Hello everyone,
This is my first time posting here. I found this website last night and spent hours and hours browsing threads. I'm so glad to find a group of people I can relate to and I thought I could share my experience with crippling social anxiety and perhaps get some advice. This post might be long so I apologize.
It's hard to know where to begin so I will begin at the beginning. :
: When I was a child, about 5 years old, I had a serious problem with anxiety crying. This only began to manifest after entering kindergarten for the first time. I would cry at the slightest provocation, benign or otherwise. If I dropped a pencil, I would cry. If I couldn't have my bear, I would cry. I would cry even at the thought of the class leaving to get pizza, something that ordinarily would thrill most kids. Back then all I could remember was wanting to be home and having terrible anxiety about being seperated from it and my mother. I also couldn't seem to handle the interactions with other children, even though they were being friendly and playful I would somehow interpret their actions as threatening. My crying became so frequent and so inconsolable that after 1 week of kindergarten, the school kicked me out because I was too disruptive to the class. It wasn't until grade 3 that I was able to mostly control my emotions and the crying over anything and everything stopped, though it had gradually lessened before then, at least enough to allow me to actually go to school without constantly disrupting everybody.
My home life was not so good. My parents worked full time so I was juggled between a dozen different babysitters. I was never able to settle into a comfort zone for long and I remember frequently being homesick. My father drank heavily and was abusive both physically and mentally. He stopped drinking after losing his job when I was 7, but it seemed to only exacerbate his abuse. He was the kind of man who had no rationality to his anger. For example, simply spilling a drink would provoke him to berate me until I felt lower than an amoeba. One night while laying in bed I picked a scab and it bled pretty heavily. Being the child I was, I was terrified, so I began to cry. His response to this was not to come check on me, but to come in and beat me for crying. He wouldn't allow me to have friends over and I could only do so if he was gone. At one point he worked a night shift and wouldn't allow me to leave the property or have anyone over, so the only friend I could interact with was a neighborhood dog that would sometimes come into our yard. His abuse also extended to our pets. He bludgeoned one kitten to death on a wall and took me with him while he shot another cat after it was injured in the fanbelt of his truck when I was 8. He would burn the whiskers off our cats, purposefully drop my hamsters from a high height, gave one kitten a seizure by smashing it on the head after it urinated behind our TV, then locked the same cat away in a room and forbade me or my mother from entering it. I know all this sounds horrible but I'm not posting it for sympathy, I'm posting it to give you guys an idea of my father's psychology. There's so much more I could write but suffice it to say he was a bastard that made me terrified of my own shadow.
My mother left my dad when I was 9, but she couldn't support herself financially so she had to come back. She couldn't take me with her at the time. It wasn't until I was 10 that she seperated from him fully and close to another year before she got custody of me. At that time I started junior high. I didn't fit in well and I knew nobody in my class. I was awkward and had begun to respond to bullying with increasing hostility, which only further diminished my popularity. I experienced enormous anxiety because of this and as the months passed I became increasingly less able to cope. Four months in, I started hiding in a utility closet in our apartment instead of going to the bus stop. Six months in, I stopped going to school all together.
When this happened social services got involved. I wasn't of age to legally quit school so they "had" to intervene. Their response was to put me in a group home. It was basically a mini-prison. Alarms/buzzers on all the doors, bars on the windows, plastic sheets on the mattresses, no razors, not allowed to do anything without permission, not even going to the bathroom or adjusting the volume on the TV. During my time there I had gone back to school (not willingly) and after a month they decided to let me go home. Not long after that I stopped going to school again.
This time their response was to put me in a foster home in another city. I was placed in a new school and attended it for 3 months. I was only able to see my mother every-other weekend. At the end of the 3 months my hypersensitivity to rejection spiked my anxiety to the point that I couldn't cope with being in the school environment anymore. I simply refused to go and I'd be damned if anyone forced me.
Social services responded by putting me in the group home again. I should mention that between these incidents they also attempted to give me and my mother therapy, usually with disasterous results that only stressed us and our relationship more. I wasn't able to articulate the emotions and anxiety I was experiencing, and being a young teenager I was prone to responding to these attempts with anger. At any rate, none of the psychologists put two and two together or made any kind of diagnosis on me other than low self-esteem and possibly depression.
I was the group home another month before I refused to go to school anymore. They couldn't make me and they knew it. There was no way they could force me to do the school work even if they physically forced me through the doors and into a desk (which they had done once via taking me to school in a police cruiser). I knew it, they knew it, and eventually they gave up and returned me home. They continued to force me and my mother into disasterous therapy sessions but when I turned 16 and legally of age to quit school, they stopped bothering us.
When I was 17 my grandfather on my mother's side died. The wake was held at our house. In the evening when only close immediate family was left, my two uncles got into a fist fight in front their small children. One of them was bloodied pretty badly and the house was in chaos. My mother ended up having a nervous breakdown so I had to do damage control. It was an awful night and I think the start of my detachment from society.
