Category: Social anxiety

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Social anxiety

By George, he’s got it!

“Pater” of Hasses aren’t only avocados sent me an email about my last post:

Very interesting largely because the fear you describe is something everyone feels just not all the time. For example meeting royalty or the big boss of your company would induce the same fear as you described in your fear of day to day dealings. I guess that makes the SA issue easier to understand for a non sufferer because it’s not outside their existence. What you suffer all the time, the non SA sufferer will suffer occasionally. Thanks for the enlightening post.

You’re welcome, Pater! Anything that helps others to understand can only be good.

Here’s another way I’ve heard it put. What’s the thing you’ve done that has scared you the most? Let’s say it’s standing on the edge of a cliff. Imagine standing there by yourself, looking all the way down to the sea, knowing that one wrong step will be the end. Imagine how you feel, your heart racing, your hands shaking.

Now imagine having to walk out and stand on that cliff for five minutes fifty times a day, every day of your life.

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Social anxiety

What are you scared of?

Mapelba, one of the blogs I awarded in my last post, has posed another question:

What scares you? What has scared you that you went and did anyway?

I couldn’t answer this as a comment on her blog, because my answer is too big, too all-encompassing. Because what scares me isn’t isolated incidents. I’m scared all the time, every day. I’m scared of every interaction with other people – except for my immediate family. Some interactions are more scary and some less so, but they all scare me and I do them anyway. Because I have no choice. Because behind the mask of a person who’s afraid of society is one who really, really wants to connect with people, someone who yearns to be sociable.

What am I scared of? I’m scared of being tongue-tied, of being unable to express myself properly, of being misunderstood, of doing the “wrong” thing. Most of all, I’m scared of their thoughts, worried they’ll think I’m strange, weird, not “normal.”

That’s the essence of social anxiety, but I’m not typical in that I have never avoided social interaction. I’ve always felt the fear and done it anyway. And despite the theories, it has never really got any easier. Perhaps I need to work at this more, to visit places like The Social Anxiety Parlor (Jon’s mum’s blog, which I also awarded in my last post). The thing that gets in my way when trying to work through the different methods is a failure to see my thoughts as anything but logical.

So that’s what I’m scared of. What are you scared of?

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Books Social anxiety

Stuck for a Word

Being stuck for a word is something I’m used to amongst company. It has a lot to do with anxiety. Even simple words can get lost in the jumble that my mind becomes while I’m trying to ignore interruptions from my inner critic, the voice in my head – the one who says, “Shut up. They don’t want to listen to you.”

When I write, I don’t always think of the best words to express what I want to say. I expect that’s normal. This is one reason why I like to write with a pen on paper; I’m not tempted to keep leaving the writing to search for the right word. So I underline the substitute word or phrase and carry on, leaving the word search for the next stage.

While I type up my work, and also when I’m blogging or writing something online, I sometimes ponder over a word. Often I give up and start searching a thesaurus but, more often than not, exactly as I query the thesaurus, the right word comes into my head. As if the pressure of needing to think having been lifted enables me to think clearly. “Of course,” I think, wondering why I always go through this circuitous procedure. (And I did that just now starting with the word “complicated” and ending with “circuitous”.) Will it ever get easier and faster? I expect not.

I could always give up writing and go and lie in the sun. Relax in the sun? Bask in the sun? Arrrggh!

Categories
Social anxiety

SA and Kids

Sorry to have been awol. I’ve been thinking about Erika’s comment:

I’m wondering how SA and being a mom go together. Sometimes moms have to defend their children in different [social] situations so the children feel someone is backing them up when an injustice happens to them. Avoiding this kind of sometimes unpleasant social contact may cause problems with the child. And also, at what age children of SA moms become aware of this and what is their reaction.

The best way to answer this would be to use my personal experience. I had to think about whether I wanted to do this. While I decided a while back to take the plunge and be open about who I am, I don’t think it would be right to expose my family. So I’m going to try to answer Erika in a general way, based on comments I’ve read from others in this situation.

It’s very hard to generalise, though. Many women are scared of their ability to function as mothers and often decide not to find out. Or they worry that their offspring will suffer from similar problems to theirs and therefore decide not to have any.

But being a mother might force a woman out of her safety zone. Things she might avoid doing for herself she will do to protect her child. So, having children can be very helpful for the mother.

I think children will always have been aware in some sense. They will meet friends’ mothers and notice differences. I’m not sure it’s possible to generalise about their reaction. I suppose their reactions would depend on the type of people they (the children) are. I’m faltering here. Can anyone else throw any light on this?

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Social anxiety

How does shyness become social anxiety?

