What is the root cause behind your social anxiety??

Hi,
I thought that I'd post this because I think it could be rewarding to go through a list of possible causes of social anxiety/phobia. I figure that if we pool together our own ideas of what we think is behind our social anxiety, that this could enable us to better pin-point what could be the root cause for SA.

So, I figure I'll start off first. And I'll start with how I was as a child...

I was extremely sensitive to any stimulation. Sensitve and moody. I was also extremely creative, had a few imaginary friends and an elaborate imagination. Also, from a very young age I was very self-concious; if ever much attention was directed at me I would cry and fall apart. And a few years ago when I tried marijuana for the first and only time, I had a strong sensation of feeling more acutely self-concious, that felt as though I was a 5 year old again, even more exposed to being effected by the outside. I also recall being stopped from joining my siblings and cousins for a walk outside, due to my tendency to fall over a lot (I was very clumsy) and my highly over-protective grandmother who controlled practically everyone around her. And when I threw a tantrum in rebellion I was only ignored, which I found even more frustrating. -And I think that this last one was a key factor, in that it struck a key that resonated throughout y childhood -which was that I seemed to get the message that I was incapable and imcompetent.

Also, my grandmother was highly anxious, obsessive, most likely socially phobic, a real control freak; and more than a few members in her family were all obsessive perfectionists, controlling and were highly insular and seemed scared of the outside world and of change.

...anyhow, I wrote more than I wanted to. So maybe we can just compare things like childhood and family to see what there is in common.
Then maybe, if there's interest, we could get into the nitty-gritty of how we think when we experience anxiety and general personality.

Bye for now,
Muffet

Genes and environment. Sounds like you got the genes and the environment you were in contributed. My grandfather and father are/were socially withdrawn, especially my grandfather. He basically stays in his house all day and builds furniture and rarely goes anywhere except the store. He's always drinking beer too. Probably to calm down his anxiety. So, I got the genes from them. Gee, thanks.... I'm somewhat clumsy too and wasn't very good at sports(I didn't really like them much when I was a kid anyway), but I wouldn't say I fall/fell over a lot. Maybe it's related.

i was going to post a thread like this (is that wat u call it??) but did it for me thanks ..lol

i was teased when i was in elementary, i still am sumtimes but not as much.

my mom was controlling over me...everything i did i had to do it her way, when she wanted to do it, and she'd do it for me. like for example when i got home from school she'd wash my feet and arms and face herself then she'd tell me to go to my room..well it wasnt really my room it was hers...or taking a bath i could only do it once a week and she'd undress me like a freaking doll or sumthing and wash me :evil: until i was like 12..just sum examples...

my dad said he use to have anxiety attacks but only when he had to tallk infront of the class..so i dunno it could be genetic...

my moms shy so maybe i learned it from her...my parents and aunts/uncle use to say i always wanted attention from ppl and talked a lot but now im quiet and shy and they think thats weird...

yea thats pretty much it... :x

I don't follow the crowd.

LittleMissMuffet

I wrote this a while back but thought it worth repeating.

What is Anxiety?

A state of mind (appearance to mind) characterised by feelings of mental pain, fear and unease which functions to make our mind unpeaceful and uncontrolled. It arises in dependence on certain causes and conditions which result in our mind generating mistaken conceptions and views of ourself, others and our world.

According to this definition, anxiety is a state of mind, it is completely internal, so we can, if we wish have complete power over it. It is internal, so we need not look anywhere else than our mind if we wish to tackle this problem. It functions to make our mind unpeaceful and uncontrolled, therefore it is a negative state of mind which really only functions to bring us harm, pain and more problems. When anxiety arises in our mind we become out of control, anxiety becomes our controller, under its destructive and completely deceptive influence.
Anxiety is not our self and is not an intrinsic part of who we are, so there is no need to identify ourself with it whatsoever. Our mind is like a clear blue sky, anxiety is like the dark clouds that appear in the sky but are not the sky itself. It arises in our mind in dependece on certain causes and conditions. External conditions, such as other people, situations and so on act as a contributing cause of anxiety arising but are not the substantial cause of our anxiety. Just like heat and light are conditions that cause a plant to grow but are not the substantial cause of the existence of the plant. If there were no seed, the source of the plant, it could not grow, no matter how much heat or light are given.

