Social Anxiety to Social Confidence

I’ve always liked the Carl Rogers’ quote, ‘the most personal is the most universal’. It is particularly relevant to social anxiety as when we are socially anxious we often try and hide everything that is personal about us. We can end up scared that other people might think our most intimate secrets and problems are strange or signs of weakness, but if we could really see into other people’s minds, I think we would find a great deal in common. I have certainly learnt this as I have changed and become more open about my thoughts and problems over the years.

We can agonise over keeping our most personal problems private, trying to not let others know the secrets. We may even start to shape our whole life around them. But then when the pain gets too much and we have no choice but to bring them out in the open, we grit our teeth and wait for the worst reaction only to be met with a rather surprised reaction of, ‘me too!’ or a more casual account of how the other person also used to have the same problem, or knew someone who did. I guess we are all just human after all, and humans are human like!

Social anxiety is a very common anxiety problem, but most people struggling with it think they are the only one until they are fortunate enough to stumble across a website on the internet or accidentally find out in some other way. People with social anxiety are very secretive about their fears, have often crafted a well rehearsed act to hide them, and many just do not go out and meet many people, so it is not really surprising that they each feel like they are the only one even though there are many others near by going through the same.

Research on the prevalence of social anxiety disorder has quite varied results, but even at the most conservative level of 2% of the population, that is 1.2 million people in the UK, 6 million in the US, and 134 million globally. Some estimates are almost four times this number. Suddenly this very personal problem does not seem quite so personal. This is echoed in the support groups I facilitate where although everyone’s fears are slightly different, there is also a huge degree of similarity, right down to the most intimate details.

Carl Rogers quote of, ‘the most personal is the most universal’, is well demonstrated in Derren Brown’s Trick of the Mind 3 series, episode 1 (watch it here, 14 minutes, 55 seconds in), where he gives each person from three groups of people from three different countries a personal psychic reading. To their surprise it is very accurate, but then to their amazement, they all have exactly the same reading.