As time passed I became increasingly dependant on the internet for social interaction. It was safe, I could control who I talked to, and I didn't need to fear being in situations that triggered my anxiety. I felt in control and it was addicting. My friends attempted to get me out of the house but I kept finding excuses to turn them down. After doing that over and over, I lost my friends, and though it hurt, I found the control, safety and comfort of the internet too alluring to give up. I became a full-blown internet-addicted hermit and I didn't care. I stopped caring about most things and instead simply woke up only with the intention of getting my next internet fix. Education didn't matter. Getting a job didn't matter. Well, I shouldn't say that, they DID matter, but when balanced on a scale of comfort vs discomfort, anxiety vs non-anxiety, the internet always won out over participating in the real world. I stopped leaving the house period and became dependant on my mother to do everything for me like a child.
Though it shames me to admit it, many years passed. I'm now 28 and have been living on disability for the past 5 years. I don't have a driver's license, I have half a grade 7 education, and no work experience. These days when I wake up there is no comfort, only an omnipresent sense of panic in the back of my mind that time is running out, that I've pissed away the best of my youth in hiding from the world and that I'm doomed to a life of dependancy or poverty. I can count the number of times I've left my house in ten years on both hands. The feeling of a breeze and the smell of grass has become an alien novelty to me. I feel so ill-prepared and unequipped to deal with being an adult. I've wanted to get my GED for years but I can't leave my house to write the test. I feel trapped and isolated and angry at myself for wasting my potential, and guilty for burdening my mother and the taxpayer.
Late October my father died. I must mention that he left to live in Ontario when I was 11 or 12. I only saw him once when I was 25 when he visited for a day, but we communicated on the phone over the years. I held a lot of inward animosity toward him and only made half-hearted attempts to maintain a relationship with him, especially considering for many years he'd only call while drunk. He had no will but left his pension and work insurance to his friend instead of me, to a sum in excess of $70,000. This has mind****ed me beyond belief because of the message it sends. My father knew I had nothing and had no desire to help me. He tortured my mind as a kid and even in death he haunts me.
This is such a long post, I really didn't intend to talk this much, but it's been a catharsis for me. I'm feeling strongly about trying to change my life before it's too late. The panic I feel now is just as bad as the panic I felt when I was out in the real world. If it's a choice between the two I'd rather be panicked but independent than panicked and a dependant failure.
I'd love to hear stories from the rest of you about how your anxiety has affected your life, how you feel it's manifested and how you're working to overcome it. I really need inspiration and advice. Thank you to anyone who managed to read all this.
This is my first time posting here. I found this website last night and spent hours and hours browsing threads. I'm so glad to find a group of people I can relate to and I thought I could share my experience with crippling social anxiety and perhaps get some advice. This post might be long so I apologize.
It's hard to know where to begin so I will begin at the beginning. :
: When I was a child, about 5 years old, I had a serious problem with anxiety crying. This only began to manifest after entering kindergarten for the first time. I would cry at the slightest provocation, benign or otherwise. If I dropped a pencil, I would cry. If I couldn't have my bear, I would cry. I would cry even at the thought of the class leaving to get pizza, something that ordinarily would thrill most kids. Back then all I could remember was wanting to be home and having terrible anxiety about being seperated from it and my mother. I also couldn't seem to handle the interactions with other children, even though they were being friendly and playful I would somehow interpret their actions as threatening. My crying became so frequent and so inconsolable that after 1 week of kindergarten, the school kicked me out because I was too disruptive to the class. It wasn't until grade 3 that I was able to mostly control my emotions and the crying over anything and everything stopped, though it had gradually lessened before then, at least enough to allow me to actually go to school without constantly disrupting everybody.My home life was not so good. My parents worked full time so I was juggled between a dozen different babysitters. I was never able to settle into a comfort zone for long and I remember frequently being homesick. My father drank heavily and was abusive both physically and mentally. He stopped drinking after losing his job when I was 7, but it seemed to only exacerbate his abuse. He was the kind of man who had no rationality to his anger. For example, simply spilling a drink would provoke him to berate me until I felt lower than an amoeba. One night while laying in bed I picked a scab and it bled pretty heavily. Being the child I was, I was terrified, so I began to cry. His response to this was not to come check on me, but to come in and beat me for crying. He wouldn't allow me to have friends over and I could only do so if he was gone. At one point he worked a night shift and wouldn't allow me to leave the property or have anyone over, so the only friend I could interact with was a neighborhood dog that would sometimes come into our yard. His abuse also extended to our pets. He bludgeoned one kitten to death on a wall and took me with him while he shot another cat after it was injured in the fanbelt of his truck when I was 8. He would burn the whiskers off our cats, purposefully drop my hamsters from a high height, gave one kitten a seizure by smashing it on the head after it urinated behind our TV, then locked the same cat away in a room and forbade me or my mother from entering it. I know all this sounds horrible but I'm not posting it for sympathy, I'm posting it to give you guys an idea of my father's psychology. There's so much more I could write but suffice it to say he was a bastard that made me terrified of my own shadow.
