{"id":676,"date":"2024-12-21T20:27:37","date_gmt":"2024-12-21T20:27:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sonne.sonverrid.org\/sanctuary\/?p=676"},"modified":"2024-12-21T20:31:29","modified_gmt":"2024-12-21T20:31:29","slug":"social-anxiety-5-22-2009","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sonne.sonverrid.org\/sanctuary\/blog\/2024\/12\/21\/social-anxiety-5-22-2009\/","title":{"rendered":"“Social Anxiety” (5\/22\/2009)"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

“Social Anxiety” (5\/22\/2009)<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Last night I was looking up information on anxiety disorders, not in relevance to myself though, and came across information on social anxiety disorder.  Granted, I\u2019ve heard about it before, years ago, yet I never actually took time to read a decent description of it and the typical symptoms associated with it.  I\u2019m not aiming to give myself a definite self-diagnosis of having social anxiety disorder (SAD), instead considering how greatly I fit the description and usual symptoms except for the level of intensity that is shown with the actual disorder, I\u2019m apt to currently think of myself as being somewhere between \u201cvery shy\u201d and having SAD, or just simply me having a seemingly rather mild form of the disorder.  It\u2019s not, however, something I feel I can attribute to just shyness because it goes beyond that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The thing is, I have also never thought of it as being like a disorder for me, as it being a \u2018not quite right\u2019 functioning of my mind, behaviors, and reactions until in January when I started finally delving into my socializations and trying to understand better why I do the things I do pertaining to those.  It led me to putting more pieces together about social influences in my childhood and adolescence, from peers and family, primarily.  My exploring into those matters of mine in January and February this year coupled with factors related to people in my social life (and feeling like I didn\u2019t have stable or close enough relationships with people important to me) along with still subconsciously adjusting to living on my own, I ended up experiencing a sort of amplification further, on and off, of my social problems, which may have been taking the form of anxiety some of those times.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I don\u2019t seem to show a sense of being actually phobic<\/em> of most social situations, even though public-oriented ones often make me uncomfortable, so I can handle them the vast majority of the time pretty well without getting scared or panicky.  However, I also think that I have been consciously and subconsciously rather tactical, so to speak, in managing these \u2018not quite normal\u2019 social behaviors and reactions through a variety of techniques over years.  I became quite keen at avoiding most situations that would lead to the most noticeable and difficult emotional reactions, particularly after identifying over time what those circumstances were that would set me off.  Rather than dealing with my social anxiety much as an active disorder (in the way of physical and noticeable emotional symptoms), I found numerous ways to stop myself from even having to experience it except in uncommon situations or in symptoms that manifested as milder and more manageable.  Another form of coping came through in automated, almost instinctive-like behaviors which allow for more simplistic and emotionally distant ways of handling social situations that make me uncomfortable.  Some of these behaviors I\u2019ve described before as being connected to my therianthropic prey-mindset, and to be honest, even with recognizing them as forms of social anxiety (or the means by which to cope with such), I still believe they are related to the prey-mindsets of my theriotypes, particularly because I already believe that my therianthropy in part, if not largely, was a result of post-birth and childhood factors.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Tracing the influences back to my childhood, I can remember well that I experienced a lot of regular criticism, ostracizing, and humiliation from other students (mainly those in the same class grade as me), from my siblings, and to some but lesser extents, from adults.  I was never bullied in a physical sense (minus physical, mild-level fighting with my siblings), instead people just sort of fucked with me and showed repeatedly their ongoing dislike in me even being part of their classes by bothering me, primarily in the ways I mentioned above.  It continues to make me feel like I was sort of \u2018conditioned\u2019 into my social behaviors through years of common negative socializations toward me from various people around me, at school and at home.  