Anonymous
Well-known member
I just wanted to share some of my success with dealing with social phobia.
I have suffered from social phobia for as long as I can remember and have spent a great deal of time and effort trying to understand and overcome it. Up to quite recently my progress has not been too great until I came across some material on fighting negative thinking.
The literature was actually for helping people with depression but it has really helped me with my social phobia. I'm very good at beating myself up and used to believe that I was actually helping myself by doing this. For example if I felt that I messed up in a social situation I would analyse it for days, going over all the things I did wrong and hammering myself about it so that I would be better the next time.
The thing that really made a difference was realising how cruel I can be to myself and how my negative thinking is actually destroying me. The moment I realised this I felt the pit of my stomach relax and it felt great. I began to question these negative thoughts in terms of how they are not helping me but actually draining my self worth and causing me to become depressed.
The thing I find about depression for me is that the more depressed I am the more negative thoughts I have, which makes me more depressed, more negative thoughts and so on and so on.
I've never considdered depression to be a problem for me and always believed that I felt sad and lonely because of my social phobia. I never realised how closely related depression and social phobia were for me.
The action I am taking is to try and prevent the negative thoughts whenever possible and replace them with positive, feel good thoughts. To be honest it was not easy at first and took a lot of work to break out of the depressive cycle but over time it has become easier. Of course I still have my ups and downs but the more I work at it the more forward momentum I get towards recovery.
I know that this is probably not the answer for everyone with social phobia but just wanted to share what is working for me.
I'm interested to hear if anyone else has had a similar success.
I have suffered from social phobia for as long as I can remember and have spent a great deal of time and effort trying to understand and overcome it. Up to quite recently my progress has not been too great until I came across some material on fighting negative thinking.
The literature was actually for helping people with depression but it has really helped me with my social phobia. I'm very good at beating myself up and used to believe that I was actually helping myself by doing this. For example if I felt that I messed up in a social situation I would analyse it for days, going over all the things I did wrong and hammering myself about it so that I would be better the next time.
The thing that really made a difference was realising how cruel I can be to myself and how my negative thinking is actually destroying me. The moment I realised this I felt the pit of my stomach relax and it felt great. I began to question these negative thoughts in terms of how they are not helping me but actually draining my self worth and causing me to become depressed.
The thing I find about depression for me is that the more depressed I am the more negative thoughts I have, which makes me more depressed, more negative thoughts and so on and so on.
I've never considdered depression to be a problem for me and always believed that I felt sad and lonely because of my social phobia. I never realised how closely related depression and social phobia were for me.
The action I am taking is to try and prevent the negative thoughts whenever possible and replace them with positive, feel good thoughts. To be honest it was not easy at first and took a lot of work to break out of the depressive cycle but over time it has become easier. Of course I still have my ups and downs but the more I work at it the more forward momentum I get towards recovery.
I know that this is probably not the answer for everyone with social phobia but just wanted to share what is working for me.
I'm interested to hear if anyone else has had a similar success.