4 ms·

I was able to get better at rock climbing, but some people never get over a fear of heights. I've got borderline personality disorder. Consider a bad social enc

I was able to get better at rock climbing, but some people never get over a fear of heights. I've got borderline personality disorder. Consider a bad social encounter: for you, there might be some shame but your brush yourself off and figure out what to do differently next time. Now imagine instead, when you get home from the party or whatever, someone there follows you and screams at you for hours that you're a pathetic failure, how being social is hopeless, how you'll never make it, dissecting everything you did, until you're on the floor crying. Except that person is inside your own head. You'd probably just try to never go out and socialize again, it's just too painful. If you did, you'd then have double the painful memories, and what good would that do?

vorpalhex 7y ago
So obviously social anxiety in the formal, medical sense is a real thing. I've had friends who have struggled with it, and had very good luck working with therapists. I'm sure that it's still a struggle for them, but at least from an external perspective, they seem to socialize and form relationships just as well as everyone else now. Outside the formal anxiety sense, most people struggle with the negative feedback loop. The trick is that you can't simply turn it off - even if you're the best socializer in the history of humanity. For me, I set an informal timer (usually while journaling or in the shower) to intentionally introspect my interactions and pick one thing I felt I could have improved on ("I really wish I had said more than 'fine' when So-and-so asked me how my day was") and then move on. One lesson that's hard, for me and I suspect others, is that while it's very important to be polite, it's not your job to make everyone else feel happy or complete - that's not an excuse to go around being a jerk, but also don't feel you owe anyone else something by default. It's enough to have a conversation about the weather or let the other person complain about their boss some and offer a bit of empathy.

vorpalhex 7y ago

So obviously social anxiety in the formal, medical sense is a real thing. I've had friends who have struggled with it, and had very good luck working with therapists. I'm sure that it's still a struggle for them, but at least from an external perspective, they seem to socialize and form relationships just as well as everyone else now. Outside the formal anxiety sense, most people struggle with the negative feedback loop. The trick is that you can't simply turn it off - even if you're the best socializer in the history of humanity. For me, I set an informal timer (usually while journaling or in the shower) to intentionally introspect my interactions and pick one thing I felt I could have improved on ("I really wish I had said more than 'fine' when So-and-so asked me how my day was") and then move on. One lesson that's hard, for me and I suspect others, is that while it's very important to be polite, it's not your job to make everyone else feel happy or complete - that's not an excuse to go around being a jerk, but also don't feel you owe anyone else something by default. It's enough to have a conversation about the weather or let the other person complain about their boss some and offer a bit of empathy.