During elementary and almost all of middle school I would always aspire to \u2018fit in\u2019 and conform better to how the other students \u201cshould be\u201d, maybe as unsuccessful attempts to get people to accept me and so that I could feel I actually \u2018belonged\u2019 amongst them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But my social conditioning strengthened my thoughts that I didn\u2019t want to be the center of attention, or to lead other people (so teamwork assignments still don\u2019t sit with me well, as almost always I end up having to be the team leader\u2014that and I end up doing the majority of the work anyway, so I prefer to work alone on academic assignments), because I was afraid of what that could lead to: criticism and embarrassment if I did something wrong, and I would manage to convince myself that I would make a mistake or appear in a way that people would have the desire to criticize me for it.  I still think and act that way, as I still remain highly sensitive to most criticism, and I hate making mistakes and when I make one, especially if another person points it out to me, then many times (depending on the mistake) I will go through it in my head for hours afterwards shaming myself for screwing up; all while fully acknowledging at the same time that I am being too hard on myself and irrational.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Technically, I very rarely at this point get criticism, am pointed out in an embarrassing way, or such things, and even most of the \u2018criticism\u2019 I get is actually just one of those situations I stated above when someone is pointing out a mistake I made, which in all honesty I would prefer to acknowledge my mistakes so that I can try not to repeat them in the future.  Yet my mind runs almost constantly, when I\u2019m around people that I\u2019m not personally close to (like friends or family), in a way geared toward thinking that any and everyone is a potential person who may criticize me, even if only in their minds.  I am very often in public situations running a sort of automated \u2018program\u2019 based on that which leads me to behave in ways that reduce the likelihood that anyone will even notice me, let alone remember me for longer than a few minutes or so.  I can even argue with this \u2018program\u2019, as I question why the hell I\u2019m doing such stupid things because I\u2019m afraid it will drag attention to me (many times regardless of whether its negative or positive attention), even if those people would only notice me for a few seconds and probably not remember me for much beyond that, and my questioning and also thoughts to change those specific behaviors end up failing most times.  The social anxiety reactions have over years integrated themselves into my instinct-like automatic reactions and socializations, and thus conscious recognition of them as not being useful or being irrational does little to no good.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yet because they are so automatic, it\u2019s made it very easy for me to not even realize until this year that this is not the way that I should<\/em> be functioning, and that it\u2019s not just something like my \u2018natural disposition\u2019 or something I can simply attribute to being introverted or shy.  This isn\u2019t only minor discomfort in social situations, though it\u2019s not an active phobia either\u2014it\u2019s a deep-seated alteration of my behaviors and ways of thinking over ten years ago toward a manner that would \u2018protect\u2019 my mind from the social anxiety feelings\/emotions.  It\u2019s like having the behaviors and symptoms minus the notable emotional response because years ago my brain saw to managing a sort of barrier between actively experiencing the bad, anxious, fearful, or depressing emotions, and just exhibiting odd but still seeming well functioning social behaviors.  So it kind of leaves me to wonder if it\u2019s a better idea to leave those symptoms, and thus those coping mechanisms, as they are, or go back to trying to tear them down progressively, as I was barely beginning a few months ago before a gave in and shot the barriers back up again. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

A related mention of this coping mechanism was in a SAD article<\/a>: \u201cSocial anxiety disorder symptoms can change over time. They may flare up if you’re facing a lot of stress or demands. Or if you completely avoid situations that would usually make you anxious, you may not have symptoms.<\/strong> Although avoidance may allow you to feel better in the short term, your anxiety is likely to persist over the long term if you don’t get treatment\u201d (bolding mine).  It thus gives me and others the appearance that I don\u2019t have a \u2018disordered\u2019 social functioning other than run-of-the-mill shyness or moderate introversion, including that it\u2019s tricked me for all but recently.  Without the active, noticeable symptoms of anxiety or depression caused by the social situations (which I had them sometimes, but they were so uncommon that I attributed them to being a normal response of nervousness), I lacked until this year the conscious acknowledgment that there was anything even \u2018wrong\u2019 with the way I\u2019ve been functioning socially.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I kind of wonder if I could have ended up with a \u2018full\u2019 form (an intense level, that is) of social anxiety disorder, had I not either been conditioned to automate these behaviors and responses and\/or subconsciously integrate them into my instinctive-like behaviors.  