Fear of Humans : Understanding Social Anxiety
It was a parade of a day. As the hours of the “fun little trip out of town” progressed, I found myself feeling ill at ease. While I knew several of my fellow day trippers on an individual basis, I hadn’t ever been in this particular group for so long, and I struggled to find my place in the milieu. I texted a dear friend to vent and she responded, “Ah, good old social anxiety.” Oh, right. That’s what was going on.
Another post sort of named after a piece of music that I like.
Maybe you have felt how unfamiliar people and situations can trigger such a shift. For what seems like a minor reason, perhaps a look or a pause, you are suddenly awash in uncertainty. Your personal swirl of bodily sensations, thoughts, and emotions turns into jumpy self-derision and an onslaught of questions, such as “What do they think of me?” or “Do I even know how to be with people?”
While most people experience elements of social anxiety from time to time, at their most extreme these feelings can be diagnosed as Social Anxiety Disorder. Social Anxiety Disorder is experienced as a near-constant fear of scrutiny in many social situations, in a pattern that lasts at least six months. Common triggers include meeting new people, engaging in conversation, or having to perform or give a presentation. The diagnosis is relatively common, affecting approximately 7% of Americans every year, and about 12% of Americans could be diagnosed with this disorder at some point in their lives.
Social anxiety has a profound prehistoric logic that deserves to be honored. For most of our species’ history, survival has depended on maintaining membership in a group. Being part of a tribe meant protection and food. So, there is good reason for monitoring any signs of rejection from others. It could have quite literally meant life or death.
Where the human brain seems to perennially get its wires crossed, however, is in its logic that “if some is good then more is better." There’s nothing wrong with seeing someone react with discomfort to a joke, for example, and deciding to rein it in. What is more pernicious, though, is when we find ourselves sucked into a vicious cycle of hypervigilance. Instead of engaging with others and trusting that we will notice and react when such cues come up, we instead become obsessed with analyzing all the looks and all the pauses. We run through all the possible interpretations and of course, the most painful ones grab our attention and colonize our imagination.
This fascinated fear can trigger our brain’s fight-or-flight system, which then floods our system with adrenaline and cortisol that lead us to seek safety blindly, desperately. One client told me about climbing out of a window in order to escape facing the people in the next room. If a person doesn’t find a way to manage their anxiety, they may find themselves avoiding more and more situations that they associate with this out-of-control feeling.
Although actual abandonment and rejection are real fears, my clients also speak to an even more abstractly terrifying anxiety. That look, that pause, those microexpressions of human distaste referred to above? If I see those, some clients tell me, then I will know what the other person really thinks even if they are too polite to tell me so, and then I will know that I really am unacceptable. I think of this as the Schrodinger’s Cat corollary of social anxiety: as long as I don’t see my unacceptability, it isn’t real. After all, we define ourselves partially by the measuring sticks of others. And as a result, if someone fears rejection, they avoid social arenas because it is just not worth the risk of finding out if they are right and making their alienation real.
Yeah, doing stuff can feel like this sometimes.
Anxiety, of course, creates a tragic narrowing of life. If I tell myself people don’t like me I will hold myself aloof. If I never go out because I think I don’t know how to talk to new people, my social skills get more rusty. And if I don’t know how to change this course, I stay in and keep to myself more and more. And things that one might like to do, like deepen friendships, explore a city, or go on dates, seem insurmountable, like scaling a mountain made of glass. Life becomes solely focused on maintaining equilibrium, but it is a sad, dull, disappointed equilibrium. In the avoidance of anything that shakes us, we end up missing out on any experience that move us.
The experience of social anxiety speaks to a human yearning for closeness and safety with others, and our correspondingly desperate fear that we will not get that need met. When peered into more deeply, it can be a protective set of bulwarks against a feared truth that we will never get that need met. The truer truth, of course, is always more nuanced and fluid. We will sometimes get that need met, and sometimes not. We have some control over that, and sometimes it’s not up to us. For some, this imperfect predictability is initially as hard to swallow itself as the fear of being unwanted and unworthy.
With time and practice we can learn to coexist with that sometimes soothing, sometimes hard-to-swallow reframe. And while an individual course of action can be effective, many people seek therapy to help them hold onto their best self’s hope, belief, and commitment to ongoing change. After all, social anxiety has a long history of study and treatment, with many, many people who have found a way forward. I’ve seen them do it, and I hope you find that somewhat tippy balance in imperfectly, sometimes unpredictably being with others too.
