Social anxiety - help me understand it

[KayPassa]

I know I’ll get piled on for this so have NC’d. Am genuinely not being critical - just curious & seeking to understand things.
So many posts recently have mentioned social anxiety. The cat who attacked the postman & its owner couldn’t go and help. The tenant who wasn’t able to let the estate agent & owner visit to name just a couple.
I can’t say I would enjoy dealing with either of those situations but I would do it. Maybe I’d need to push myself & feel a bit nervous but I would do it. How can social anxiety become so horribly crippling that the OPs couldn’t?
I read posts every week about problems caused by people not being able to deal with confrontation & ending up in a much worse situation. Don’t they just have to take a deep breath & face things? Short term pain for long term gain? What sort of life do they have if they can’t do that? Everything must be overwhelming & draining for them.
Very few of us relish confrontation or dealing with tricky situations but we can’t avoid them all the time surely? Where’s all the resilience gone?

But when women do end up confronting situations they’re called ‘Karen’s’, women cant win in any situation

How obtuse. People who behave like “Karen” are not the anxious people OP is referring to. The epitome of a Karen is being so confident when you’re wrong that you ignore reason eg wasn’t one of the main events creating this meme being older white women calling the police on innocent black children? Karen is a pejorative slang term for an obnoxious, angry, entitled, and often racist middle-aged white woman who uses her privilege to get her way or police other people's behaviour. Gender isn’t the defining factor as the situations that brought the term to prominence was racism.

I’m a mix of being an introvert and an extrovert. I’m fairly intelligent and a psychology graduate, also studied philosophy, so think I have a tendency to lean towards lateral thinking. This doesn’t just extend to social situations, but I suppose it can make me look into social situations in more depth.

EG I send an email and don’t get a response, my brain automatically will give me a few different angles: perhaps I forgot to send it, perhaps I’m being ignored, perhaps there was a technical error, perhaps I missed a response, perhaps the person is busy. So then I’ll check and usually nothing will come of it.

But on the odd occasion I am being ignored or something isn’t right, at least I pick up on it earlier and am perceptive I suppose and can plan accordingly. I wouldn’t say that I outright have social anxiety as I have a good balance of reason and logic to not act on whims. But I can see that if I don’t keep my thoughts in check and overthink small things, I could impact my confidence. The balance is being aware of everything but not letting it impact your psyche.

I'm 55 too and this sounds like a fantasy of victorian or 1950s times. It's hard to believe you grew up in the 1970s-80s actually thinking that was women's lives.

The K word is a misogynistic slur, nothing more nor less. If you think it’s only ever used in the context you described (and even then it’s bore out of misogyny) then I’m afraid you’re deluded. I’ve seen women being called this word under many comments, often because a woman has simply spoken out about something or used a disagreeable tone.

@aramox1

Maybe you have a different experience because your mother was a career women but I agree with the poster who said that in the past women could keep themselves to themselves without being thought of as abnormal.
You cannot deny that there is a huge pressure these days on women to be absolutely everything, mother, career women, social butterfly with loads of friends. It's unrealistic expectations put upon one person especially a mother who has a family to raise and very little time on her hands.
I think anxiety is common because of these social pressures. Women aren't allowed to just be mothers and focus on the one role, they now have to be a million different things.

I was trying to simplify so OP understood! 🤦‍♀️

Until more recent years I wouldn't have know to describe what I felt as low level social anxiety.

It certainly was and is, but as a teenager I had no resources to understand the shaking, heart plapitations and desire to run home and hide and stay there, were anxiety not shyness. Sadly I treated it with alcohol to have a social life and that led to a drinking problem and eventually down a dark hole for a time.

I say low level, because in my 40's I can deal with most things, and can generally push on through. But new situations still give me all of the above along with sweating, word stumbling and a whole other host of shit.

But I'd count me as lucky for it not generally stopping me having a life or doing what I want.

Agreed.

Very complex issue but agree with PPs saying that lots of people self diagnose now so the term has unfortunately become meaningless for those who genuinely suffer from this debilitating condition (see also health anxiety, ADHD, etc - so many self diagnosing 😬).

I think lack of resilience among young people is a separate issue and a huge concern - where once we talked about people being nervous or worried about something now I hear so many of my parent friends leap to use the label “anxious” about their kids - it’s a slippery slope and a dangerous one.

God knows what the answer is and as I know schools are drowning under the pressure this is causing.

I think too many people use the term social anxiety, that’s the main problem. It’s become the word some people use to excuse themselves or delay adulthood. It’s similar with any other word for mental health issues that gets over claimed by the majority such as depression, OCD etc.

Because social anxiety is crippling for those who have it, and really awful in many cases. But because so many people use the word to describe just not liking some social situations, which I’d say about 99% of us feel, those people with really marked social anxiety get lumped together and I do think we should give some respect to severity.

