My year end thoughts on Social Anxiety

[phoenix1]

This year has been an eye opener for me with everything that has happened. For years I’ve tried to examine everything about anxiety and social anxiety like many of us here do. I’ve thought about practically everything and tried everything. I’ve tried ignoring the pain. I’ve tried refocusing the pain. I’ve tried mindfulness. I’ve tried acceptance. I’ve tried optimism. And the funny thing is that they all work to some degree, at least temporarily and then your body adapts and you end up back where you were.

The reason why nothing really works is that everything falls back on what it is you truly want. Ask yourself what do you want? How do you picture yourself ‘better’? Do you say you want to stop the pain? not be so scared anymore? Shy? Anxious? To maybe stop sweating or blushing? If you said yes to any of those, then your body and brain is working exactly right. It’s doing what you ask it to do. Welcome to anxiety-land. The land of spiraling pain because the only way your mind knows how to actively stop pain is to create pain. Sounds crazy at first thought, but if you really think about it, its quite sad but true.

How can we change? The answer is so ridiculously simple but so ridiculously difficult at the same time. It’s as simple as wanting the joy of being social. That’s it. Not wanting to stop the pain or suffering, but wanting to feel the joy more than fearing the pain. Of course its easier said then done, because we want so bad to be pain-free first. But for me with what I’ve experienced and learned over the years it always comes back to that. Do I really want to feel the joy of being social more than I just not stop myself from looking stupid or foolish or feeling pain? Once you decide you want it enough, your body and mind does the rest. No books, no tapes, no psychotherapy, you just become the change you truly want. As a tip - Try finding like minded people and convince yourself you need their love as much as you want to give yours and the world changes in front of you.

I know another year has gone by and many of us are in so much pain and regret. The poison we give ourselves is sickening. Poison to cure poison is great fun. It might be cliché, but try to smile, try to live, try to experience joy. The goal isn’t to be anxiety-free. The goal is to experience joy and in the process…anxiety is shed.

 

[creep_x]

All I can say is..very nicely said & a great post. Its a pity none replied to this & it was about to go unnoticed even by me.
If u dont have the will to change, u will never change.

 

[no1]

what a crock. it has nothing to do with your mind. sure it helps but what is more important is what you do/are.

sorry. I don't believe any of this BS change your mind and change your world stuff. things happen from the outside in, not the other way around. At least in my situation, in my world.

you know what I mean. I have always wanted to be social when I wanted to stop the pain. I don't need anymore of this "universe" misinterpreting whatever it is I want and then supposedly giving me nothing but utter BS. People lying everywhere saying it's all me, everything is my fault.

It has nothing to do with "belief" or "faith". I know it doesn't.

Nothing at all to do with some dumb "law of attraction" or "God" or whatever. It's just delusion. People delude themselves until they create it for themselves, IN THEIR OWN MIND. All is illusion/delusion.

If the law of attraction is "real" then I guess there is something out there that can read my thoughts and transform them into nothing but negativity and BS, the opposite of what I think.

In fact.. it's not even what you do. Because in this OPPOSITE FUCKING WORLD NOTHING WORKS as it is "supposed" to. The "evil" rule and not a damn thing might ever be done to save you or your family from what is to come unless there is real help, real solutions.

You think the "evil" powers that be will ever let anything in this world ever have any importance? You are being watched. I am being watched. This entire world, nothing can really ever escape, because we are freaking futile by ourselves. Nothing can ever be truly good, because the powers that be don't allow it, and true good cannot exist..

I'm sorry for messing up this thread, and yes sorry doesn't do jack sh*t or means anything.

 

[creep_x]

dude chill out
i didnt even talk about the law of attraction in this post.
all i meant was the hunger & the desire to change has to be there.
yes everybody wants to change but we have to ask ourselves, are we doing something about it sufficiently?
feeling the pain is not equivalent to willingness to change

 

[Helyna]

Well, no1, when you think about the fact that most of our problem is in our heads and thought processes, then why shouldn't thinking differently change something?
It's an intriguing thought... we have to rewire ourselves to make EVERY thought positive.

 

[Andrew]

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[Andrew]

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[kt2222]

great post !! totally agree with you !

new year new start new way of thinking. i really do believe simply we programmed ourselves to fear we can un programme.
just finding the the trigger as we found the trigger in the first place.

 

[stardog]

Great post Phoenix. It's true, focusing on what you want is most important.

 

[phoenix1]

Andrew,

I loved what you wrote and I just noticed you deleted it. But I wanted to respond anyway.

I’m sure that is one of the biggest reasons why modern day man is more riddled with anxiety. We don’t have survival needs to counter our anxieties. We don’t have things like the absolute need for human companionship in modern day so we instead go down the path of focusing on how to stop the bad parts of social interaction which only spirals into more pain and more bad parts.

