How To Lose Anxiety Of Social Anxiety

Are you afraid of people noticing your anxiety? When we have social anxiety, it is common to be ashamed of our anxiety, which causes us to fear that others will notice and judge our social anxiety. This talk will provide you with insights and exercises to help you release and lighten this anxiety.

Transcript

Hello,

My name is Noah Elkrief and today I want to share with you about how to deal with anxiety about anxiety.

So for many people that struggle with anxiety and have had intense anxiety experiences or unpleasant anxiety experiences,

We can begin to form a fear of getting anxiety.

We can begin to feel afraid of feeling anxious.

And that really sucks.

It's really like a vicious cycle.

And so it's basically a layer on top of the normal anxiety.

So if I have an anxiety,

A fear of stepping on a snake,

Then I can have a fear of feeling afraid.

So I'm so scared that I might feel afraid of stepping on a snake.

And so once we have a fear of getting anxiety,

A fear of fear,

We become hyper aware of our body.

So I'm very,

Very aware,

Always focusing on what experience,

What symptoms am I noticing in my body?

Is there anything in my body that's feeling scared?

So always focused on our throat.

Is it closed?

Is it open?

Focusing on our chest.

Do I have shortness of breath?

Is my breathing okay?

Do I have tension?

Am I tense?

So we're constantly focused on whether we have fear,

Whether we have anxiety,

Because if we do,

That's bad.

And if we're always looking for anxiety,

We can very,

Very often find it.

And just the fact that it could come at any moment means basically in almost any environment or in many types of environments,

We can feel the fear,

We can feel the anxiety of getting the anxiety.

So for example,

If we have social anxiety,

Like sometimes anxiety arises when we're in social interactions,

What can often happen is that we get rejected for our social anxiety or we feel we could get rejected for our social anxiety.

So for example,

If we feel socially anxious,

Maybe it becomes difficult for us to speak.

It becomes difficult for words to flow.

And then maybe in some moments when words don't flow,

We either judge ourselves,

I'm stupid,

I'm no good,

I'm terrible,

Or maybe other people laugh at us or make fun of us or reject us or leave us.

And so therefore in the future,

We can fear that the anxiety may come back.

And so there's this extra layer of fear,

Of anxiety,

Of our normal anxiety,

Of the original anxiety.

Does that make sense?

It kind of gets confusing with the words fear of fear,

Anxiety of anxiety.

And so I'd like to offer,

I don't know what exactly I would offer,

But maybe some tools or at least one to help you with this because I know the vicious cycle it can be and how it can create many,

Many moments of anxiety where it's really not serving you and not helpful.

So yeah,

So maybe if you close your eyes,

I want you to close your eyes for a moment,

I'm going to guide you through an exercise.

Instead of explaining something,

I'm going to guide you through an exercise to help you have an experiential impact instead of you just knowing something different.

One of the traps in working on our emotions or self-help or any of that is to try to understand things,

To understand what's going on instead of actually healing it or shifting our experience.

So I'm going to try to shift your experience and then that might lead to understanding.

So if you close your eyes now,

I want you to imagine yourself as a child,

Maybe five-year-old,

Six-year-old,

Whatever sort of image comes up in you.

And I want you to imagine that child feeling anxious,

Feeling afraid,

Feeling uncomfortable,

Nervous.

And I want you to imagine that one or both of his or her parents are there with him and that your parents notice the fear,

Notice the anxiety.

And I want you to notice what their response is.

Are they comforting?

Are they gentle?

Are they compassionate?

Or do you notice maybe they're frustrated,

Annoyed,

Confused,

Afraid,

Perhaps even judging you.

How did they treat you when you had fear,

When you had anxiety,

When you felt nervous,

When you felt uneasy?

Just imagine it.

It's not about making our parents wrong,

But maybe they didn't know any better.

And sometimes maybe our mom felt frustrated because she wanted us to be happy.

And when we were afraid,

She felt frustrated because she didn't know what to do.

Maybe it triggered her own fear.

When you're afraid,

Maybe she's afraid,

Afraid that you will get hurt,

Afraid that you will stay in fear,

Afraid that she will be a failure,

Afraid of thinking of herself as a terrible mom if her child is afraid.

Maybe she's annoyed.

Maybe your father is annoyed and judges you for your fear.

