Old_Boy
New member
Hi
I was gonna post this on my blog, its my experience with S.A.D, just wondering what you guys thought.
Warning, this isn’t my usual funny Blog, and no I haven’t gone emo either (now where did I put those razors ?). Ive been meaning to post this for a while so people can understand why I act the way I do in certain situations, and seeing as today mark’s the 5th anniversary of me having to put up with this f***in disorder, I thought now was appropriate. Ive found myself having to explain to a lot of people lately what exactly Social Anxiety Disorder is, then I stumbled across this video on Youtube
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=go6hgBNSp8Y&mode=related&search=
Pretty bad eh ?, well that was me 5 years ago. I was 22, had decided to pack in my job as an electrician, get my own place and go back to college as a mature student once I hit 23. One day I went out to the cinema when 15 minutes into the movie, for no apparent reason, I got a panic attack. My hands went numb, I got pins and needles in my face, and I started to hypervenalate. The only time I had a panic attack before was from smoking too much weed, but it felt exactly the same, and I felt like I had to get out of there. It got even worse when I got home, to the point where I would feel like I was going to have a panic attack if I left my house. At first I thought I was just Agoraphobic, but later I found I had Social Anxiety Disorder, of which being agoraphobic is just one of the symptoms.
Social Anxiety Disorder (also known as social phobia) is basically a fear of being in certain social situations where escape is either difficult or embarrassing. Doesn’t matter if your giving a speech in front of a class or waiting in line for some shopping, you feel like everybody is judging you, and that you look like a fool and need to get out. Take the cinema incident for example, I felt like I was going to faint and that if I didn’t get out, everybody would laugh at me for fainting. To make matters worse I was sitting in the middle of the middle row, I was terrified id have to say “excuse me”, “pardon me” to about 10 different people so they could let me out and thought they were probably gonna laugh at me as well if I fainted. The same goes for waiting in line, the longer Id have to wait and the further up the line id go, the more anxious I got. One half of my brain would be yelling “I gotta get outa here!”, but then the other would say “but then Ill have to go back to the start of the line”, and it all becomes a vicious cycle.
S.A.D tends to carry the symptoms of most other anxiety disorders, such as being agoraphobic, one other being Uraphobic, this basically means you cant take a piss in a public toilet. A lot of guys actually have this and just use the cubicle instead, but for somebody with S.A.D, sometimes you cant even go in the cubicle. I can remember one time going to use a cubicle and some prat banging on the door for me to hurry up. Because he was putting me on the spot, I couldn’t go, I actually had to leave the club and go in the street.
The only way to treat this disorder is to either use medication or cognitive-behavioural therapy (CBT), also know as Desensitisation Therapy. Obviously I didn’t want to have to rely on meds for the rest of my life so I picked the later. CBT involves getting used to the situations that make you anxious little by little, getting your brain used to knowing you’re not in any danger, until you become less and less anxious. For example, when I got anxious from leaving my house, id start by just walking to the top of the street and then a little further each day, until eventually I could make it to wherever I wanted to go. I got over my fear of using a public toilet by going through the motions before I went in, to the point where I was almost gonna go in my pants, then run in as quick as I could to the urinal. After a few successful attempts, I was able to go by myself and didn’t have to do this anymore.
It took a long time to get from being too scared to leave my front door to being able to take a leak in a public toilet, but the breakthrough for me came when I went to see a counselor. S.A.D can usually be traced back to a trigger event that causes it, such as being bullied in school or being physically abused, none of which related to my problem. Once we actually discovered what had triggered it (its personal so don’t ask) it felt like a huge burden had been lifted from me, course I already knew what triggered it, it just took a councelor to get me to admit it.
When I finally did go back to college, I always had to sit in the front row so I couldn’t see the people behind me, and id have to always sit on the outside so I could get out as quick as possible. Because you cant function properly socially you have a very low self esteem, at the start I ended up ballooning in weight to 15 stone, and felt so bad about myself that I didn’t so much as kiss a girl for over a year at one point. Having S.A.D is a horrible experience that I would not wish on anybody, its robbed me of 5 of the best years of my life. Its only within the last 9 months or so that Ive been able to lead a (reasonably) normal life, I fell as if Im 99% cured now but it will always be there, and sometimes it does come back for a while.
So there you have it, next time somebody ask’s me “whats social anxiety disorder ?”, instead of me going on a big rant Ill just say “read my blog”
I was gonna post this on my blog, its my experience with S.A.D, just wondering what you guys thought.
