To be able to build relationships with other people you need to accept your SA.

I am back again. With more info on social anxiety and what it is like living with it.

In my last bp I talked a bit about what some of the signs could be of having social anxiety.

One of the signs, or you could call it a sideeffect, I did not mention, is the struggle to connect with other people.

This aspect deserves its very own bp because it is such a big one.

Being human means being a social animal. By that I mean we all need social contact. We need to feel like we belong somewhere. We need to feel accepted, and loved, and appreciated. Everyone needs this. These needs are part og Maslow’s pyramid of basic human needs. If these needs are not met, humans cannot ever reach their full potential. But to have these needs met we need connection. We need relationships, and we need love.

But to have that we need to love ourselves.

Dogs are good at that relationship building ❤️

Part of being socially anxious is the difficulty of building relationships. Connecting with other people is hard if you are afraid of them.

There are many layers here. Social anxiety means you are afraid of talking to people, etc. But it very likely also means that you are afraid people will notice your anxiety. So you try to hide it. And when you are using all your energy trying to hide that part of you, you have no energy left for connecting with people.

All your social interactions become rushed and awkward. You are so busy wondering how you come across that you lose track of what is actually happening in the present. You are anxious about your appearance, your voice being shaky, blushing, etc. so you can’t focus on the conversation at hand. And so the conversation becomes almost pointless.

If you have social anxiety you are probably much better at conversing someone you already know. You feel more at ease, you don’t need to keep your guard up so much. But there are still so many factors standing in the way of you really being able to connect. Because, very likely, this person doesn’t know anything about your struggle with anxiety: you are afraid to say anything about it for fear of rejection. So, there is a whole part of you that you cannot reveal.

Having to always hide a big part of yourself is exhausting. And it makes for a poor starting point for creating lasting and healthy relationships with other people.

This may all be quite obvious. But what might not be obvious is how we can make it easier for ourselves to overcome the anxiety and be able to connect with other people more easily. The first step is to accept the problem. Accept your anxiety. Accept that it is there. By accepting I mean acknowledging that you have anxiety, the point here being not giving up on overcoming it, but realizing that the problem is there.

This way the problem becomes a lot easier to solve!

I myself have only just started to accept my SA, and quite frankly I feel there is a long way to go.

“For after all, the best thing one can do when it is raining is let it rain.”

– Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

You know you have social anxiety when..

Right. As I think I explained in my last bp, social anxiety is a spectrum. There are many degrees to wich you can have it.

I want to be clear that social anxiety (SA) is NOT a personality trait. It is not the same as being introvert. You can be an introvert AND have SA. But you can also just be an introvert. As an introvert you typically prefer being in smaller groups of people, you prefer having a lot of alone time, and you prefer quiet places to crowded and loud places. This is typically an inherited personality trait. But simply being introvert does not make you socially anxious.

The introvert/extrovert spectrum is of course also fluctuating and you can be anywhere on the spectrum. But again, you are not suffering from social anxiety just because you are an introvert. Introversion is when you prefer something, anxiety is when you fear something.

Social anxiety is not about being introvert. It is about percieving danger that is not there. Nobody has a socially anxious personality. You may be an extrovert and have social anxiety. You then actually wish to be with people for the most part, however, you are prevented from socializing as much as you want to by your anxiety.

So. Here is a list of things that could indicate that you are struggling with social anxiety:

– You worry about how other people percieve you.

– You are afraid to speak your mind, especially if you do not hold the popular opinion.

– You go out of your way to avoid certain social situations.

– When you have been to a social gathering you feel exhausted, worried about what the other people now think of you, afraid that you made a bad impression on people, you are worrying about stupid things you may have said or done, you may feel sad or even depressed about the outcome of the event, and so on.

– Things, even small things, generally worry you more. You worry about the way someone looked at you, about the tone in someone’s voice when they said something to you, you worry about a specific word someone used when they said something to you etc.

– Bying something at a store can be a challenge for you.

– Using public transportation can induce anxiety for you.

– You are afraid of inviting people in to your home.

– You often feel guilty about things you have said or done, or things you didn’t do.

– You are scared of being judged.

– You feel intense anxiety when having to perform in front of an audience.

– Talking to someone you really like or admire makes you very anxious and scared and you may avoid it altogether.

– School was never your thing.

– You have a feeling of not fitting in anywhere.

Now. These are just examples. The list is endless, really. But the list goes to show that having social anxiety makes you worry excessively about everything.

An analogy could be that when you are at a party, or any social gathering as a matter of fact, your brain percieves danger, and this makes your body react as if there is a lion in the room. Thus, while everyone else is enjoying themselves, you’re left fighting the lion.

The good thing is knowing that your system is actually trying to protect you. It is reacting to former traumas that you have experienced in your life that made you feel unsafe.

So. Now, when your brain percieves danger it sends signals to your body to be alert to protect you from this danger, and then you experience anxiety. Wich means your system is working, however, it is misinformed and thus is actually overworking. And you can use energy psychology to realign your system and be free of your anxiety.

Using energy psychology belongs in another bp.

That is all for now.

Social Anxiety

This post is about Social Anxiety as I am dealing with it. I am no expert. I am simply a person dealing with Social Anxiety.

I have been wanting to write about this for a long time.

I want to talk about mental health today. This is something I haven’t talked about on the blog before since it really has nothing to do with unschooling or lifelong learning. And yet, In my case it does. Since my mental health is part of me. Part of our family.

Truth be told I have been suffering from mental health problems for almost all my life. It is not something I have ever written about in public before. Both because I feel afraid and anxious about doing it, and because it is taboo. We are not supposed to have mental health issues, whoever we are, in today’s world. The buzzwords of today’s world are OUTGOING, COOL, FUNNY, and so on. Definitely not words that buy into mental health problems.

