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For example a fear of not making a good impression on people causing a person to be paranoid of people's opinions and thus not making a good impression on them.

Is this situational irony or something else? I feel like it is, but when looking it up I only see mention of the opposite of the expectation occurring. In this situation the expected outcome is making a good impression, but more specifically the expectation is causing the opposite to occur as opposed to it being out of the person's control.

The sentence I'm trying to use the word in:

[Ironically] my fear of burning bridges resulted in my paranoia, which is the most bridge burning effect I have exhibited.

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    Self-fulfilling prophecy : en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-fulfilling_prophecy
    – user66974
    Commented Aug 10, 2015 at 18:08
  • @Josh61 Is there an adverb for that? I'd like to start a sentence with something like Ironically.
    – Docopoper
    Commented Aug 10, 2015 at 18:13
  • @Docopoper - Could you edit your question to include a sample sentence. You could put a blank where the word should go. It's easier if we see some context. Thanks
    – chasly - supports Monica
    Commented Aug 10, 2015 at 18:15
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    Inevitably? perhaps
    – Hugh
    Commented Aug 10, 2015 at 18:18
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    This is kind of a stretch, but the word "iatrogenic" describes an illness caused by a physician while trying to treat an illness. I guess the adverbial form of that would be "iatrogenically".
    – Doug Warren
    Commented Aug 10, 2015 at 18:34

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There isn’t much irony in my fear of burning bridges resulted in my paranoia because there is no general expectation that fear should prevent the feared outcome. So ironically does not work there. Predictably or unsurprisingly would probably be more accurate.

There is no question that you’re talking of a self-fulfilling fear. As you want an adverb, you may want to know that, even though I wasn't able to find it in a dictionary, self-fulfillingly has been used before in the sense you want (as opposed to self-satisfying) in a number of books, albeit very rarely. Here’s an example:

In short, attempts to institute alcohol-free social activities or institutions may fail to generate support because students mistakenly (and self-fulfillingly) assume they will not be widely supported. (Arie W. Kruglanski and E. Tory Higgins (editors), Social Psychology, A General Reader, 2003, p. 599.)

Then you may want to consider fatefully, from fateful:

having an important, especially bad, effect on future events

Now fatefully only implies that the fear will have a bad effect on future events, not that the bad effect is the feared outcome itself, but in context this is quite evident.

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  • Most often (in the US) referred to as "self-fulfilling prophecy".
    – Hot Licks
    Commented Jan 5, 2016 at 20:05
  • @HotLicks Indeed. I've never heard anybody say self-fulfilling fear myself. But I just thought it was a more exact description of what the OP was talking about. Fulfilling a fear sounds a bit strange though.
    – Jacinto
    Commented Jan 5, 2016 at 20:31
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Rather than irony it's perhaps portent -

something that foreshadows a coming event : omen, sign

...so you could use portentously, as foreshadowed by the suggestion in the comments of self-fulfilling prophesy, though with less definite an actor than prophetically, and not as gloomy as ominously.

However in your sample sentence I might just switch it to the less dramatic and less pretentious tellingly:

carrying great weight and producing a marked effect

As the line sounds introspective, tellingly seems fitting to me. But if the subsequent events are a bit dramatic, portentously would work just fine.

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