Would it be worse to leave them as they are and continue avoiding the social situations that the \u2018automatic program\u2019 aspects can\u2019t handle (as in, the ones that would lead to negative active, emotional reactions)?  Or would it be worse to tear them down and risk exposing myself to social situations in a less coping form\u2014in a way that would leave me feeling more vulnerable and quite likely further amplify the bad emotional responses of my social anxiety?  I mean that rhetorically, actually, because it\u2019s something I have to decide for myself based on weighing the benefits and risks of each possibility.  What I think I\u2019m more likely to do, though, is to slowly work toward \u2018reconditioning\u2019 myself in some ways socially in order to reduce the underlying social anxiety and thoughts I have toward certain social situations, and from there I can then (or progressively at the same time) be reshaping my behaviors and those integrated \u201cinstinctive responses\u201d.  That technique sounds better and more feasible than first tearing down the barriers\/coping mechanisms (even just one or two specific ones) and trying to change myself from there because the latter goes with the method of tearing down problem areas from the \u2018outside\u2019, per se, and working toward the inner, underlying aspects (emotional) in healing, rather than healing from the \u2018inside (emotional) to the outside (behavioral)\u2019.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Getting back to the details and manifestations of the social anxiety symptoms, I can recall some of the times when the emotional symptoms would strongly act up, not like panic attacks but as feelings of depression, despair, or distress.  It tends to happen when I am around someone, anyone (even close friends or family members) for two or more days straight with no privacy besides brief times in bathrooms, such as when traveling and visiting places.  Those symptoms tended to be milder when I was in middle school considering I managed to go to camp each summer for a week and didn\u2019t get much in the way of privacy and alone time, though by my eighth grade trip to New York City (which lasted 4-7 days, I think) I was starting to experience the symptoms more strongly and had gotten numerous occurrences of feeling very discontent, depressed, and anxious to get away from everyone and just \u201cgo back home\u201d.  The symptoms proved to have intensified even more a few years later when, during the summer after my junior year in high school, I went to a Governor\u2019s School of the Arts program that involved staying in a dorm with a roommate and doing various art-oriented activities in a campus-like setting for three weeks.  I was okay for a few days, but by the end of the first week I was already getting rather uncomfortable and depressed, and I began using whatever free time we got to only stay in my dorm room by myself because I wanted that privacy and wanted to be alone.  There were also times when I wondered if I was going to make it through the full 3 weeks because I had such a strong desire to just go back home, with my family, pets, familiarity, and my own, private room.  I stuck through it though and was very glad the day I left that place.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And honestly, I\u2019ve been bullshitting myself and people on my LJ friends list for years regarding my \u2018art slump\u2019.  I\u2019ve attempted to attribute it to a myriad of different things, but I\u2019m increasingly realizing this year that I have been ultimately making up excuses for an underlying problem that led to, and causes the persistence of, my artist\u2019s block and lack of ability (or consistent motivation) to finish any but one or two pieces a year of visual art.  It relates to my social anxiety along with built up, unresolved issues about how social influences for my career path affected the choices I was making in that direction for the majority of my school life.  Year after year, person after person, beat it into my head that I was \u2018destined\u2019, so to speak, to become a visual artist, often times with them wanting me to become \u201ca famous artist\u201d\u2014and considering how much attention such a position would give me, which I didn\u2019t want, and that it would be ridiculously hard for me to attain when that\u2019s not what I even wanted to do with my art (be rich and famous with it), the famous part wasn\u2019t something I strived for.  However, I did strive to be a visual artist, and thinking that I was being simply \u2018true to me\u2019 by choosing a path of digital art, preferably at the time of wanting to go into digital painting for movie effects; so I was being different in my goals from what people encouraged me to do, yet not as different as I led myself to believe.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

