How do I stop being so afraid of people?

People take practice.

Jump in, observe what happens. Don’t worry about what happens, just observe it. Good or bad, don’t let anyone go quickly. See things out to their ends. Often people who seem bad can surprise you and be amazing once you learn the method to their madness. Sometimes the opposite is true.

Welcome to Fluther. I hope you can find some useful help

You have to take people at face value and then spend time with them and get to know them. With some people that happens fairly fast, with others it takes a bit longer.

My experience is that there are many great people out there with a few bad apples thrown in. Thankfully, the bad apples reveal themselves pretty fast.

Start slow but always work out of your comfort zone. Fairly soon you should be able to see that people are ok. You won’t get along with everyone nor like everyone but there will be people you are drawn to.

If you are having problems starting up conversations then do some work prior to going out. Think of questions you can ask people to get them talking. Talking about the weather, surprisingly, is often a good opener. If you pay attention you can find something the other person says that will lead to another question and more conversations.

Fear sucks. I’ve been there and done that. Once you gain some experience talking to people it’ll start reinforcing the fact that people generally are decent. Then you’ll start making friends. Then you are off and running.

Your guard should be down my default. You only raise your shields when you run into the Klingons. It takes too much energy to leave them up all the time, and most people aren’t out to get you anyway.

I often feel intimidated by people I don’t know, too, at least in real life. It’s an irrational fear to me. Or an irrational nervousness, anyway.
I find the Internet makes a great set of training wheels for social interaction. You can take your time to find the right words, you don’t have to worry about mumbling, and if you do run into a jerk, there’s nothing they can really do to you anyway, as long as you keep your private information to yourself. It’s nice and safe that way.
It’s also a good place to learn to distinguish between reasonable people whose opinions you value, and abusive dolts who can go take a hike.

I just dove into the cesspool, climbed out, discovered I could clean myself off. If there’s any permanent negative effects, I’m not aware of them. I think problems only stick when you get stuck. . . Or something like that. Just keep moving, you probably wont get hit with anything too hard. And if you do, even if something really harms you, it probably wont ruin you. Even horrible wounds can end up making someone genuinely stronger.

You sound a little agoraphobic possibly.

What dangers are you worried about? Why do you have such a problem trusting people? What happened?

Refuse to be ashamed of anything. That’s how you do it. I’m the spokesperson for a radical, controversial organization and I’m constantly in the media. The corporate media hate me, hate our organization, and hate what we do. They use every opportunity to make me look insane, stupid, ignorant, violent, criminal, or simply a liar. They once ran a front-page story accusing me of being an extortionist — without even bothering to interview me. They eventually ran a “correction” and allowed us to write our own op-ed article in exchange for not suing them… but the original story went out on the wire and ran internationally, while their correction and our op-ed story ran locally. If I allowed myself to be intimidated by stuff like this, there’s no way I could do what I do.

The secret is to never be ashamed of anything. Put your hands on your hips, puff up your chest, and defy the entire world. I get people screaming insults at me from cars as they drive by on a fairly regular basis because I’m extremely easy to spot, but I just smile and take it as flattery that they feel so threatened by my effectiveness that they not only revile me, but lack the courage to do anything but shout abuse while protected by speed, distance, and two tonnes of steel.

If you want to take on the world, you need a certain measure of arrogance. This is tough, since our entire culture will try very hard to hammer down the tallest nail, and everyone will hate you for thinking you’re better than them. The solution is to be better than them by defying their resentment.

“You have enemies? Good. That means you’ve stood up for something, sometime in your life.” — Winston Churchill

just go slow and easy. don’t let your guard down ever. Listen more than you speak.

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Just be picky about who you associate with, and be insincere with the rest. You’re right that not everyone is good, but you are, right? So there must be others. I’m really picky with people, but I hang in there, be myself as much as possible. You are probably just really sensitive and that’s why people scare you. I’ve learned to care much less about what people think and focus more on being a good, decent person, because if your that, who cares what people think. Trust your gut with people.