Somewhere on the journey of learning to live fully as someone with social anxiety, there's a new hurdle: learning to keep up emotionally with the newly active social part of yourself. As you grow more comfortable in the situations that previously provoked fear or avoidance a surprising thing can happen: you can find yourself becoming more social, more outgoing than your emotional self is prepared for. This is especially true of socially anxious folks who lean toward the introverted end of the spectrum. Suddenly there's a new, rather bombastic voice in the mix that wants to go on all those fabulous adventures the fearful self had been so good at talking you out of. And before you know it, you're burned out with trying to keep up with this newly-freed sense of creative living.
stay with the raw feelings
A favorite piece of wisdom I’ve gathered from American Buddhist nun Pema Chodron is the idea of, as she says it, learning to “stay with the raw feelings.” It sounds scary, and at some levels it is, but at the easiest level for me to get to this practice of staying with the raw feelings is natural, human, basic.
in praise of listening
’m learning that we are vastly layered beings, complex in our imperfections, which we are so quick to scorn and which we so quickly try to hide, avoid, or fix. But every imperfection is just as much a method of communicating with ourselves. Fear, I’ve learned, may seem like a basic inconvenience, but underneath it – as with so many things – there is a part of ourselves that is just trying to be seen, that just wants to communicate our struggle. Listening, I’ve learned, is most certainly not a weakness. Listening does not mean giving in. Listening means bearing witness.