Warning, this isn’t my usual funny Blog, and no I haven’t gone emo either (now where did I put those razors ?). Ive been meaning to post this for a while so people can understand why I act the way I do in certain situations, and seeing as today mark’s the 5th anniversary of me having to put up with this f***in disorder, I thought now was appropriate. Ive found myself having to explain to a lot of people lately what exactly Social Anxiety Disorder is, then I stumbled across this video on Youtube
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=go6hgBNSp8Y&mode=related&search=
Pretty bad eh ?, well that was me 5 years ago. I was 22, had decided to pack in my job as an electrician, get my own place and go back to college as a mature student once I hit 23. One day I went out to the cinema when 15 minutes into the movie, for no apparent reason, I got a panic attack. My hands went numb, I got pins and needles in my face, and I started to hypervenalate. The only time I had a panic attack before was from smoking too much weed, but it felt exactly the same, and I felt like I had to get out of there. It got even worse when I got home, to the point where I would feel like I was going to have a panic attack if I left my house. At first I thought I was just Agoraphobic, but later I found I had Social Anxiety Disorder, of which being agoraphobic is just one of the symptoms.
Social Anxiety Disorder (also known as social phobia) is basically a fear of being in certain social situations where escape is either difficult or embarrassing. Doesn’t matter if your giving a speech in front of a class or waiting in line for some shopping, you feel like everybody is judging you, and that you look like a fool and need to get out. Take the cinema incident for example, I felt like I was going to faint and that if I didn’t get out, everybody would laugh at me for fainting. To make matters worse I was sitting in the middle of the middle row, I was terrified id have to say “excuse me”, “pardon me” to about 10 different people so they could let me out and thought they were probably gonna laugh at me as well if I fainted. The same goes for waiting in line, the longer Id have to wait and the further up the line id go, the more anxious I got. One half of my brain would be yelling “I gotta get outa here!”, but then the other would say “but then Ill have to go back to the start of the line”, and it all becomes a vicious cycle.
S.A.D tends to carry the symptoms of most other anxiety disorders, such as being agoraphobic, one other being Uraphobic, this basically means you cant take a piss in a public toilet. A lot of guys actually have this and just use the cubicle instead, but for somebody with S.A.D, sometimes you cant even go in the cubicle. I can remember one time going to use a cubicle and some prat banging on the door for me to hurry up. Because he was putting me on the spot, I couldn’t go, I actually had to leave the club and go in the street.
The only way to treat this disorder is to either use medication or cognitive-behavioural therapy (CBT), also know as Desensitisation Therapy. Obviously I didn’t want to have to rely on meds for the rest of my life so I picked the later. CBT involves getting used to the situations that make you anxious little by little, getting your brain used to knowing you’re not in any danger, until you become less and less anxious. For example, when I got anxious from leaving my house, id start by just walking to the top of the street and then a little further each day, until eventually I could make it to wherever I wanted to go. I got over my fear of using a public toilet by going through the motions before I went in, to the point where I was almost gonna go in my pants, then run in as quick as I could to the urinal. After a few successful attempts, I was able to go by myself and didn’t have to do this anymore.
It took a long time to get from being too scared to leave my front door to being able to take a leak in a public toilet, but the breakthrough for me came when I went to see a counselor. S.A.D can usually be traced back to a trigger event that causes it, such as being bullied in school or being physically abused, none of which related to my problem. Once we actually discovered what had triggered it (its personal so don’t ask) it felt like a huge burden had been lifted from me, course I already knew what triggered it, it just took a councelor to get me to admit it.
When I finally did go back to college, I always had to sit in the front row so I couldn’t see the people behind me, and id have to always sit on the outside so I could get out as quick as possible. Because you cant function properly socially you have a very low self esteem, at the start I ended up ballooning in weight to 15 stone, and felt so bad about myself that I didn’t so much as kiss a girl for over a year at one point. Having S.A.D is a horrible experience that I would not wish on anybody, its robbed me of 5 of the best years of my life. Its only within the last 9 months or so that Ive been able to lead a (reasonably) normal life, I fell as if Im 99% cured now but it will always be there, and sometimes it does come back for a while.
So there you have it, next time somebody ask’s me “whats social anxiety disorder ?”, instead of me going on a big rant Ill just say “read my blog”
