Roots of social anxiety

A while ago, I wrote “Anxiety Is…“, a post all about being diagnosed with an anxiety disorder and my own experiences of anxiety and mental health issues. Since then, I’ve had one lot of CBT (Cognitive Behavioural Therapy), felt somewhat better, then worse again at the start of the year (before Covid-19 and lockdown hit us in the UK).

So now I’m having more CBT. But this time there’s more of a specific focus: we’re looking at social anxiety, which is a big thing for me. Feeling inadequate around others or inferior to them; not knowing what to say to people in conversations; avoiding conversations, especially with people I don’t know or barely know; trying to avoid social events as much as I can (quite hard in my line of work, sometimes…); struggling badly with conflict – all of these are wrapped up in this thing called social anxiety.

One thing I knew, and mentioned in my last post about this, was that a lot of this has its roots in my past, especially during my schooldays. They weren’t terrible, a lot of the time they were fine; but neither were they the “best days of my life”. And stuff happened that has, I think, contributed to this sense of inferiority, of lack of confidence in myself, of social anxiety. Stuff such as:

• Being teased because of my appearance, listening to the wrong sort of music, wearing the wrong clothes (a cliche, but it happened), having the wrong computer/console; being awkward, naive, “mummy’s boy”.
• Being picked on for no reason I can think of.
• Having people I thought of as friends turning against me seemingly without reason.
• The times when I said or did something daft or embarrassing, and it “sticking” with me.
• Being seen and labelled as a loner.
• Being rubbish at PE, and physically weak and slow in general (sports days were hell).
• Being teased for wearing a Dennis The Menace t-shirt to school (in primary school, when we didn’t have a uniform).
• Saying something I thought was funny or clever, and everybody falling about for all the wrong reasons.
• Not feeling able to ask out the girl (in my case – YMMV) you’d fallen head-over-heels for because you just knew that she’d say no, and you just couldn’t deal with that. But then not knowing what to do with your feelings for her.
• Other people finding out about this in the most embarrassing way possible.
• Desperately wanting to be in the “in” crowd, but not having any route in.
• Not knowing how to effectively deal with all this, bottling it up and then exploding – which just made matters worse.

There’s more I could write, I’m sure.

And it all affects you. Sure, you could probably brush off some of these. But they have a cumulative effect, especially the stuff that you don’t understand the reasons for. It chips away at you and your confidence, gradually makes you think you are a lesser person, makes you think you’ve nothing to contribute, makes you believe someone, somewhere is judging you, laughing at you, waiting for you to fail. None of which might be true; but when the ideas get in there, they’re so hard to get out. The roots go down deep.

Yet… it’s not the whole story. I know it’s not. At secondary school, I did well in music: I played drums in the orchestra and was an important part of it, I led the drum section. Academically, I did well (I’d have done even better if I’d done my homework and revision properly). I became an officer in the Boys’ Brigade. I have made friends, good friends, since then. People have wanted to talk to me, to spend time with me, to include me. I’m married and I have two children who love me unconditionally. Heck, I’m a church minister – and no one’s told me yet that I’m in the wrong vocation. I have, I hope, done good in the world and played a positive part in people’s lives, if only in a small way – people have been glad to have known me.

(Writing that paragraph was as hard as writing the list of stuff that knocked my confidence – it feels too much like boasting, it’s undermined by the fear it might not be true).

The problem with anxiety, at least for me, is that as soon as you get anywhere down the road of believing all of this, you’re snapped back by it, like a dog snapped back by one of those extending leads that you can lock to stop them chasing after every dog or squirrel they see. I’m hoping that this round of CBT will help break that lead and allow me to be the person I want to be, the person I might be under all of this.
In my head, it’s all unbalanced: the bad stuff outweighs the good stuff. And then you live with all the stuff I’ve mentioned before, along with this constant feeling that you’ve got to prove yourself because otherwise people won’t accept you.

Why am I writing all this?
For sympathy and/or reassurance? Quite possibly, yes (might as well be honest about it).
To make people I’m friends with from my schooldays feel bad? Definitely not: as far as I can tell, I don’t bear any ill will to anyone from those days – I prefer mending relationships to breaking them. I’m glad to be Facebook friends with a number of school peeps, and that a few of us were able to meet up last year and get on really well.
To get all this off my chest? Yes – I need an outlet and this, I’m afraid, is it.
To try and help people understand? Yes: to help people to try and understand what it’s like living with this, how it’s affected me and can affect others, how some of us can’t just “get over it” – believe me, we would love to! – but need a way to work through it and then past it.

And then perhaps to get people to think about how we treat each other. For all the talk of “being kind”, that often seems to extend only to people we know and like, often people who are like us or have similar tastes or opinions to us. For everybody else – well, then be as toxic as you like and screw the consequences.
But this stuff does have consequences and they can be so much worse than what I’ve been dealing with. And “being kind”, while important, only has true value if we’re willing to do so to people who might not be kind to us: not to make ourselves doormats for them to walk all over, but because nothing’s going to change if we don’t take that risk.

The roots of anxiety grow deep, spread quickly and can last a long time.