My senior year, after experiencing the less than wonderment of Governor\u2019s School for the Arts and the discomfort that gave me, including that all but one or two artists in the visual arts program (out of 31 besides me) were notably better in their art than me, and then a few months later I got unpleasant, not really helpful, criticism from about 8 college representatives looking for visual art students.  I became disconnected from my art because I realized I was following a lie\u2014I had spent most of my school life striving for a career goal (in art) that was not right for me and was not what I honestly wanted to do with my life.  I love my artwork, and I really want to complete more pieces, for myself, and as giftart when I choose, yet I keep hitting the mental wall that holds me back from much of that because of what my artwork remains associated with in my subconscious mind now, and for the past 5-6 years.  Those associations, including ones caused by social anxiety problems, continue to restrain my artistic ability and productivity, which I have been discontent with for years.  I can consider that some form of interference with something that is important to me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

My social anxiety, however, has not really affected me academically.  I excel pretty well in academics, maintaining A\u2019s most of the time, and sometimes B\u2019s, and it\u2019s generally fairly easy, minus some stress primarily from my typical procrastination habit (something I know a lot of people do as well).  Yet I\u2019m kind of weird when it comes to my grades: if a grade is reported as distinctly wrong, then I will make sure it is corrected to the proper grade, but even if the teacher\/professor has a curve designed for the class grades or at the end of the semester decides to drop the lowest test grade (when that wasn\u2019t something s\/he stated s\/he would do earlier in the semester), I feel like my grade is being reported \u201cwrong\u201d.  It leads me to feel like my honest grade is not being reported, even if I gain notable benefit from that raised grade (such as going from a B to an A grade), or still if my original grade would have kept me in the same grade level as the increased one.  This is part of my insistence on being honest, although for those situations I don\u2019t act on it (as I have to convince myself mentally that it\u2019s okay for the grade to be raised above what I actually earned, because besides, it was the professor\u2019s choice anyway).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Throughout school my grades were good, and I was most often one of, if not the very top person grade-wise in my classes, so I didn\u2019t have reason to fear people criticizing me or me being embarrassed because of my grades.  I may have nevertheless still held some irrational fear over being judged and criticized for my academic grades, yet considering I often got positive feedback from people on them such didn\u2019t seem to manifest as prominently.  Although I eventually developed behaviors and interactions that involved not letting people know I did so well academically, which was heightened the most after I graduated high school (and therefore left behind all those people who already knew me as being a \u201csmart person\u201d as they called me) and entered college.  Outside of teachers, my family, and my close friends, I don\u2019t let people know my specific or general grades.  I feel like if they know about my grades they will either scoff at me and be jealous because I\u2019m \u2018smarter\u2019 than them, or that they will try to use it to their benefit by wanting to take advantage of me (\u201chelp me with this assignment\u201d or possibly thinking I would help them during a test, among other such situations), on the account that both of those have happened many times during my years in school.  This was like that people gave me so much positive feedback on my art, yet I also got a lot of people approaching me with jealously about it or wanting to use me for my art so that they could get free artwork to show around and them get special attention for such.  So my academics and artwork have a sort of different association with my social anxiety\u2019s manifestations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

My social anxiety, I must admit, has had a benefit in keeping me quite an honest person.  Now I can be prone in certain circumstances to hiding parts of the truth of a matter, and it\u2019s not like I never lie, but I quite often uphold strongly me being honest most of the time even if it makes me uncomfortable to not lie.  I\u2019ve had numerous situations in which I screwed up or did something stupid, like for some class, and I ran through possible lies that I could state to the person dealing with the situation (like a teacher\/professor), and each time I feel bad for considering the lies, not just because of some morality, but equally if not more so because I\u2019m irrationally afraid that the person will find out I lied and to me the potential<\/em> outcome of someone finding out I lied scares me more than just admitting I did something stupid and made a mistake.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Thinking about this social anxiety of mine has led me to think more about a fear of mine that I\u2019ve had for years and tried to cope and compensate for it many time, so much that I didn\u2019t realize until recently that it was even an actual fear.  That fear being me appearing weak and vulnerable to other people, though not necessarily in a physical strength sort of way, instead it deals more with the \u2018strength\u2019 in my personality traits, willpower, and ability to help those people and things that I care about.  