On the occasion of her blog’s birthday, Nicola Morgan wrote a comment on my post. First, she sent me to heaven by praising the way I wrote about SA. Then she wrote:

“It’s interesting to think about how shy children … sometimes become gregarious /extrovert and sometimes don’t, and how shyness can sometimes become SA and sometimes not. I wonder what the triggers might be that would make the difference between the common shyness that comes from all sorts of natural fear reactions, and the one that then tips over into something hard to live with?”

My first reply to this is that the basic premise is wrong. Social anxiety doesn’t always grow from shyness and I’ve never been shy. But I wrote about that before, so I’ll get off my high horse now. The fact is that in most cases social anxiety does stem from shyness.

One reason for this is that both are fed by sensitivity. Anyone who isn’t sensitive isn’t likely to be afflicted by either of them. Also, children who are shy might get teased for being shy and this can exacerbate their shyness and cause them to refrain from participating in activities that could help them to open up.

My answer to Nicola is that it all depends on what happens to the child during childhood. While shyness is usually a trait that’s inherited, SA can come later or alternatively the shyness can vanish. If the child is born into a loving, warm and supportive family and goes on to be popular and make friends, any symptoms of shyness are likely to disappear. If the child is made to feel different or inferior and is shunned or worse by other children, self-confidence will leak out and SA could take its place.

Not all sufferers of SA were bullied, although many were. But most went through things that lowered their self-esteem. This in turn caused them to abstain, voluntarily or forcibly, from parties and other social activities so that they didn’t know how to behave at such activities. The resulting embarrassment lowered their self-esteem even more. It can be a never-ending spiral that doesn’t stop at the SA barrier.

Categories
Social anxiety

Is it good to publicise SA?

“It’s bad to tell others about your social anxiety. They’ll think you’re strange, they’ll treat you differently.”

“The people I’ve told have shown a lot of understanding. I feel much better for having told them.”

So went the discussion at a group therapy session I attended a few years ago. I noticed a marked difference between the owners of these opposing views, a difference that must have influenced their opinions on this matter. The first one was able to hide his social anxiety. Talking to him, you wouldn’t know about all the illogical thoughts flying around in his head. (Illogical, that is, according to the therapist.)

The other participant in the discussion displayed obvious symptoms of social anxiety – stammering, hesitating, blushing, etc. What did he have to lose?

And that’s the conclusion I’ve come to. I tried to hide it and failed. The attempts only make people think I don’t want to talk or I’m standoffish or just plain boring. So I have little to lose by explaining, and possibly something to gain.

Reaching that conclusion hasn’t made life easy. I’ve thought hard about every stage of my journey – about telling each person I’ve told, about starting this blog and more.

For me, so far, the feedback has been positive. If I can help to increase awareness of social anxiety – to make life easier for sufferers and try to prevent it from happening – I will feel I have accomplished something.

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Social anxiety

Is it good to pin the SA label to yourself?

I was amazed, delighted and scared to receive all those comments to my last post. I suppose it’s like getting publicity for publishing a book. You know it’s good, but it’s still scary. At least two of the comments deserve a whole post as a response. This is one of those.

Sheila wrote: “I have 2 grown-up sons who are both on the face of it equally ’shy’ but only one considers himself to have this condition, and spends a lot of time networking online with others who suffer from it, and the other one doesn’t appear to be at all bothered by it but just lives his life, makes the friends he chooses to make etc. … In some ways I do not think it’s helpful for my older son to have defined himself in this way, but on the other hand I suppose it is useful to be able to pin it down to something instead of a kind of generalised anxiety.”

When I first discovered that there was a name for this thing I’d been struggling with for most of my life, my husband was against it. He said that defining yourself in that way is just an excuse to give up. As if I’d said, “What can I do? I have this thing and I’m never going to be able to get rid of it. So I’ll hang around online and offline (but mostly online) with similar weirdoes who have all decided to give up the struggle.” Hubby said that all I had to do was to decide to join in conversations more and to start new conversations and gradually the problem would disappear. Well, he would, because this worked for him, diminishing his symptoms of shyness.

But, we’re not all the same. In fact, we’re all different. What works for one person doesn’t necessarily work for another. I’ve tried that way and it hasn’t helped.

So, seven years on, I’ve continued to define myself as having SA. That doesn’t mean that I’ve given up on “normal” society or that I try any less when I’m in it. But it means that I don’t beat myself up over failures. And it means that sometimes I explain to people why it’s hard for them to talk to me, if I think they’ll understand. Usually I do this online, occasionally face-to-face. It has become a little easier to do it, but not much.