I have severe anxiety and have done all of my life. Despite this I do face up to a lot of it, but I can only do so much. I don’t want to be on medication as I have such anxiety about taking drugs, and anyway this is life long. So I face most of my life but I can’t drive, see danger everywhere, am hyper vigilant and have to make a conscious effort every single day just to function.

So for me I have got to a manageable level, some others can’t.

I think being autistic is a bit different, perhaps? Being faced with a social situation and knowing you don't have the skills to navigate it is a rational cause of anxiety, just like being faced with water when you can't swim would be. Practising social skills, being trained in them (as happened to you via your mother) is really important and will eventually make things easier, but that's not really overcoming anxiety, rather it's removing some of the source of that anxiety through training and practice.

It also shouldn't need to be a really miserable experience - you can recognise the stress of some situations and be sensitive to them, and still give someone the skills they need to gradually get used to them, and do all that while recognising that sometimes sensory overload or other issues are happening at the same time and it's not a skills issue at all.

It is still true though that the principle of exposing yourself to some anxiety and not responding to it helps, but it's not quick and easy. The logical part of your brain that decides that would be a good idea will often be completely drowned out by any massive fight or flight responses that are going on in the moment. For severe anxiety it could take years of guided therapy to help someone gradually reduce their response to anxiety in that way.

It helped me to understand that we are to some extent hard wired to react to our own feelings of anxiety. I assume it's something to do with things like our ancestors looking out over a landscape, subconsciously noting something odd about a bit of vegetation (lurking predator making it look very slightly different), and feeling anxious without really knowing why. Ancestors who reacted to that unexplained uneasiness got eaten less often. Nowadays that can mean a feedback loop where a feeling of anxiety tells our brain there's something wrong and our brain reacts to that by going on alert and moving towards a 'danger' response (including brain chemicals), even if the initial feeling of anxiety had no serious cause. You can't just reverse that response by logic alone, once you're having it.

But I do agree that the challenging is worthwhile, and avoiding things completely is really unhelpful. It just won't be the fast and easy process that some people (not you) imply when they want people to "just do it".

It's like all those poor sods with depression. Bet you think they should just cheer up, right?

Unbelievable.

That is not how 'Karen' is used at the moment. The accusation of 'being a Karen' is absolutely not limited to women who actually are obnoxious, angry, entitled and racist. It is used to imply that a middle aged (usually but not always white) woman someone disagrees with is all those things, though.

In short, my brain says the same things your post does, but my body disagrees and thinks there’s danger (usually feels like someone is squeezing my insides) and I can’t over-ride it and do what’s rational.

I haven’t suffered for years thankfully, but have a lot of empathy for those that do.

Is 55 a typo?
If not, I think you must have had quite an unusual upbringing if you think the 70s and 80s were filled with women who were too anxious to ever leave the house. "Home bird" might describe someone quite quiet who doesn't go out much for fun- but that's a gaping chasm from people so crippled with anxiety that they struggle to leave the house at all.

If you were seeking help privately. I imagine you could find a therapist that would come to you. They may even start by doing sessions remotely.

I think one of the worst things for youngsters now, is social media and the inability to escape peer pressures through it.

Or we grew up in different demographics. I watched classic coronation Street with my DD, she couldn't believe the sexual abuse Deidre got when she was running for the council. Just watched a news report about the first woman goal scorer (who is from were I live now) and they used to get "get home to your kids" shouted at them. The women around me were cleaners etc and were forced out of work when pregnant. It might not have been your immediate norm, but women of the 70/80's didn't have the expectations of women today. Child rearing was completely different. That started to change in the late 80/90's.

Away with your bs I'm not trying to be goady. Whole posting a goady as fuck post.

I'm 59 and just don't recognise any of that. My own mother was a "career" woman who was full time until pregnant with her first, then part time for a few years, then returned to professional full time work again when I started school.

I started work straight after leaving school in the early 80s, as a trainee accountant. I worked alongside a couple of female fully qualified middle aged chartered accountants, both with school aged children. I'd say half the tax/accountancy senior staff were women. Obviously (!) all the secretarial/receptionist/support staff were women!

Both my mother and I read papers daily - what a strange idea that women didn't read papers back then!

I can guarantee that I was fully independent by my early 20's in the mid 1980s - building up my career, saving for a deposit for a house, owned my own car, etc.

I moved jobs in the late 80s and my next employer was even more woman orientated as two of the partners/owners were female chartered accountants (out of a total of 5), and again half the professional staff were women.

I vividly remember meetings with other professional women, such as female bank managers, female solicitors, etc.

Like I say, I just don't recognise your picture of women not being independent, etc. and find the idea of women not reading papers as, frankly, laughable.