Maybe for him,

It's illogical for you to be afraid of a cricket or a spider or a dark room.

And since he doesn't understand it,

He judges you or gets annoyed by your anxiety,

By your nervousness.

So just notice their response.

And now notice the child's response,

The child you,

How the child feels in response to how his parents are treating him,

Whether it's the mother or the father or both.

And it might be helpful to isolate one parent.

Notice that the child unconsciously,

Automatically absorbs,

Gets an imprint from how his parents are treating him.

He learns if I feel anxious,

If I feel nervous,

If I feel afraid,

This is how I will be treated.

I will be treated with frustration,

Annoyance,

Rejection.

Maybe it brings up in your mother or your father that they're failing as a parent.

So they feel bad about themselves when you feel afraid.

Like if you're afraid going to school and all the other kids seem to be doing fine,

They can feel I'm a bad parent.

I'm failing if my kid's afraid and the other kids aren't afraid.

And then they can take out that rejection towards you that you're bad,

You're screwed up so they don't have to take responsibility for their own pain.

So the child absorbs their parents' response that if I feel afraid,

If I feel nervous,

I get rejected,

I get frustration,

I get fear.

And we can absorb that as an unconscious conclusion that I'm bad if I'm afraid,

I'm unlovable,

If I'm nervous.

Or we can absorb it as our parents' habitual,

Not habitual,

Like our parents have a response to our fear and we can sort of absorb that ourselves.

So every time we feel nervous,

Anxious,

We might instantly judge ourselves or instantly feel frustrated with ourselves and we think this is our relationship to our own anxiety,

But actually it's our parents' relationship to it and we've sort of taken on our parents' relationship to our fear.

Does that make sense?

So we treat ourselves,

When we treat ourselves harshly for having anxiety and fear,

It's actually our mother or our father's harsh treatment towards us that we've internalized.

So I want you to imagine the child with his parents or with one of them in a moment when he's feeling afraid,

Anxious,

Nervous.

Notice how his parents are treating him,

How her parents are treating her,

Her mother,

Her father.

And see if you can notice the child absorbing,

Inheriting this treatment,

This response to fear and anxiety.

And I want you to reverse the process.

So tell that child,

This isn't yours.

This isn't your emotional response to fear.

This is your parents' and you don't have to hold on to this anymore.

You don't have to keep it in your body.

You don't have to keep it in your system.

So I want you to give it back now.

Give this emotional response back to your mother,

Back to your father.

So if there's frustration in response to the anxiety,

Imagine it flowing out of you and going back to your parents' feet,

Like placing it in front of them.

It no longer serves you.

You don't need it.

It's not yours.

It's not true.

It's not helpful.

It doesn't help you or your parents for you to hold on to this.

And it doesn't hurt your parents for you to give it back.

It's not like it's adding fear or frustration to them.

If every time there's anxiety,

There's fear comes up in response,

It could be your parents' fear.

So imagine that the child lets go of the fear,

That like a wave of fear.

Visualize it.

Really visualize this extra layer of fear on top of your anxiety or frustration or rejection on top of the anxiety.

Maybe it's a cloud,

Like a black cloud.

Maybe it's a ball,

A dense ball.

Who knows?

But imagine it in some way.

It doesn't matter if it's real or not.

We're imagining it to the place where it feels real.

You understand?

What matters is that it feels real.

And imagine it leaving.

Imagine it gets lifted off of you.

Imagine you just like pull out the ball and place it at their feet.

You don't need to hold on to it.

It's not yours.

It's not true.

It's not real.

It's not needed.

So it's time to give back the imprint,

The emotional imprints and trained responses to our anxiety that aren't ours.

So I'll give you a few moments to do that if you haven't already.

It could take longer,

You watch this video again or just pause it and take as much time as you need,

But I'm going to move on.

Once you feel like that's complete,

It's time to give the child a new energetic reference point,

A new normal for how it is most natural and most true to be treated when you feel afraid,

When you feel nervous,

When you feel anxious.

So imagine the child you feeling nervous,

Anxious,

Afraid.

And I want you to approach the child as yourself,

As the adult you.

I want you to tell the child I'm the adult you and speak to the child as if it's a child,

Child language and child words.

Tell the child I love you even if you're afraid.

I welcome your fear and your anxiety.