I have suffered from social anxiety since about the age of 8. It has been my longterm companion, so to speak. It has been bearable for the most part and it has been excruciatingly painful and stupefying for a great deal of the time. It has let to depression, self-loathing, low self esteem, other types of anxiety etc. etc.

The thing about social anxiety is that it is not something you can overcome on your own. It isn’t something you can rid yourself of by practicing being out and about, practicing your ‘social skills’ so to speak, or by ‘facing your fears’ as they say. If it was I wouldn’t be having the problem in the first place; I have tried these things. I have tried for almost 30 years!

Social anxiety, however, also isn’t something you are born with. There are no socially anxious babies. No such thing. It is something you learn. You acquire your anxiety through your experiences, your upbringing, how you are met by the world, there is a part of it that may be inherited if anxiety runs in your family, not least since you will inevitably learn from your parents. All kids do. Social anxiety, thus, since it is learned behaviour, can be unlearned. And this is essential.

For the longest time, the better part of 20 years, I have believed that I was supposed to live with my anxiety for the rest of my life. I have found out that this need not be the case.

But, let us return to anxiety itself. As I mentioned briefly, social anxiety is not overcome by practising your social skills. However many times you practise a certain thing the anxiety will always come back and be your faithful companion the next time you are about to go and do this certain thing. Social anxiety involves EVERY activity that has to do with other people. Which goes to say that there is not necessarily one or two specific activities that can set off your anxiety. Social anxiety can be set off by anything involving the presence of other people. That being said, social anxiety is of course a spectrum, you may be in one end of the spectrum and others may be at the other end. I can only speak for myself, using my own experiences as a reference point.

To be clear, social anxiety is not the same from day to day. I believe all people with anxiety disorders can recognise this statement. You may be very very anxious about something one day and not very anxious about the same thing another day. However, this does not mean that the anxiety has disappeared. It won’t disappear on its own.

My experiences with social anxiety have been fluctuating. I have experienced times in my life when I couldn’t bear to leave the house. Hours of painful longing to be rid of the anxiety. Hours of crying and wishing I could be dead. Hours and hours of hating myself and my anxiety, hating that I couldn’t, simply, pull myself together and rid myself of the anxiety. I have spent hours, days, months, even years blaming myself for my anxiety disorder. All these hours and years where I could have actually been enjoying life ❤

I have had times in my life where I pretended not to be anxious. Almost convinced myself that I wasn’t and that that part of me was gone now. Hours and hours of trying to repress my anxiety. But never with any good results. The anxiety would always resurface.

I have experienced periods in my life when my anxiety was bearable, when I thought I could live with it. Well, I thought I could if I had to, and I thought I had to.

My social anxiety may hit me when I walk in to a room full of people, when I am waiting to order food at a restaurant, when I am with friends and everyone is telling stories and laughing, or when I am about to make a phonecall to someone I don’t know very well. It may hit me when I am picking up A at ballet class, when I am doing my own ballet class, when I need to speak to authority figures. It may surface when I  am walking past a large group of people in the street, when I am waiting in line to buy groceries, when I am riding the bus. It always hits when I need to speak in front of more than two or three people, when I have to talk to someone I really admire, when I need to ask for help, when I think I have done something wrong etc.

My social anxiety is ever-present. Not only in social settings; it is there too when I lay awake at night worrying about all the stupid things I may have said or done, when I worry about how a specific event is going to go, how I will manage to do such and such etc. etc. My social anxiety never leaves me. It is absolutely devastating for my quality of life. It seeps into every part of my day and life and holds me at a strong grip. It is crippling, exhausting, hurtful…

It is very important to understand that social anxiety, anxiety in any form actually, is a mental illness. It is not YOU. It is an illness. And it can be cured.

I have far from overcome my social anxiety. In fact until very recently I thought there was nothing to be done about it. I have tried all kinds of therapies and pills to overcome my anxiety. I have seen psychologists, psychiatrists, I have taken medication for depression and anxiety, I have spoken to doctors, I have tried natural remedies suchs as herbal teas, perikon pills etc. I have seen alternative healers, I have meditated, I have worked with myself. I have practised my social skills the best way I could. So far, I have seen very, very little progress.

I have heard that behavioral therapy has worked for some people suffering from social anxiety. However, I have my doubts about behavioral therapy when it comes to social anxiety. As I said earlier, it is not something you can condition yourself out of, to the best of my knowledge. Social anxiety is about emotional wounds. It is FEELINGS. And feelings can’t be changed with practice.

I do believe, however, that EFT or TFT can work. Quite possibly even cure social anxiety. EFT, or Emotional Freedom Techniques is a form of energy psychology. I will not go into details in this post about EFT. A post about EFT in relation to Social Anxiety Disorder Will come later on.

The thing about Social Anxiety is that it is about neurology, it is about how your brain has acquired a perception of danger in social situations. Your brain percieves danger and your body reacts; it goes into the fight, flight, or freeze mode. When you are in a state of alarm it makes it virtually impossible to function normally, you feel like you have to protect yourself from the percieved danger. And there is NO way to think way out of this.

Everyone with anxiety disorders have, being intelligent and emotionally resourceful individuals, acquired ways or strategies to deal with daily anxiety. As have I. I stay silent in most situations, I observe, I read people, I avoid situations, I do all these things to protect myself.

But I am tired. I am tired of the strategies, the pain, the discomfort and so on. I am so ready for a change.

Have you ever experienced anxiety? What is your experience with mental health problems? Do you know anyone who is dealing with anxiety?