In my personal symbolism, characters like Vash from Trigun<\/em>, Peter, Claire, and Nathan from season 1 of Heroes<\/em>, and my favorite character that I\u2019ve created, Angellore, are some examples of personalities and characters that I really look up to\u2014that I admire and find personally inspiring as I walk through my paths in life.  I also hold a strong \u2018angel\u2019 symbolism that I associate and identify with a lot, including through my white phantom wings, and part of the aspects (morals and virtues) encompassed by that angel symbol\/archetype for me are guardianship, willpower and determination, sentinelism, devotion in love and loyalty, and compassion.  Within the past year or two those symbols for me have been extra pronounced in the frequency and level of importance they hold to me on a regular basis. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

My character, Angellore, represents me a lot in a scifi\/fantasy way, and that she holds my angel symbolism through her appearances that are seemingly \u201cangelic\u201d in some ways, and through her personality that includes those aspects I mentioned above.  Yet she is also in various other ways not angelic in appearance, let alone appearing fully, acceptably human, so she has an alternate form that is a purely human appearance which allows her to function around other people\u2014it\u2019s like wearing a sort of full-body mask or disguise so that she can live a relatively normal life and especially have a social life, even if no one sees the \u201creal\u201d her unless they get very personally close and she chooses to reveal herself.  Though it\u2019s not just her appearance that changes, there are ways she acts and presents herself differently, personality-wise, in her human rather than \u2018humanoid\u2019 form; though I haven\u2019t yet worked out the details enough about those differences, I just mainly have a vague understanding of them.  As her \u2018true\u2019 appearance, the one she is most comfortable as, she is also the most limited in her abilities to help others and be the \u2018angelic\u2019 ways she has such longings to be, and she\u2019s afraid to let people, even those close to her, see or continue to see the real her\u2014physically and personality-wise.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There\u2019s much more to her character as well, yet that gives the relevant basics for this subject, because in those ways I described above, she stands as a character that personally represents some of my own conflicts and \u2018appearances\u2019 (though obviously not physical ones, as those are for amplified symbolism).  Metaphorically like her, I wear a \u2018full body mask\u2019 of normality to blend in, to hide amongst other people, and veer away from people seeing the \u201creal\u201d me, including my important desires to be helpful, protecting, devoted, and so forth (those \u2018angelic\u2019 traits), particularly out of fear of ridicule, scrutiny, and active ostracizing, while also wanting to be comfortable enough to let people see my weaknesses because of not feeling concern with them about such.  In some formats, like online, I tend to feel a little more comfortable appearing stronger, yet sometimes it results in me going to greater lengths to keep it up as a certain image to the point that I use it sometimes to compensate for me fear of exposing my vulnerabilities.  Even in my photos, I want to appear as the \u2018strong, noble-minded\u2019 person that I feel I am, yet letting through a genuine smile, or any of various other emotions in photos, video, let alone in audio of my voice, are things I have avoided notably.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The negative socializations in my childhood and adolescence that likely led to the chronic form of my social anxiety probably contributed quite a bit to my fears of letting people know my weaknesses and vulnerabilities, even down to health\/medical related problems of mine.  And while I have been exploring my social issues along with my work with Horse, those things have made me feel particularly vulnerable for obvious reasons, so I have become increasingly withdrawn from talking about myself and my life in general online, like in my journal or in personal essays, to the point that I stopped posting entries altogether for about a month and then only under certain friends filters (as most of my entries this year have not been visible to my whole friends list).  When I feel really vulnerable, I also feel less trusting of people and it leads me to refrain a lot more from opening up to other people that I either don\u2019t feel can relate much to what I\u2019m saying, or seem to show little to no interest in those subjects I\u2019m torn anyway about sharing, or that I otherwise do not have the personal closeness or comfort in letting them read my thoughts on these problems in my life and self.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s interesting how I can make such large strides in improving myself in numerous ways, before and after I moved out to live on my own, within the past couple of years, yet my social anxiety has continued to intensify in some areas of my life (though in some others it may instead be improving; that\u2019s something I have to look into more over time).  The internet, more specifically my interactions in the therianthropy community and my journal, have provided me the best option so far in socializing with people more openly and more like my real self than in-person interactions have been for me.  And my online interactions allow me to do some reconditioning of my thoughts by helping me be more okay with assertive speaking, talking about my problems, and being able to share in some similar interests and thoughts with a variety of people while having a much less intense worry that I will be negatively viewed by those people.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

