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Stop Agonizing About Presenting Yourself to Others ... NOW!
Diagonally-Parked in a Parallel Universe: Working Through Social Anxiety
CHAPTER EXCERPTS (Ch. 1, 5 & 8)
CHAPTER 1 "LIONS AND TIGERS AND BEARS, OH MY!" "He flung himself from the room, flung himself upon his horse, and rode off in all directions." (Stephen Leacock, Nonsense Novels, 1911) Joanna's tale Joanna's heart galloped, the surging blood thundering in her ears, painting her face and neck crimson. The butterflies in her knotted stomach were flapping their wings with greater force as the time drew near. Sweat trickled down her sides as her underarms opened their pores and oozed. She was sure everyone could see her soggy, wrinkled shirt, even with her jacket on. Perched on the edge of her chair in her college English class, 35-year-old Joanna had started the count-down for the instructor's call for the students' five-minute presentations to begin. It was always the same. Whenever she had to speak before a group, her mouth instantaneously became parched. Her tongue stuck to her hard palate. Words caught in her throat. And those incomprehensible phrases that managed to escape, submerged the audience in a tidal wave of croaked stutters and stammers, while she gasped for breath, quaking. You're a mess, girl, she chided herself. Joanna knew she couldn't present for even five minutes without looking like a laughingstock. Her mindless trepidation was one reason she was still in the process of trying to get through school. Fear of public speaking seemed to malevolently greet her in every other subject, rendering her unable to stick with one major and finish her college degree. Just standing before the group of 19-year-olds reduced her to shimmering guava jelly. Having to speak on top of that totally liquefied her resolve. She already knew how the audience would respond: They'd either look disgusted at this pathetic old person or smirk and snicker at the absurdity of her trying to pull it off. Once again she'd be embarrassed, humiliated. Every last one of them, including the instructor, would write her off as being weird, incompetent, or both. Either way, she grimaced, I'm a failure. Like a coyote-cornered rabbit she felt on the verge of panic…again. Something primitive, ancestrally-wired in her brain, made her want to run, flee, escape. But, no, she couldn't do that. Crazy behavior like that would only draw attention to herself. Joanna mulled it over. A room this packed is a minefield - not something to navigate in a hurry. She chewed her lip and sighed. Maybe I can find another excuse to get me out of the rest of the class period and doing the presentation. But as she sat jiggling her crossed leg, her mind was blank. Compounding her immediate distress was the knowledge that she needed to do this presentation for her grade. She'd already skipped the others, one way or another, leaving her teacher, who'd tried to talk with her about it, with no other conclusion than Joanna just didn't care. And her grade-point average, which she'd struggled to keep high despite these self-presentation obstacles, depended on her doing well in this class. But to Joanna it was a rattlesnake roundup from the perspective of the snake - a lose-lose situation. At this point she couldn't tell which failure was worse. As she bounced her leg under her desk, her foot brushed her book bag which fell open, revealing the fifth of Jack Daniels she'd stashed there for emergencies. A fleeting flash of relief played across her face. Her eyes drinking in the label gave her courage. She grabbed the bag and its precious cargo, took a deep breath, then cautiously threaded her way to the door. Once outside the classroom, she bolted for the restroom. After a couple of healthy swigs, Joanna felt a warming calm wash over her. She was alone, away from scrutinizing eyes. Her hyperventilation was fading in the glow. I've got to find some way to make it work out, she sighed dispiritedly. Her heart palpitations were leveling off too. Sinking to a sitting position on the gray tiled floor, Joanna leaned against the wall and took another drink.