The source or seed of our anxiety exists within our own mind. Because we have generated anxiety in the past previously, there exists within our mind seed-like potentials, like memories, which are the source or substantial cause of our anxiety. Whenever we encounter anyone or anything, both real or imagined, who acts as a necessary condition for generating this anxious mind, our seed potential will ripen as the appearance of pain and fear in our mind. This causes our mind to become unpeaceful and uncontrolled and we are deceived or fooled into being frightened of our world, thinking we are afraid of certain things or people.
The more we become anxious, the more we programme our mind to become anxious in the future. We need to break this nasty habit now if we wish to be happier in the future.

Another cause of anxiety is anyone or anything we observe when we develop anxiety, directly perceived or even remembered. When our mind comes into contact with this (object of our mind), it thinks about it, we get anxious. For example, we are afraid to speak to our work colleague. Our colleague is, in our mind, the object whom we observe. Whenever we directly perceive this person or rememeber this person, we feel a degree of anxiety. Although this person causes us anxiety, they do not directly from their own side give us anxiety. It's only how our mind observes this person (the object of our mind) that causes anxiety. So although people and things do not directly cause anxiety, they are still classed as causes of anxiety because they contribute to the generation of anxiety in our mind. People are not scary or indeed frightening. Our mind however creates scariness and is frightening.

Familiarity is also another cause of anxiety because we habituate or we become routinely anxious. It's like deeply ingrained within us. It's like when we get out of bed and then make a cup of tea and start to feel awake. In a routine way we go into situations and develop anxiety almost spontaneously without any effort or thinking on our part.

Innapropriate attention also causes our mind to generate anxiety, its what actually causes our mind to focus mistakenly. For example, before and after any social situation for most, if not all social phobics, their attention will be focused innapropriately in a negative way. A tendency of over-analysis of one's performance or past performances in social situations leads to generating anxiety. This is negative self-evaluation focusing on faults of our self and is completely unecessary

This mind of anxiety is our real enemy, many people say anxiety is the result of negative thinking and that it is not the cause of further anxiety because it's a result of certain ways of thinking. This however is not entirely accurate because anxiety is a state of mind it can arise in differing degrees or strenghts. Some times our anxiety appears strongly and is unbearable and at other times our anxiety is very mild like low level unease. We can think thoughts one day and feel anxious about them and yet we can think the same thoughts another day and yet no or little anxiety appears at all. Why is this? Because it depends on causes and conditions as to what state of mind we are in. If our mind is really peaceful, we can think about giving a speech to hundreds of people without feeling anxious, yet if our mind is already unpeaceful say we are rushing around or are angry about something or upset and depressed then the slightest thing or thought can make us extremely anxious. This proves that thoughts alone are not the only cause of anxiety. Sometimes we can go out and feel great, other times we can feel really anxious. This is why social phobia is very misleading, some times we seem ok and other times we seem really out of it and afraid over what appears to be nothing at all.

wish i knew what the problem was with me. I love going out and spending time with people. Just can't do it as freely as I would like due to SA.

Scatmantom

Where do you experience anxiety?

This is where you will find your problem.

Hi Little Miss Muffett,

When I read your story it really resonated with me. I was an only child and my parents doted on me to an extreme extent. They would worry about everything and I felt that I was wrapped in cotton wool. They never let me do any chores or anything around the house when I lived there and so I had no experience of responsibility. My mum has a social anxiety although we have never talked about it, and she is a compulsive eater, which I am at times (and used to binge eat when I was a teenager).
I was a very shy child and found it extremely difficult to mingle. My mum is an extreme people pleaser and that is where I get it from, although I have the strength of my dad and the individuality to not please everyone.
It seems nurture rather than nature has made us who we are.
xxx

I get serious anxiety when I do things for the first time or go to places for the first time. Most nights out I get anxious even tho I love to go out...

I think Im just naturally anxious

I don't really know what the root of my phobia is. Just that as long as I can remember I've been nervous around people and new situations that I haven't encountered before.

This is going to be reeeeeeeeeeaaally long...sorry

Ok...here's my life story, lol. When I was two years old I was seperated from my teenage mother and placed into foster care. The seperation was traumatising...I was put into a much worse situation at my first foster home where my foster dad molested me and played mind games with me. That all happened before I was school age.

When I was 6 I was moved to another foster home and here my foster parents were physically abusive to me on a daily basis and made me live locked in the basement on a blanket on the floor and only brought me bread and water to eat. They were also mentally abusive making me believe I was a bad girl and it was my fault I was being punished. They told me nobody wanted me and that I deserved to be in prison. They also made me clean the house and would punch me, pull my hair, hit me, pinch me, spit on me, etc if I didn't do things well enough to please them. They made me do strange things like lick a toilet bowl and putting flavored extracts on my tongue which burned.