However, interactions on the internet, though helpful and nice, do not and cannot fully stand in place of offline and in-person social interactions, which I have been low on outside of a couple of family members (my mother and one of my sisters) and a couple of short times when Jason and I were on good terms, since I left high school.  I went through two years of community college like a \u2018ghost\u2019, not dragging any notable attention to myself accept as my grades, and those were only known for the most part by the professors of my classes, and I didn\u2019t even try to develop any level of relationship with any except one of my professors there, which I have similarly followed suit at the university I\u2019m attending now (though all of my courses have been large lecture classes so far except 4 labs, and I didn\u2019t try to develop relationships with students or instructors in those).  Although I did take a step by joining Zoology Club, and even took up being an officer in that club (one I\u2019m better suited for and involves less social stuff: webmaster), and that\u2019s nevertheless progress, plus that I did make a friend in one of my classes and I hope to remain friends with her at the least through the rest of my next year there (and preferably longer).  I still remain in need of balancing my socializations offline better.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Now a rather big, important aspect affected by my social anxiety that even in writing this I have been holding off talking about deals with my environmentalism interests and goals.  I tried delving into learning more about environmental issues, and though I\u2019ve progressed in greatly increasing my knowledge about some of those (with much more I could learn of them), and that I tried to find ways to \u2018empower\u2019 me to dive deeper and more persistently into environmental activism, yet I wound up withdrawing again and re-established my barriers associated with that topic (I can barely bring myself to read about that topic now).  When I think about it now, one problem I can see in how I went about that is that I was looking for people whom I could relate to (in books, primarily) in the devotion and thoughts I have and feel regarding environmentalism and ecology, and that there were people who struggled through being open and active in trying to help out in the areas of those things, and further that maybe they could indirectly help me find my way to embracing environmental activism.  However, the issue came in that as similar as their situations may have sometimes seemed to mine, such as through the thoughts and emotions they described, even despair and continued struggle in maintaining optimism and hope, they still ended up subconsciously feeling like \u2018normal\u2019 people to me (or rather, people who didn\u2019t have socially anxious issues like mine).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Environmental activism and continued devotion to that activism can be for many people, myself of course included, very difficult, tasking, and quite an ongoing obstacle to not just \u2018run away\u2019 in apathy, pacifism, or being overwhelmed in hopelessness, despair, and pessimism about the ability to actually help to a worthwhile extent.  For me, though, that remains true with an additional obstacle on top of it: my social anxiety.  It wasn\u2019t even until this year, just a few months ago, that I came clean to others about my environmental concerns and interests in helping, to more than 2-4 people (and only one of those people had previously known about it being a deeply important matter to me).  It\u2019s something I had wanted to do for years, yet I always worried to irrational extents about admitting it. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The people who think that such a task for me to open up initially (and even farther that I have and would like to go with it) should have been so easy, or at the least significantly easier than I showed it to be for me, just end up contributing some bit more to my misconceived negative thoughts about me being open and honest regarding my environmentalism thoughts.  I\u2019ve for over a decade of my 23 years of life feared consistently the backlash, or even just more subtle judging and ostracizing I would get from people, both active environmentalists and not.  