I agree with Sheila that networking online with other sufferers is both useful and harmful. On the plus side, it’s a way of discovering treatments and strategies, of finding a sympathetic ear, of discovering others who are worse off. But the negative posts on SA forums can become depressing, and eventually the recurring themes become boring.

I wouldn’t advise everyone to follow my route. Those who can get away with hiding anxiety are probably better off never defining themselves as having it. And that also goes for the question of whether to announce it, which I will also blog about – maybe in my next post.

In the meantime,

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Social anxiety

Do you know what SA is?

If you’ve been reading my blog from the beginning, you’ll know what I’m talking about. If you’ve just arrived here from Nicola Morgan’s wild birthday party, then I’m sorry to be the party pooper but I think it’s very important that you should know. I’ll tell you why in a moment.

SA stands for social anxiety, which is a fear of people and especially of what those people think of the sufferer. I’ve seen SA defined as extreme shyness. While this is probably true for most sufferers, it doesn’t apply to everyone.

The origin of SA is a mixture of nature and nurture. Two people can go through the same experiences and only one will get it. Two people can start off with the same characteristics and only one will get it.

SA has been recognised as a disorder since 1980. A lot of people suffer from it. Yet most people haven’t heard of it. Even some of those who have it don’t know that there’s a name for it. That’s a shame, because not knowing the name means missing out on treatment, and support from other sufferers.

Of course, the best cure is prevention, and that’s where you come in. Even today, in the second decade of the twenty-first century, quiet children are ignored. Children who disrupt classes or are violent are sent for therapy while quiet ones are simply ignored. SA is allowed to fester instead of being nipped in the bud.

So, if you’re a teacher, a therapist, a parent, a family member, a friend – in other words if you’re anyone at all – please do something to help a child who is on the path to SA.

And if you know someone who suffers from SA – someone who is quiet, appears to be shy, behaves awkwardly – please try to include them and draw them out. If it’s done tactfully, they’ll usually appreciate it.

Now I’ll let you return to the party. Do come back here any time. I’m not always this serious.

Categories
Social anxiety

Just a Phone Call

“I’d also like to read about your life and thoughts in general,” says Erika.

“Are you able to say exactly what you want from others when you write?” asks Mapelba on her blog. “Money? How much? A compliment? What would that compliment be?”

“I want to be understood,” I reply. “I want people to stop judging me by their interpretation of what they see and discover the reality behind it. I want money, too. And compliments. But most of all I want to be understood.”

So here is an excerpt from my life. Although I’m worried you won’t understand it.

I have lived in Israel for most of my life, but I arrived as an adult. I’ve acquired a fairly good grasp of the language, but my accent tells all but a few other non-native speakers that my native tongue is English, even if they assume that I come from the US.

The other day I had to make a phone call. And here’s the first thing you probably won’t understand: phone calls are problematic. I worry about them beforehand, wonder whether I could substitute an email. Sometimes they turn out to be OK, other times they don’t.

Anyway, I phoned, said what I had to say and listened to the reply. Everything was going fine until I requested clarification about something he’d said. It wasn’t that I hadn’t understood any word of his Hebrew, just that I wanted him to explain something further. At this point he, a native Hebrew speaker, switched to English. I listened with mounting anger and kept quiet. The only thing I said was “all right” (in Hebrew). I wanted to tell him to stop talking in English, but didn’t think I could manage that without sounding angry, and that wouldn’t be fair to him because he obviously thought he was helping me.

This scenario has happened to me many times. Each time it infuriates me. I want to shout at the person who does this to me, “Just because I’m quiet, it doesn’t mean I’m stupid!” But it wouldn’t be appropriate.

So there it is. My life and thoughts. Does anyone understand?

Categories
Social anxiety

My Message

Sometimes, you begin to read a blog post and you know what your next post is going to be about. I just read Justin Dixon’s post: How to Find Your Message and Stand Out. In it, he writes:

Your message is the story that you tell people about your own life and theirs. It is a consistent message and it is your brand, and without a strong message your blog is going to just end up being a raindrop lost in the ocean.

I don’t need to find my message. I know it:

Many people, all over the world, suffer from social anxiety. If you’re not one of them, they need your help. They need support to break out of their walls, because it’s an extremely difficult process. You may not understand why it’s difficult. Take it from me; it is.

And another, related, message:

In most cases, social anxiety doesn’t need to happen. If people noticed the signs in time, that wall would never need to become so thick and strong.

That paves the way for at least two future blog posts:

  1. What you can do to help.
  2. The signs that should be addressed before they lead to something worse.