Social Anxiety to Social Confidence

I remember, years ago, accompanying my sister when she went to reunite with some old friends. At the time she told me she felt a bit anxious about it and although I had experienced anxiety for many years myself, I actually had no idea what she was talking about. I didn’t really know what the word anxiety meant and I probably replied with something like a slightly bemused, ‘oh right’.

It seems I’m not alone with this experience and have spoken to other social anxiety suffers who have also never really known what the word anxiety meant. For me at least, the reason for my ignorance was that my anxiety had been so frequent that it felt like a normal part of my life and that made it hard for me to comprehend what this thing that occasional cropped up for other people was. Of course, at the time, I had no idea that I knew very well what anxiety was.

It wasn’t until someone I knew who was a sufferer of panic attacks noticed my over-adrenalised composure one day and suggested to me that I was anxious. It took a while for it to sink in, possibly several months, but it was the key to me discovering definitions of social anxiety and therefore recognising that I might be able to change.

As many of you will know, many sufferers of social anxiety get depressed about their situation or experience depression for separate reasons along side of social anxiety. I tended to fall into the former category, but it wasn’t until quite recently that I came to recognise quite how depressed I was when I was younger. This I’ve concluded is for similar reasons as those described above. My sadness about my social difficulties had been fairly constant and without any kind of contrasting experiences to that sadness, or people explaining to me about sadness and depression, I just didn’t know that I was feeling depressed. Of course, not knowing didn’t make life any easier, but at least now I can explain why I didn’t ever try to do anything with my life back then.