I have a social anxiety. That is common for persons suffering from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder or Syndrome. I avoid people and social situations as much as possible because I fear being judged by others and being rejected. It comes from a lifetime of being blamed and scapegoated by family and others close to me.
I go out very little and avoid most situations that require social interaction. In contrast, I am very outgoing bordering on outrageous with the people I am the most comfortable with. This includes my Red Hat ladies’ group and my membership in the Coast Guard Auxiliary, both of which I joined to force myself to leave my home and to interact with others. Still, I find myself avoiding friends and people whom I truly love. With the Auxiliary, I choose solitary tasks like publishing newsletters both because I have the required skills and because working from my computer does not require face-to-face contact.
When I must interact with large groups- like teaching a class at a conference, I ‘perform’ well, but then I must spend hours, sometimes days decompressing. As a matter of fact, almost all social contact requires that I decompress after. Because I appear to be outgoing, very few people know how truly painful the ‘after’ is for me.
Case in point: I spent yesterday evening with an old friend whom I truly love. It was a wonderful evening, I enjoyed myself and I posted photographs to Facebook. A relative immediately berated me for not honoring Memorial Day properly and by pointing out that it was not a day for pleasure. (He has, thankfully, since deleted his comment, but not before I read them and felt cut to the bone.) It served as a trigger that evoked other painful memories of the many times I was unfairly judged and accused by family, especially events like the complete rejection of me by my son who recently told me that I deserve no respect. That was a statement that I cannot begin to understand and his cousin’s disrespect of me only served to open all these wounds.
I could not sleep last night. The sense of unease was physical, palpable. While my mind knows these attacks against me are baseless and unfair, however, I cannot control or turn off my emotional responses and the flood of pain and sorrow. I know how I will respond even though it is irrational: I will withdraw even more to avoid feeling judged and rejected. I will become even more of a hermit.
dottieriley 