It's okay to welcome here.

It's no big deal.

It's no problem.

I see you.

I hold you.

I'm here for you.

Fear is no reason for rejection and I'm not afraid for you.

I see you're afraid.

I know maybe some other people aren't afraid in this situation.

It's okay.

I will support you in helping you to see why you're afraid and taking care of you so you can feel calm in these environments.

But it's light.

It's okay.

Let the child feel accepted.

Let the child's fear feel welcome.

Let the child know that if they're afraid you're not going to respond with annoyance or frustration or fear or panic or trying to fix them.

Tell the child I love you while you're afraid.

You don't have to be happy all the time.

You don't have to be filled with energy and aliveness.

You can be afraid.

You can be nervous.

You can be scared to talk and I'll hold you.

I'll help you know it's safe.

Help you feel comfortable to open up.

That I'm here for you.

And ask the child what do you need.

Do you need love?

Do you need touch?

What do you need?

Maybe you need to express something.

Maybe you need to yell and scream.

Imagine the child yelling and screaming if that's what they need.

Maybe they need to break things.

Imagine them breaking things.

Maybe they need to cry.

Just hold them in their tears.

It's your job now to take care of this child to be the energetic reference point that they needed.

The reference point of love and acceptance,

Softness and gentleness in the midst of fear.

That fear,

Anxiety,

Nervousness is not a reason to be rejected.

That it can be met with acceptance and openness,

Lightness and calmness.

So give the child space and time.

You can pause this video to take more time.

Give the child space and time to express his or herself and to let in your love,

Your care,

Your patience,

Your wisdom.

Now this isn't meant to address the underlying fear.

The child doesn't need to stop being afraid.

He just needs to know in this moment that fear won't get him rejected.

That anxiety won't get her outcasted.

That nervousness won't get him annoyance and frustration from the people around him.

So when that feels complete,

You can open your eyes and I'll share some more.

Welcome back.

So many of us are taught that our fear isn't welcome,

That our nervousness is unacceptable,

That we're defective if we're anxious.

Our society doesn't support us to be honest about our feelings.

If we're in school growing up at any age,

It's not really allowed to express your fear.

It's not an environment to share all your fears,

Share that you're anxious about your test scores.

Well,

Anxious about your test scores actually is oddly enough acceptable.

But other types of anxieties and fears.

Well,

Actually I'll talk about that for a moment.

So notice that it's really socially acceptable to say you're anxious about your test scores,

You're stressed about your work performance.

That's really,

Really socially acceptable.

So most people don't have anxiety about that anxiety because in an environment,

At least not socially,

Because socially you're not going to get rejected for that because everyone has it.

You might still have fear of those anxieties because maybe when you.

.

.

Yeah,

I think I have to say something about this.

So if you go into a test and you have anxiety,

Maybe that anxiety can have an impact on your ability to concentrate,

So it can impact your test scores.

So you might have fear of having anxiety because it will give you negative test scores,

Low test scores.

The same thing with work performance.

You can be afraid of having anxiety at work because when you have anxiety at work,

You can't be efficient enough to have the level of performance that you want.

So it seems I'm not addressing those types of anxiety in this video.

I'm addressing the anxiety about getting anxiety in social situations.

Yeah.

So now that that's clear,

Let's move on.

So our society doesn't make it normal to share our social anxiety.

So you might see here at school or at work,

I'm stressed about my performance,

I'm stressed about getting decline,

I'm stressed about getting a bad test score,

But it's very,

Very unlikely that we talk about our fears of being insulted or of being rejected or the girl not liking me or whatever else the case may be or just other types of fears,

Fears of I don't know,

Of being ugly,

Fears of getting injured,

Fears of all sorts of different stuff.

And so when we feel like our fear is unusual,

Not normal in our social environment,

Then we can feel like our fear makes us defective.

My fear makes me unworthy of love in this environment.

And the truth oftentimes is that everybody has the same fears practically,

Maybe in different intensities,

Maybe with different things that activate it.

But if you grew up in a place where no one even talked that they had anxiety at school,

Anxiety with test performance,

And you knew you had anxiety about your test performance,

You'd think I'm the only one.

But everybody has it practically,

A very high percentage of people have it.

So the same thing is true socially.

