Throughout my life, I have spent hundreds of hours listening to tapes and reading books on social anxiety and personal development. While I’ve become very well-read on the subject, I have had limited success in trying to program my sub-conscience with positive self-talk.
My brain processed social input very fast – too fast, in fact. It did this in a very efficient and predictable manner - so quickly that I had little chance to think about it. The most efficient way to deal with what it thought was “routine” information, was to process it through the express line. [...]
If you think about the amount of input we receive on a daily basis, it is truly fortunate that we have our automatic systems to deal with most of it – otherwise, there is no way that we could consciously handle the sheer volume. I would say that, for the most part, these systems handle [...]
Now that I had peeled back the layers and uncovered the source of my social anxiety and poor self-esteem, I had to determine the best way to interrupt the negative cycle that had developed over the years. Attacking it head-on seemed pointless – it was too powerful and had way too much momentum.
I have been writing about my social anxiety for a while now. I’ve talked about the different layers involved and how it seems that there is no end to it – just one level after the other.
I decided that confidence and self-esteem would be one entire section of my new foundation. Then I discovered that [...]
I truly believe that there is some sort of programming hard-wired into every living thing on the planet. You can observe this by watching any mother in the wild care for her young. Even domestic pets show traits that just seem to be there.
Automatic thoughts and responses control much of our daily routine. We trust that they are accurate and we normally let them do their thing without question. However, in my case, the auto-responses/thoughts that looked after my social interaction were not right and far from normal.
I was comfortable in my routine – a little too comfortable, actually. The problem was that I also felt like there was something horribly wrong with me. My brain/subconscious was completely comfortable in the rut that it had been in for years. It was a familiar rut and the brain had all the various auto-responses [...]
I was determined to get to the root causes of my social anxiety. However, just when I thought I had broken things down to the most basic level, I would discover a few more under that. Where would it end?
Exposure therapy never really worked for me. I mean, it makes sense that the more you do something, the better you should get at it, however, I always felt that there was something missing.