noblame4 said:
Blah Blah Blah. All of us know that we have a problem and it's something we should fix, but we cant just say, "Alright, this sucks, so I'm going to start thinking positive and not be a social phobe anymore!" This is life, it's not some cheesey after school special. Not many of us (if any) just read some little article on the internet, take a deep breath and walk out into the bright sunny world with a big grin on our face and a new lease on life.
Get real, man. We need therapists. We need one-on-one counseling and we need lessons on scocial interaction. We can all help ourselves, but we cant cure the problem, if we could it wouldnt BE a problem. Quit pushing your self-help panacea. The shit dont work. It's noise. Is anyone here going to post about how your "JUST STOP" ideas had a noticeable effect on their day to day lives? About how they had better relationships with their families and how they made some new friends and landed a date? I dought it.
I know I'm negative. I know other people dont see me the way I see myself. I know this whole SAD is bullshit that only manifests inside my own head, hell I even have a pretty good idea of how I got this way. But that doesnt help me. That doesnt make me speak normally to people instead of having my brain go blank in the face of an impending interaction. It doesnt make my mouth move and my body relax.
I KNOW I should just be normal. Telling myself to just be peachy doesnt fix shit for me. The placebo effect of listening to ($$$ much?! so much for helping people) self-help tapes has no hold on me either,
so NOW WHAT?? "Quit controlling people!" Bipolar people are systomatically charismatic, histronic people force others to bend to their will with the threat of an emotional breakdown (and believe me, I've had enouph experience with both). How the fuck do I influence people? I'm blank. I'm furniture. Noone does what I want them to do. You think my being withdrawn has other people takeing the time to pry me out of my self indulgent little shell? Wrong! They go about their buisness. We are about the LEAST controlling people on the face of the earth. People with SAD dont bend others to our will, we bend to the will of others because of our inherent fear of confrontation.
I dont know. It's a forum and people are entitled to post whatever they want. I just think people in our situation need encouragement to get REAL help, not someone feeding us some magical psudo-existentialist placebo that says a lot but amounts to nothing.
You're all over the place with this post but let me try to understand where your coming from.
What you're saying: You know you have a problem.
What I'm saying: I believe you.
What you're saying: It won't be resolved overnight.
What I'm saying: I agree
What you're saying: You need more than just 1 solution (therapy/CBT etc.) and it has to come from somebody else (you can't solve it by yourself). I think you're also hinting at how its going to take a lot of work to solve SA.
What I'm saying: Pick and choose however many solutions you want, I'm suggesting one that worked for me and that didn't require a lot of effort on my part.
What you're saying: You think I should shut up.
What I'm saying: I'm okay with pissing you off, you don't have to read my posts.
What you're saying: You think your negative and something other than normal and you think that I'm suggesting you need to know this and by knowing it, you won't have SA.
What I'm saying: I disagree with this whole paragraph. You think your weird and negative and whatever but I think that's a bunch of bullshit. I think you are normal... There's nothing wrong with YOU. You are a beautiful human being. You just have some habits and some behavior that don't get you what you want. But your behavior is not who YOU are. There is a separation despite what most people think. And no where did I suggest that by judging yourself, could you free yourself from anxiety. If you read my first post carefully, you'll realize that the first part of it is me giving an interpretation of whats going through an SA person's head - not a play by play of what you need to be aware of in order to solve SA.
What you're saying: Listening to self esteem tapes doesn't work for you.
What I'm saying: Did you listen to them every night for 4 months?
What you're saying: You say that SA people don't actually control people.
What I'm saying: No they don't actually control people, they just try REALLY hard to... and again, I'm not saying SA people try to control others in any other way but this:
SA PEOPLE TRY TO CONTROL HOW OTHERS PERCEIVE THEM. And this isn't even under debate... We all acknowledge that part of SA is feeling self-conscious.
What I'm saying is that by trying to control how others perceive you, you are trying to control how they think and feel about you. That is CONTROLLING behavior. And when we lose grasp on this control over how others feel and think towards us (like when someone starts to look at us weird or react in a way we don't want them to), we get anxiety.
phoenix1 said:
madeup said:
Human beings automatically feel nervous when they lose a grasp on something they are trying to control. When you drop an egg on accident, you feel nervous. It's that feeling of "oh no, I'm losing control of this." That's where anxiety comes from.
You see, I think this is where the confusion is coming from. The control that you talk about is really the anxiety itself. When we are anxious we automatically go into control mode. For example think about climbing a steep cliff. When you are anxious about the pain of falling, you will focus on each little foothold, every little grip, every little thing that happens around you. Anxiety, which is one of the most basic primal behaviors, uses that control to prevent pain.
As far as where the control is directed, I think a lot of it is semantics.
The control is really directed at stopping pain. Some people focus more on themselves, without much thought of actively changing other's opinions, and then there are others who will actively focus more on changing others opinions of themselves. The ultimate goal of anxiety is to stop the social pain though and to do that it needs control.
That's the reason why you can't just stop yourself from using the control without a proper replacement in hand (which you are also talking about which is good). The control doesn't cause anxiety. Anxiety causes the control. If you willfully stop the control and give up trying, it will either make you depressed or uneasy without an alternative. And eventually you will fall back into control whether you want to or not. Its like someone who is walking on ice and keeps falling over and hurting themselves. The control of making sure each step is solid arises out of the need to stop the pain. But if you willfully just stop the need to control the situation, you will either feel sad that you can't do anything about the pain of falling or really uneasy as you keep getting hurt and you don't even know why because you don't have your control set in place. Eventually that person will go right back into watching every little step they take. Social anxiety is alot worse because the anxiety itself causes the person to 'fall'. So its a downward spiral.
This is a brilliant post.
We disagree on one matter: whether control precedes anxiety or vice versa.
But we agree that by giving up control, you no longer feel anxiety.
Now you point out something important, the fact that without anxiety (without control), people with SA still feel bad.
YES! This goes back to the idea that solving SA doesn't solve all your problems. I forgot that I mentioned this in my other thread "Everyone with social anixety just has victim mentality" but I made a point about how often times it feels like if we just solved SA everything would come together. But I agree; it's an illusion.
Yeah, I remember the loneliness and hatred and depression and sadness that filled the gaps between anxiety.
The only thing that worked for me was to do the self-esteem tapes and to just have those tapes rewire and influence my lonely, hateful, depressed, and sad producing thoughts and beliefs for 8-9 hours a day while I was asleep.
There's no way I would have had the energy to fight those thoughts during the day and I really didn't have to produce much effort to listen to tapes at night and so I feel like it's one of the better solutions out there.
But all of this is leaning towards something else that's important that I want to write about. I haven't had time in the last few days but I hope to write about it soon.