A very high percentage of people have social anxiety,

Are afraid of rejection,

Afraid of abandonment,

Afraid of being insulted,

Afraid of not being loved,

Afraid of not being heavily held.

But it's just with different intensities and arising in different types of situations.

And so when we have this social anxiety,

We're not defective,

We're not bad.

There's a reason why we have it.

There's a reason why we have it.

It has to do with something that happened in our upbringing,

When our parents weren't giving us unconditional love,

Which practically none of our parents gave us.

Comes from disassociating from having such intense fears that we had to leave our body and go up into our mind and become analytical.

Comes from all sorts of different stuff.

And you are not bad or defective or weak or anything for having fear in social environments.

And as long as you think that your fear in social environment makes you defective or bad,

You will judge yourself for it,

Right?

That's a judgment for it.

And then you will fear having fear.

And as long as you fear having fear,

What it is is you're not accepting your fear.

You're not accepting or welcoming the social anxiety.

And then when you come from that place,

It's very,

Very difficult to see the social anxiety clearly and to undo it,

Find the root of it,

Heal it,

Give it love.

You understand?

When we look at any emotion or thought through the filter of a judgment,

Through the filter of non-acceptance,

It creates a blurriness,

A fogginess that blocks the clarity to see what's really going on here.

How do I let go of it?

How do I undo it?

You understand?

So it seems I discovered what I was talking about,

That this is really mostly about feeling fear of having anxiety in social environments,

Feeling afraid that others will reject you,

Not welcome you,

Not accept you,

Outcast you,

Abandon you if you show any signs of having anxiety.

Like if you show that you can't speak fluidly or if you have tension in your chest or you're sweating or you're awkward,

That that will get you outcasted and rejected because it's like not okay.

It's okay if you have awkwardness.

It's okay if you're not fluid when you're speaking.

Okay,

You have fear.

It doesn't mean you're bad.

Doesn't mean there's something wrong with you.

Doesn't mean,

I don't know,

That you don't deserve love or inclusion.

You deserve to be included and welcomed and treated gently.

Like if someone's speaking in front of me and they're sweating,

They're turning red,

Whatever,

Am I going to say like,

Get away from me,

You're clearly worse than me because you have anxiety while talking to a fellow human being?

No,

I understand.

I see you.

I see you that there is fear here when talking to someone.

And that means there was fear when talking probably to your mother and father or father as a child because you were dependent on them for survival.

And if they don't accept you,

If they are rejecting you in one subtle way or another,

That can manifest as being afraid of all men or all women or all men in that environment or all women in that type of environment or all women who look like this or men who look like that.

You understand?

It's not a sign you're defective.

It's just the manifestation of a previous scary experience.

So I have gentleness towards it.

And it's time for you to have gentleness towards yourself,

To realize that's the natural,

It's just the normal natural intuitive response when we see someone in fear is to take care of them,

To support them.

Like if you saw a child in fear,

Are you going to say,

Oh,

They're terrible for being afraid?

The natural intuitive response is to treat them with love,

Gentleness and compassion.

And so if we're afraid and our first response is I'm terrible,

I'm horrible,

I'm no good,

Ugh,

That is not our natural intuitive response.

We were trained,

Programmed to have that response by the people in our life,

Usually our parents but could be other people.

And so we want to untrain,

Deprogram how we were treated when we had fear and then give a new reference point,

A new treatment towards ourselves as the new normal,

The new pathway for what is natural intuitive and instinctive in how to treat ourselves when we feel fear,

Anxiety or nervousness.

Yeah,

So I think that's all I'll say about that.

I hope you found it helpful.

Please feel free to ask questions in the comment area.

I will probably respond at least in the beginning.

And I would love to hear your experience to share with me what impact you noticed.

Yeah,

And if it helped you,

Share it with others.

I hope you have a great day.

Bye!

Reviews

This was very insightful, the exercise was gentle and easy to follow along. I will be coming back to it when I need reminders, thank you so much!

This was SO HELPFUL! I will definently be coming back to this as a reminde and for practice.

I can’t wait to listen to it again! Humongous, eye-opening experience here! Thank you so much.

Thanks for the clear instruction and the beautiful, sad and clarifying excercise. It brought tears in my eyes when i got a flash of understanding and those original emotions experienced loong time ago.

Very interesting! Thank you!