Social Anxiety Disorder Makes You Believe Irrational Lies
Social anxiety makes you believe that getting better is impossible.
It lies to you and trips you up every time you make an effort to overcome it. It puts roadblocks in your way and tells you that you'll never be able to get around them (when really -- just a touch from your little finger would knock it over). Social anxiety lies to you.
Social anxiety makes everything dark and hopeless. It makes you feel powerless and helpless. Social anxiety likes using your brain's neural pathways and doesn't want you to start using them to learn new things that would steal you away from it. Social anxiety holds on tight, and gets you to believe huge, ridiculous lies about yourself. such as:
I will always feel this anxiety,
I will never have friends,
I can never feel good at work,
I can never take a promotion because then I would have responsibilities I couldn't handle.
I can't go to college because the instructor may ask me questions, I won't be able to make friends there, people look at me funny and make me feel like I've done something wrong. Walking past a policeman makes me feel guilty, even though I've done nothing wrong.
Even cleaning my desk is uncomfortable because people are watching and judging me.
Maybe I walk funny.
Maybe I don't hold my back straight enough.
Maybe people are grossed out by my hair.
I know everyone dislikes me.
Why am I like this? What did I ever do wrong? I've never hurt anybody. Why can't I be normal? Why can't I get a good job? Why can't I have friends? Why am I so hopeless? Everyone else seems to be fine...
SOCIAL ANXIETY is a LIAR. IT MAKES YOU BELIEVE A HUGE AMOUNT of LIES about yourself.
Please get in appropriate treatment, because do you know what? In all truth:
There is absolutely NOTHING wrong with you, except you are believing what social anxiety wants you to believe.
Choose to believe the truth. Turn your back on all the old lies that hold you back and restrict your life. You CAN get free from all them, and
you CAN live an anxiety-free life.
You DO have this choice. Although effective treatment is hard to find, move if you need to. If the choice is between living with social anxiety the rest of your life and temporarily moving, but overcoming social anxiety... is this really a choice? What would be the rational thing to do?
Please choose to OVERCOME social anxiety. It will be more than worth it.
Learning cognitive strategies for overcoming social anxiety is not difficult. Recent research indicates that the use of anti-anxiety strategies makes a profound difference in people's lives and puts you on the road to getting better. Using several dozen, easy, cognitive strategies changes your life completely, so that you can say, "I have overcome social anxiety". The research can be viewed here.