At school I kept to myself and did well on tests and in class, but I was always getting in trouble for not doing my homework so I would have to stand outside as punishment during recess while other children played. I had a hard time talking to other children and I feared authority.

Finally I was moved into a third foster home. When I first got there my foster mom tried to give me a hug. I thought she was going to hit me, so I ducked and covered my head and stayed curled up on the floor crying. This foster home turned out to be a really good home and I came out of my shell a little bit and started playing with other children and developing confidence.

Unfortunately, when I was 9 I was adopted. Everyone always tries to tell me how lucky I am to be adopted, but seriously, I wish I could have just stayed at my third foster home. My adoptive parents were very cold, yelled and hit a lot, and believed strongly in discipline. I was never allowed to go out with friends because i was always "grounded" for stupid reasons. I wasn't even allowed to be free inside the house. My dad always made us sit on the couch. If we even got up to go to the bathroomhe would be like "where do you think you're going?" and he'd give us a time limit on when we had to come back.

I always felt better at school than going home. I felt like I was living in a prison at home and walking on eggshells around my parents. My dad gave me black eyes and busted lips sometimes, but usually he never left a mark so I couldn't prove that he was a bad parent. My parents were well respected members of the community, very active in church (actually head of property committee) and had great paying jobs in the Department of Revenues for the state. No one would take my brother, sister, or I seriously when we complained about our parents. I ran away when I was 18 to another state and didn't return for 5 years. When I did return, my parents wouldn't let me spend the night and made my husband and I sleep in our truck at a church parking lot.

Since I ran away my sister took my parents to court and got herself emancipated. I am proud of her but sad because we were very close and we have lost contact. The reason I went back home was to help my brother get out of that house. He was 20 years old and my parents were still controlling him and treating him like that. he now lives with me and my husband.

I am happy to have found a very loving husband. His family is more of a family to me than I have ever had. I am opening up a lot more and slowly healing. It is hard though because I am haunted by my past, feel inferior to everyone, insecure, self-concious, and panic about everything. I feel like no one understands me mopst of the time. Especially little things like wanting to have the curtains closed all the time so no one can see inside...or feeling deathly afraid to make a phone call...I want desperately to have friends but it is excrutiatingly difficult for me to even talk to anyone.

I have been getting better bit by bit though. I guess I just have to take it one day at a time, right? Anyway, thanks for reading my story. Sorry it was so long, but I felt I had to get it all out, you know? I am looking forward to meeting some new people on here. If anyone wants to chat with me, my yahoo SN is glittergraffiti and my AIM is liberalfairy. Have a good day!

wow!!!
there are some really sad stories here. which makes me wonder..... because I had just the opposite, really wonderful, loving parents and a beautiful family. some (or all) of my best memories are from my childhood years up to the age when I had to go to preschool. when I sarted going to preschool and I had to deal with other people besides my parents and my brother, that's when my social problems began.
I have loving, caring, supporting parents but somehow I still managed to end up with SA and very low confidence.
so I really don't know what is the root of my SA, it certainly wasn't abuse, or neglect or anything like that. maybe its just my genes, maybe I'm super sensitive and when I had to deal with mean people I couldn't cope.....
all I know is that I have terrible low confidence. I don't know which came first, the low confidence or the SA but they feed on each other and I'm sick and tired of it. :evil:

Re: This is going to be reeeeeeeeeeaaally long...sorry

Glittergraffiti said:

Ok...here's my life story, lol. When I was two years old I was seperated from my teenage mother and placed into foster care. The seperation was traumatising...I was put into a much worse situation at my first foster home where my foster dad molested me and played mind games with me. That all happened before I was school age.

When I was 6 I was moved to another foster home and here my foster parents were physically abusive to me on a daily basis and made me live locked in the basement on a blanket on the floor and only brought me bread and water to eat. They were also mentally abusive making me believe I was a bad girl and it was my fault I was being punished. They told me nobody wanted me and that I deserved to be in prison. They also made me clean the house and would punch me, pull my hair, hit me, pinch me, spit on me, etc if I didn't do things well enough to please them. They made me do strange things like lick a toilet bowl and putting flavored extracts on my tongue which burned.

At school I kept to myself and did well on tests and in class, but I was always getting in trouble for not doing my homework so I would have to stand outside as punishment during recess while other children played. I had a hard time talking to other children and I feared authority.

