she told me. (Nic asked to be referred to by only her first name to protect her privacy.) 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 unheal

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