Just a pointer: you might want to read the end of de Beauvoir's Second Sex, which I remember seeing mentioned here recently. There's a brilliant chapter on "Character"  in  which she discusses a very similar phenomenon: the way that French women of her time, though of course also many people in ours, live in a sort of magical world in which cause and effect are dramatically skewed.  Rather than feeling that they have any real agency in the world, these women give tremendous importance to the opinions and reactions of strangers (especially men) and feel themselves powerless to react against the "judgment" which the world passes on them.  Rather than understanding things objectively, they take everything personally, and feel that everything which happens is a reflection on them (the butcher didn't smile at me today, I must be losing my looks). She describes this much more precisely and beautifully, of course, and in a way that it is quite instructive (even if you feel that you do not act this way, you certainly know others who do and she illuminates a lot). There is a childishness and a sort of hidden egocentricity to this position, but it is a very frustrated one, as it deprives the person in question of any authority, so they are constantly forced to seek it elsewhere and to feel themselves at the mercy of the world's forces which they cannot control but can only hope to appease.

The discussion, elsewhere on this site, of whether adulthood exists is also germane here.