Survival or absolute need will take away anxiety, but it doesn’t even need to be that extreme. Think about taking a test at school. You can motivate yourself in 2 ways to study. You can fear the end result of getting a bad grade so you give yourself anxiety and pain and fear in order to make sure you study and not make mistakes on the test. Or you can imagine what it would be like to ace the test and motivate yourself with what it would feel like to get the result back and get that top grade. Humans are made to do both. We use anxiety when we feel like we need absolute control to not fail. Its suppose to be something that is temporarily dangerous. But we are suppose to use the opposite of anxiety (like desire of joy) to also motivate and better ourselves.

With social anxiety, what happens is that we start out using anxiety for the control and precision of not making a social mistake. It works in its own way at first, but then we realize we can’t control social situations and something always goes wrong, so we start to beat ourselves up to create even more anxiety and perceived control. The anxiety starts to be the problem itself and we feed off that making even more anxiety until it gets out of control. Anxiety is like the ultimate last resort like making sure you pay your bills on time. In our brain, it’s supposed to work or we are led to believe we simply didn’t give it enough anxiety and pain. And when you are in that spiral, you don’t believe that joy is possible because you can’t even stop the pain. OCD follows the same kind of pattern as well. We fool ourselves in thinking that the key is to stop the pain first, anxiety or crazy thoughts. The more we try to stop it the more we get it. The key is to try to rely on its natural opposite. Joy, desire, love and need. They can't coexist. One always beats the other away. The choice is ours.

 

[DavidJonas]

The goal isn’t to be anxiety-free. The goal is to experience joy and in the process…anxiety is shed.[/quote]

Thank you for this. If I understand you correctly you're saying that the the biggest problem of social anxiety sufferers is that we want to avoid the fear and pain more than we want to experience the joy. That's very true in my case, I've severed a lot of connections just out of shame and fear of rejection, and if the choice stands between painful and excruciating but possibly joyous and exhilirating social interaction and utter boredom in loneliness, I almost always choose the latter. And it's my own fault because I chose one thing instead of the other, but on the other hand, if you knew how bad I felt, what would you do?
I don't know where I'm going with this, but I would just like to say that I agree with the idea that you have to want and strive for that "joy", you have to make yourself remember it. I think the way to do that is to act rationally as much as you can, to discern your negative feelings and not let them get the best of you. I wish I could explain how you do that, but of course I've not a clue myself. I guess you just have to torment yourself by facing people and trying to battle your negative thoughts.

 

[kayelle]

Cool, I like this thread! Yes, I agree about happiness. In fact, I read a quote about it the other day that I liked...

Happiness is the consequence of personal effort. You fight for it, strive for it, insist upon it, and sometimes even travel around the world looking for it. You have to participate relentlessly in the manifestations of your own blessings. And once you have achieved a state of happiness, you must never become lax about maintaining it.

I dunno, I guess that gives me faith that I should keep fighting my SA and agoraphobia, that there is a happy me down the road somewhere, and me fighting every day is exactly what I need to do to achieve that, even though it sucks now.

 

[phoenix1]

If I understand you correctly you're saying that the the biggest problem of social anxiety sufferers is that we want to avoid the fear and pain more than we want to experience the joy. That's very true in my case, I've severed a lot of connections just out of shame and fear of rejection, and if the choice stands between painful and excruciating but possibly joyous and exhilirating social interaction and utter boredom in loneliness, I almost always choose the latter. And it's my own fault because I chose one thing instead of the other, but on the other hand, if you knew how bad I felt, what would you do?

Exactly. Well said. I think that’s the point I’m trying to say. With social anxiety we tell ourselves that once the pain stops, once the fear stops then I might be able to focus on the joy. Except it never stops because every time we focus on stopping the pain, we create more pain and more fear. Our brains do only one thing when anxiety fails and that’s to try to make more anxiety so it can work. So we end up beating ourselves up even more and creating more pain and more anxiety.

What is social joy when you can’t even stop yourself from screwing up or being a social screw up? It doesn’t make sense to our brains. We laugh at it and think it absurd to think that we could actually go after and crave social interaction.

I think the thing we sometimes forget is the people who are outgoing and social are not that way because they have no fear or anxiety – there are outgoing and social because they crave social interaction. We are so focused on stopping pain, that we see normal people as people who have succeeded in that, when that's not true. They are just people who long for social interaction and desire it which overcomes any fear or anxiety.

I know of a couple young mothers who broke the cycle because they wanted their children to experience the best social interaction possible in their lives. So they stopped focusing on the pain, the social mistakes, the social embarrassment and instead focused on the social need itself. That need and the joy of it helping their child was enough to break the cycle.

It doesn’t have to be monumental either. Just keep the focus right. The more you focus on the joy of being social the more you will create the right motivational pull. The more you focus on the suffering, the more you will create the wrong kind of pull.

 

[no1]

I was actually talknig about this post with my father yesterday cuz we were talking about some things. your post is really good. I didn't realize this until later, so yeah you have lots of truth to your post and I apologize for my ranting on your thread.