CHAPTER 5 APPROACHING RECOVERY "Climb high, Climb far, Your goal the sky, Your aim the star" (Inscription on Hopkins Memorial Steps at Williams College, Williamstown, MA How others respond to us As those of us who suffer from it know, SA/SP is the source of great distress. It generates discomfort, pain, and incapacity. It damages beliefs and values, commitment, and social relationships. It forces us to live with fear, uncertainty, insecurity, dread, and apprehension. And it results in embarrassment, humiliation, shame, guilt, and loss of dignity. This is something that the majority of family, friends, and health and mental health professionals don't seem to understand. Family and friends. Those close to us often seem unable to understand not only the depth of the distress created by the disorder but also how they can appropriately and helpfully relate to our suffering. While some are apparently clueless about what we're going through, others seem to have at least an abstract idea. However, both these groups tend to be guilty of trying to get us to "put on a happy face." They downplay our fears, feelings, and thoughts, as if we were exaggerating or just being negative. They want us to "cheer up," "look on the bright side," and "accentuate the positive." Aside from the fact that this approach is highly unlikely to work, it trivializes how and how deeply we feel, undermining the legitimacy of our claim of suffering. This mind-set suggests that we're giving in to silly and easily controllable fears and that we should "shape up" and "pull ourselves up by our bootstraps." If only we'd "just do it!", as the Nike ad goes, we could transcend the problem. It's okay for us to feel our discomfort, but after a reasonable period of time, we should get on with it. This attitude makes it doubly difficult for us because we fear and feel threatened by others' evaluation of us. This means we're saddled with the disorder itself as well as others' judgments about how "appropriately" we're dealing with it.
CHAPTER 8 BECOMING SOCIALLY EFFECTIVE "Tiny differences in input could quickly become overwhelming differences in output." (James Gleick, Chaos, 1987) What is social effectiveness? When we recognize the limitations of our SA/SP-shrink-wrapped lives, we begin to see that social effectiveness is the primary skill area on which we need to work. Social effectiveness skills are aimed at increasing social awareness and interaction. They include a range of cognitive and behavioral abilities, social perception, and information-processing. They address how we select relevant and useful information from social situations and employ it toward reaching our goals. They target our inability to make positively-useful judgments about specific social situations. Furthermore, they zero in on the use of verbal and nonverbal behaviors to maintain our positive relations with others as well as maximize our goal attainment. Thus, to increase our social effectiveness we need to improve our interpersonal skills and social performance and increase our social participation. Doing so decreases our SA/SP. Interpersonal skills. Interpersonal skills create and maintain relationships. They bring us together to influence one another to meet our goals. They include holding conversations, listening, speaking, nonverbal behavior, image, assertiveness, and a sense of what's appropriate for the situation. It's generally thought that most of the skills we need for adult social interaction and successful relationships are learned during our adolescence. This appears to be true even for SA/SPers. If most of us have the skills, then what's our problem? The problem is that if we believe we lack these important skills, as we generally do in threatening social situations, we'll tend to respond inappropriately, if we respond at all. Our resulting communication likely will be less effective. We may also display undesirable mannerisms and seem to have difficulty pulling our conversational weight. Interestingly, while observers tend to perceive socially anxious individuals as less socially skilled, there are few meaningful behavioral differences between those who are high in social anxiety and those who are low. Yes, SA/SPers tend to speak less about themselves in conversations, ask more questions, and look less at speakers, but they also smile and nod more, interrupt less frequently, and seem more attentive. One could make the case that many of these "socially anxious" behaviors actually socially facilitate conversations, and do so more than behaviors of more "socially confident" individuals. A low level of social participation, which tends to be characteristic of SA/SP, does not, by itself, indicate poor interpersonal skills. Neither does a low amount of eye contact. What's "appropriate" will necessarily vary with the circumstances. In fact, studies have shown that individuals with high- and low-levels of social anxiety don't differ so much in the frequency or duration of eye contact but in the timing and placement of it. We do it, but we do it differently. Furthermore, whether an individual is perceived to have deficient social skills is more a function of observational bias than the presence of an actual deficit. But we have the same bias about ourselves. When we're anxious in a social situation, we doubt that we have the social skills to convey the desired message or impression of ourselves to others. Once we believe we lack the necessary skills, we tend to conclude we're unlikely to make that impression. We also tend to conclude that we will receive a positive evaluation in a situation where those skills are needed. Yes, it's true that skills we use infrequently may become rusty. It's true that they may suffer from the impact of our continuous negative thinking. But it's also true that sometimes low self-esteem causes us to underestimate our ability to deal effectively with social situations. This means that even when we are socially adept and do successfully execute these behaviors, we may see ourselves as socially deficient. What the central and overriding factor appears to be is not our lack of interpersonal skills but our perceptions of our own social inadequacy. We need only to look at ourselves in non-threatening social situations. Generally, our self-esteem is high. We feel comfortable and are likely to both feel and appear to be socially skilled. But put us in a threatening social situation and our distorted thoughts and feelings immediately take priority and interfere with our exercising those submerged social skills. Copyright 2008 All
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