Finally I was moved into a third foster home. When I first got there my foster mom tried to give me a hug. I thought she was going to hit me, so I ducked and covered my head and stayed curled up on the floor crying. This foster home turned out to be a really good home and I came out of my shell a little bit and started playing with other children and developing confidence.

Unfortunately, when I was 9 I was adopted. Everyone always tries to tell me how lucky I am to be adopted, but seriously, I wish I could have just stayed at my third foster home. My adoptive parents were very cold, yelled and hit a lot, and believed strongly in discipline. I was never allowed to go out with friends because i was always "grounded" for stupid reasons. I wasn't even allowed to be free inside the house. My dad always made us sit on the couch. If we even got up to go to the bathroomhe would be like "where do you think you're going?" and he'd give us a time limit on when we had to come back.

I always felt better at school than going home. I felt like I was living in a prison at home and walking on eggshells around my parents. My dad gave me black eyes and busted lips sometimes, but usually he never left a mark so I couldn't prove that he was a bad parent. My parents were well respected members of the community, very active in church (actually head of property committee) and had great paying jobs in the Department of Revenues for the state. No one would take my brother, sister, or I seriously when we complained about our parents. I ran away when I was 18 to another state and didn't return for 5 years. When I did return, my parents wouldn't let me spend the night and made my husband and I sleep in our truck at a church parking lot.

Since I ran away my sister took my parents to court and got herself emancipated. I am proud of her but sad because we were very close and we have lost contact. The reason I went back home was to help my brother get out of that house. He was 20 years old and my parents were still controlling him and treating him like that. he now lives with me and my husband.

I am happy to have found a very loving husband. His family is more of a family to me than I have ever had. I am opening up a lot more and slowly healing. It is hard though because I am haunted by my past, feel inferior to everyone, insecure, self-concious, and panic about everything. I feel like no one understands me mopst of the time. Especially little things like wanting to have the curtains closed all the time so no one can see inside...or feeling deathly afraid to make a phone call...I want desperately to have friends but it is excrutiatingly difficult for me to even talk to anyone.

I have been getting better bit by bit though. I guess I just have to take it one day at a time, right? Anyway, thanks for reading my story. Sorry it was so long, but I felt I had to get it all out, you know? I am looking forward to meeting some new people on here. If anyone wants to chat with me, my yahoo SN is glittergraffiti and my AIM is liberalfairy. Have a good day!

Click to expand...

Wow, your story brought tears to my eyes!

Best regards, I wish you the best in the future.

I think the cause of my shyness/SA is my mother. She was also very shy when she was younger and I think she brainwashed the irrational, anxious thought's into my mind when I was young. I can actually remember her saying things like "You can't do that, what will they think of you…" to me in social situations when I wanted to do certain things. But I don’t blame her because she did not do it on purpose. Its just bad luck for me.

styrka said:

wow!!!
there are some really sad stories here. which makes me wonder..... because I had just the opposite, really wonderful, loving parents and a beautiful family. some (or all) of my best memories are from my childhood years up to the age when I had to go to preschool. when I sarted going to preschool and I had to deal with other people besides my parents and my brother, that's when my social problems began.
I have loving, caring, supporting parents but somehow I still managed to end up with SA and very low confidence.
so I really don't know what is the root of my SA, it certainly wasn't abuse, or neglect or anything like that. maybe its just my genes, maybe I'm super sensitive and when I had to deal with mean people I couldn't cope.....
all I know is that I have terrible low confidence. I don't know which came first, the low confidence or the SA but they feed on each other and I'm sick and tired of it. :evil:

Click to expand...

Sounds exactly like me. I can't blame a terrible childhood at all, which sort of makes me feel a bit guilty when I think about.

cLavain said:

styrka said:

wow!!!
there are some really sad stories here. which makes me wonder..... because I had just the opposite, really wonderful, loving parents and a beautiful family. some (or all) of my best memories are from my childhood years up to the age when I had to go to preschool. when I sarted going to preschool and I had to deal with other people besides my parents and my brother, that's when my social problems began.
I have loving, caring, supporting parents but somehow I still managed to end up with SA and very low confidence.
so I really don't know what is the root of my SA, it certainly wasn't abuse, or neglect or anything like that. maybe its just my genes, maybe I'm super sensitive and when I had to deal with mean people I couldn't cope.....
all I know is that I have terrible low confidence. I don't know which came first, the low confidence or the SA but they feed on each other and I'm sick and tired of it. :evil:

Click to expand...

Sounds exactly like me. I can't blame a terrible childhood at all, which sort of makes me feel a bit guilty when I think about.

Click to expand...

