anyone else feel the same?

[ann]

Hi - I am new to this site - it is a huge relief finding other people in a similar position to me - think ive always suffered from SA and spent many years trying to combat it - it is up and down.

But one thing that I feel makes me feel worse and more anxious in social situations is the thought that others know how I am feeling - which might seem silly! but i feel some people can read my mind and know how anxious im feeling - or how insecure i am feeling in a social situation - which makes me totally unrelaxed - any tips at all on how to now think like this???? totally irrational to think this, but sometimes it's hard to think positively - I remember an old psychologist telling me to focus on other things in the room and not on yourself - maybe I will try and do that!

Thanks

[hardy]

people CANT read your mind they can only sense your anxiety. but then not as much as you think because a typical person with SA hides their anxiety much better than they themselves realise.

It can help to realise that others are more nervous than they look .Even the REALLY confident looking ones.

Try to divert youre attention away from how you are feeling towards helping OTHERS to feel less anxious !

[Innervision]

Welcome to sa-uk, ann.

Good points raised by Ian and Hardy.

I can well identify with your problem. I recall the days when I also felt totally vulnerable and exposed. I'd feel that all my inner thoughts and feelings were actually on show for the whole world to see.

It's easy to think this way when to us, our fears, thoughts and feelings are so vivid that we can almost taste them. They are so vividly real and all-consuming that it can feel that everyone around us must surely be able to see it too.

This actually isn't always the case. As Hardy mentioned, most SA people become expert at masking how they inwardly feel, despite still thinking everyone else can see it instantly.

I think that we sometimes are so convinced we've been 'found out' that we get agitated and some of the more perceptive people around us pick up that something is wrong, but they can't quite figure out what exactly. If we then pick up that they have spotted something, we automatically assume they know everything about how we inwardly feel, but in reality, they don't.

At the moment you are keeping alive a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy. You fear everyone knowing what you are feeling inside, so you concentrate on what is going on inside you and get more and more anxious. At the first hint you get that someone has noticed your discomfort, you may feel totally exposed and as though that person can read you like a book. This fuels more anxiety and more dwelling within your own negative thoughts.

The reality is that no one can read your mind. Perceptive people can pick up on our awkwardness or whatever, but they cannot get any genuine insight into us from this. Most people rarely ever notice ... even when we think we've given the game away bigtime. I used to blush like crazy and make excuses to leave a room, but few people ever realised what was really going on for me. You have as much 'mind reading' ability as anyone else alive, but how many minds can you actually read? My guess is none, and others cannot read your's either, no matter how much you fear they can.

Of course we all know that others cannot read our minds, but irrational SA thinking tells us otherwise, unfortunately.

I think my approach to this would be two-fold.
Firstly I'd try to be at peace with my potential for anxiety in social situations. What I mean is I'd acknowledge that yes, I may well blush a bit, I may well feel anxiety and apprehension. But I'd accept this as part of the way I am and not something to fear or see as the end of the world.

The reason for this being that if/when anxiety does kick in, I don't fuel it further by fearing it and fighting it. This means I can stay in the situation and let the anxiety burn itself out, which it always does. The fight or flight response to fear is a sharp, but short-lived one. So, if you can bluff through this short period, it passes a lot sooner.

I used this to beat a lifelong blushing problem, and it worked too. You see, it's the fear of it that fuels it, so remove the fear and it dies a lot sooner and eventually hardly ever kicks in. It's the inner conflict we experience that manifests outwardly as our discomfort in the situation we are in, so if we are more accepting of our anxiety we lessen the inner conflict and the outward discomfort shown. This in turn, dampens the anxiety and robs it of the fuel it needs to thrive.

So the key is to accept, but not fear, the fact that anxiety might kick in, and also keeping in mind that unless those around us are Paul McKenna, Derren Brown or a body language expert, they are not genuinely going to be able to know what is really going on inside us, and even those guys can only make educated guesses as to what is going on for us.

With the above fixed in my mind I'd then use distraction to divert my attention from inside me to my outside experiencing. It's a case of acknowledging what is going on inside, but not dwelling on it. I'd try to concentrate on helping others to relax around me. I'd take in what others are saying and concentrate on them rather than myself. All the time accepting and acknowledging what is going on inside me rather than denying it, but certainly not dwelling on it. You can consciously and actively keep your focus external whilst still realising that there is some anxiety going on inside you. It's about acceptance, not denial. Strange as it may sound, acceptance of what might happen is often more productive than fighting what might happen, because the constant vigilance needed to look out for any hint of pending anxiety, then the intense fear of it when it shows up are guaranteed to pour fuel on the flames and make the anxiety intense, and it's when it's this intense that we just can't believe that others have not got automatic access to our entire inner though processes.