My mother left my dad when I was 9, but she couldn't support herself financially so she had to come back. She couldn't take me with her at the time. It wasn't until I was 10 that she seperated from him fully and close to another year before she got custody of me. At that time I started junior high. I didn't fit in well and I knew nobody in my class. I was awkward and had begun to respond to bullying with increasing hostility, which only further diminished my popularity. I experienced enormous anxiety because of this and as the months passed I became increasingly less able to cope. Four months in, I started hiding in a utility closet in our apartment instead of going to the bus stop. Six months in, I stopped going to school all together.
When this happened social services got involved. I wasn't of age to legally quit school so they "had" to intervene. Their response was to put me in a group home. It was basically a mini-prison. Alarms/buzzers on all the doors, bars on the windows, plastic sheets on the mattresses, no razors, not allowed to do anything without permission, not even going to the bathroom or adjusting the volume on the TV. During my time there I had gone back to school (not willingly) and after a month they decided to let me go home. Not long after that I stopped going to school again.
This time their response was to put me in a foster home in another city. I was placed in a new school and attended it for 3 months. I was only able to see my mother every-other weekend. At the end of the 3 months my hypersensitivity to rejection spiked my anxiety to the point that I couldn't cope with being in the school environment anymore. I simply refused to go and I'd be damned if anyone forced me.
Social services responded by putting me in the group home again. I should mention that between these incidents they also attempted to give me and my mother therapy, usually with disasterous results that only stressed us and our relationship more. I wasn't able to articulate the emotions and anxiety I was experiencing, and being a young teenager I was prone to responding to these attempts with anger. At any rate, none of the psychologists put two and two together or made any kind of diagnosis on me other than low self-esteem and possibly depression.
I was the group home another month before I refused to go to school anymore. They couldn't make me and they knew it. There was no way they could force me to do the school work even if they physically forced me through the doors and into a desk (which they had done once via taking me to school in a police cruiser). I knew it, they knew it, and eventually they gave up and returned me home. They continued to force me and my mother into disasterous therapy sessions but when I turned 16 and legally of age to quit school, they stopped bothering us.
When I was 17 my grandfather on my mother's side died. The wake was held at our house. In the evening when only close immediate family was left, my two uncles got into a fist fight in front their small children. One of them was bloodied pretty badly and the house was in chaos. My mother ended up having a nervous breakdown so I had to do damage control. It was an awful night and I think the start of my detachment from society.
As time passed I became increasingly dependant on the internet for social interaction. It was safe, I could control who I talked to, and I didn't need to fear being in situations that triggered my anxiety. I felt in control and it was addicting. My friends attempted to get me out of the house but I kept finding excuses to turn them down. After doing that over and over, I lost my friends, and though it hurt, I found the control, safety and comfort of the internet too alluring to give up. I became a full-blown internet-addicted hermit and I didn't care. I stopped caring about most things and instead simply woke up only with the intention of getting my next internet fix. Education didn't matter. Getting a job didn't matter. Well, I shouldn't say that, they DID matter, but when balanced on a scale of comfort vs discomfort, anxiety vs non-anxiety, the internet always won out over participating in the real world. I stopped leaving the house period and became dependant on my mother to do everything for me like a child.
Though it shames me to admit it, many years passed. I'm now 28 and have been living on disability for the past 5 years. I don't have a driver's license, I have half a grade 7 education, and no work experience. These days when I wake up there is no comfort, only an omnipresent sense of panic in the back of my mind that time is running out, that I've pissed away the best of my youth in hiding from the world and that I'm doomed to a life of dependancy or poverty. I can count the number of times I've left my house in ten years on both hands. The feeling of a breeze and the smell of grass has become an alien novelty to me. I feel so ill-prepared and unequipped to deal with being an adult. I've wanted to get my GED for years but I can't leave my house to write the test. I feel trapped and isolated and angry at myself for wasting my potential, and guilty for burdening my mother and the taxpayer.
Late October my father died. I must mention that he left to live in Ontario when I was 11 or 12. I only saw him once when I was 25 when he visited for a day, but we communicated on the phone over the years. I held a lot of inward animosity toward him and only made half-hearted attempts to maintain a relationship with him, especially considering for many years he'd only call while drunk. He had no will but left his pension and work insurance to his friend instead of me, to a sum in excess of $70,000. This has mind****ed me beyond belief because of the message it sends. My father knew I had nothing and had no desire to help me. He tortured my mind as a kid and even in death he haunts me.
This is such a long post, I really didn't intend to talk this much, but it's been a catharsis for me. I'm feeling strongly about trying to change my life before it's too late. The panic I feel now is just as bad as the panic I felt when I was out in the real world. If it's a choice between the two I'd rather be panicked but independent than panicked and a dependant failure.
I'd love to hear stories from the rest of you about how your anxiety has affected your life, how you feel it's manifested and how you're working to overcome it. I really need inspiration and advice. Thank you to anyone who managed to read all this.