Yeah, me too! I can identify with everything exept for the fact that my parents got divorced when I was 12. But I doubt that had anything to do with it. On top of it all I had a great time in school until highschool, and was never bullied or anything. So I guess I'm just a very sensitive person with a tendency to think and at times worry way too much about my own performance... :roll:

Gees Glitter Graffiti,

....your life story is almost unbelieveable because, although I know that such things happen to people, it's hard to believe that anyone would do such things to a child. It's hard just to read what people have done to you, that I can barely begin to imagine how hard it would be to find a way of accepting and dealing with it having happened to me.

Yes I had an anxiety-filled grandmother, and my environment did have anxiety in it when I was growing up, but overall my parents and family have been and still are wonderful. (Sometimes I marvel at how tolerant and accepting my parents still are of me).

At the same time, when a person doesn't have a bad childhood, and yet they still grow-up with something like anxiety, it is difficult in the sense that you wonder what caused it. ....My answer is that a good part of it is genetic. And I figure that, like a bad childhood, how you were born is something that goes so far back in the past, that in this sense it is neither to someone's credit or discredit.

This doesn't change the fact that reading your story makes me feel compassion toward you. Yet, my strategy (and probably I'd say your's too!! -great that you have found your self a true family at last!) is to try to let go of the past -that even my past, that is lacking of abuse and mistreatment, with my anxiety I figure that it is my mind that attaches so much to past experience just as my personality is innately very sensitive and easily impressionable. ...Put these 2 factors together (really they are linked) and you get someone who, in experiencing difficulty, can continue to re-experience it and not know how to let go and not be phased so much by negative thoughts and experiences.

I wanted to start to talk, not so much about 'past experience' and possible causes of social anxiety in this sense, but go on now to how our minds attach so strongly to the past -to think about how our subconcious beliefs (whether the result of abusive childhoods or genetic factors that make a person more vulnerable to anxiety) cause us to create and recreate unpleasant experiences. And in this way find the 'cause', the 'cause' being what thoughts and beliefs are in our subconcious minds.

Since both strong sensitivity and abusive pasts can go towards making a person highly sensitive to their environment and focussed on 'how others behave and what they think of us'. That, whether it be that you have been hurt a lot in the past, or whether it is that strong sensitivity makes you vulnerable to feeling easily hurt -both of these work to make a person 'hypervigilant' to how others treat them, and what others think of them. And social phobia is largely about being preoccupied with what others think, and fearful of others rejecting or otherwise hurting us.

But I don't mind people talking about their childhoods either, since I'm sure that this will be useful in completing the bigger picture on social anxiety. (...and please don't let me stop you from telling your story...)

I am wondering, though, about what specific thoughts and beliefs have people come to understand as being the primary cause of their social anxiety.

....Is it acute sensitivity and the strong ASSOCIATIONS a person tends to have as a result; along with feeling oneself emotionally naked and dependent upon what others think of us as deciding who we are (simply because we are so easily effected and so sensitive); is it also having always had someone 'take charge' that this has effected us to believe that in certain situations we are 'incompetent'.....

I'll sit back and let people take this discussion wherever they feel is important.

Cutefluffykitten

I like your post. You are very close to identifying a key concept that our mind focuses upon inappropriately before anxiety arises in our mind. Your post indicates to me that you really want to overcome your anxiety and seek to understand, this is wonderfully inspiring, thanks.

In general, we are pretty much attached to everything thinking that things make us happy. We want such and such because we feel it makes us happy. In the case of a social phobic the concept we hold very strongly in our mind is that what others think about us makes us happy. We desire what others think about us, we like to be liked, thought well of and care what people think about us. Of course these thoughts are ok providing we understand that happiness is a state of mind and only our thoughts can cause our own happiness, not what others think. So we are essentially attached to a concept of our own mind, its deceiving us, it says if you think and focus on it, it will make you happy, when really it causes us much anxiety.

You talk about the subconscious mind I just wanted to say that there are different levels of mind, some more subtle than others so it’s not always easy to identify certain thoughts that cause anxiety but definitely certain concepts such as ‘what others think of me’ and beliefs of who we think we are have a massive effect on our state of mind.

Because anxiety distorts the way we look at the world and our self we cannot trust our mind when it is anxious, we need to notice this and say to our self, “I have been down this path, it leads to pain, I must find another way of thinking about my self and the world”

We feel so sensitive and dependent on what others think because in our mind we are deceived into thinking this is what will make us happy. So we are like a puppet on a string, driven by what we perceive others to be thinking of us. This leads us to act without self confidence and always thinking how we will be perceived, always judging our own ‘performance’.