I have worried and dreaded that they would \u2018reject\u2019 me or scrutinize me for any of various reasons, including that I have not been \u2018active enough\u2019 in environmentalism, that I wasn\u2019t born into a family that already had significant environmentalist concerns and activism, or that other people would think poorly of me for wanting to join with people for actively finding, initiating, and sustaining solutions to environmental problems.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Environmentalism has decades worth of getting a bad rap, to say the least, and that\u2019s something numerous people have written about in articles and books, and considering I grew up in a family and area that had rather low levels of environmental concern, let alone positive activism, environmentalists were often in my childhood shunned, laughed at, or generally not taken seriously.  So I bottled up those thoughts and hid them for roughly 12 years to all but a few people, and only letting one, Jason, know that ecological problems are of very deep concern and interest of mine, because he was the only one I really trusted up to this year in sharing that information with.  Something that holds so much importance to me, seemingly higher than any other particular thing, person, or interest of mine, environmentalism has really been the most difficult to allow it the open \u2018exposure\u2019 from me to be at risk for scrutiny, dislike, rejection, and other negative responses.  I hold it so deeply dear to me that until this year, finding the courage in myself to get around the irrational worry and anxiety related to talking about it with others (and being actually more active about it), ended up in failed attempt time and time again, because I couldn\u2019t bring myself to take and tolerate negative, direct responses toward my thoughts and emotions on a love, care, and concern that deep within me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yet, I nevertheless faced that fear finally to some extent and was honest to everyone on my LJ friends list, regardless of how many people actually read that entry (or any of the following similar posts of that topic), and I was thankful to get the positive feedback I did in comments for it.  Though speaking with Jason that night, quite shortly after I submitted the entry, was the most positive feedback that I got, and probably could have gotten, and I remain very grateful for that.  Since that post, though, my fear didn\u2019t stay away as much as I wanted it to, and I suppose that\u2019s kind of unsurprising because it has been manifest in me for so many years of my life that I can\u2019t realistically expect it to be gone, or even greatly subsided by one or a few environmentalism posts in my online journal over the course of a month.  It will continue to take time and effort to face that fear more and \u2018train\u2019 it out of me in some ways, and that will probably be a relatively slow journey before I reach a proper enough level of balance in it that I\u2019m seeking.  Along the way to managing that (among some other social problems), I know I will need good social and emotional support from a few key people in my life, and hopefully an additional group of supporting friends and acquaintances.  It\u2019s \u2018healing\u2019 I really want to succeed at eventually, and without the help and support of some others, I know I\u2019m much less apt to reach those goals successfully.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“Social Anxiety” (5\/22\/2009) Last night I was looking up information on anxiety disorders, not in relevance to myself though, and came across information on social anxiety disorder.  Granted, I\u2019ve heard about it before, years ago, yet I never actually took time to read a decent description of it and the<\/p>\n

Continue reading“Social Anxiety” (5\/22\/2009)<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13,16],"tags":[47],"class_list":["post-676","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-miscellaneous","category-misc-other","tag-mental-health"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sonne.sonverrid.org\/sanctuary\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/676","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sonne.sonverrid.org\/sanctuary\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sonne.sonverrid.org\/sanctuary\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sonne.sonverrid.org\/sanctuary\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sonne.sonverrid.org\/sanctuary\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=676"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/sonne.sonverrid.org\/sanctuary\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/676\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":678,"href":"https:\/\/sonne.sonverrid.org\/sanctuary\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/676\/revisions\/678"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sonne.sonverrid.org\/sanctuary\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=676"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sonne.sonverrid.org\/sanctuary\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=676"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sonne.sonverrid.org\/sanctuary\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=676"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}