Jack

Hey Jack-B,

I didn't see CuteFluffyKitten in the thread and your post with words like 'subconcious' leads me to think that you meant to reply to me. (But, of course, tell me if you meant it for someone else)

I actually have read some of your other posts and liked what you have had to say. (You actually talk like a therapist!!! :lol: :!: ...have you considered getting into this business...? :wink: )

...Regarding your points, your pin-pointing a social phobics preoccupation with what others think about them, I really agree is a major -if not THE major- cause (root thought) behind social anxiety. This was something that I did not necessarily thinkup all on my own, but that comments made in therapy sessions prompted my own figuring this out. I think that it plays a major role in social anxiety.

I even think that the reason is that because a socially anxious person is highly sensitive that this contributes to their dependence on others' perception of us, and a fear of being rejected and badly judged. If you have either a past experience of bad treatment, and/or you are easily emotionally effected, this means that you have become or are highly sensitized to your environment and how others treat you.

And, as you wrote, a person somehow thinks that focussing so much on pleasing others and on what others think, will somehow protect them from being judged and rejected. Whereas instead a socially anxious person keeps trying to ward off bad experiences by worrying about them happening again and finds that this actually creates them; and in the case of certain individuals, we can even attract nasty judgemental types. (At my previous work a very 'popularity obsessed' individual went to work on destroying my morale, using my need for approval and doubts of personal worth against me.)

I do think that rendering myself dependent upon others' views and perceptions of me already weakens me, making me nervous and hypervigilant to not putting a foot wrong, and in turn this becomes anxiety -even performance anxiety. And this worry and fear of getting a bad reaction actually inspires bad reactions because it makes me nervous and even then negative, much the same way that Glitter above described flinching when someone move because you fear being hit -like mind-reading and/or anticipating negative reactions simply because one fears the pain of experiencing them (again).

It's all an awful vicious circle and self-fulfilling prophecy. But I know that whilst I may not be able to change how sensitive I am and how strongly I feel both negative and positive emotions (that is another cause of worry that can make a person hypervigilante, a fear that they are overly emotional) but I think that the thought and attitude that Who I Am is what others think of me; that the truth of who I am is somehow reflected in others' eyes; that all this renders me dependent and then a weak slave to others' opinions, attitudes and behaviours -that if I can substitute this with my own self-created truth that I won't need others approval so much. Then I can finally break-out of the vicious circle.

Because it becomes a 'vicious circle' I think when I need others to forgive and not attack my sensitivity and am so watchful of what they think of me. But I figure that if I keep a part of this, own it and allow it, that then I can actually start attaining control over it. That if I accept a part of me regardless of what others think or do, that then I can actually start controlling my anxiety. The other way is that I try to 'get rid of it' -but this just blows it out of perspective -like trying not to make a mistake for fear of my sensitivity and its close companion anxiety showing up. This way instead I don't say that ALL of my anxiety is wrong. Part of it is right. Part of it is my sensitivity and strong emotions. Then I can finally make it smaller (ironically by not trying to hide it all or repress it all) and then it will gradually get smaller and smaller and be experienced less and less as something bad because I'll have better control and perspective over it.

Sorry that that was long. I'm trying to get some kind of plan together so that I don't lose hope when my emotions grip me and play havoc on my peace of mind. ...IT is hard to really put into practise a truly effective change in the root thinking behind a problem -because until this is achieved, emotions pull everything out of perspective and make something much worse than it really is. Then the shame settles in, making a person think themselves worthless and flawed as a human being. (I won't try to 'get rid of anxiety' anymore, I'll break it down into what it's trying to get me to do which is to see a part of my self that I am ignoring and labelling as wrong and bad and weak.)

Muffet

like ems mother my mom is also a extreme people pleaser. she´s a jehowas wittnesser. as i child i couldnt swear, not being loud, not express my true personality (what would other people think??), not being angry, not lamenting, not crying, being nice with everyone, respect everyone...

insensitive father. determines familiys rules and events in a god-like manner. is always strong. extremely perfectionist. extreme criticiser.

embarassement to talk about the sexual sphere. no privacy from my mom.

overprotected. criticism. treated like an incompetent. parents overcontrolling. criticism from relatives.

my mom worries about everything. extremely anxious.

parents always fought in front of us children.

very abusive ambience. always being ridiculed by teachers. femminist teachers humiliated me as a male.
being bullied.

and so forth...

its a miracle that im still alive