Where Does Social Anxiety Come From?

You’ve asked a very interesting question, Thao. Unfortunately, for my answer to make sense, I’m afraid you’d need to have read my book on personality and my new book on therapy (due out in September). This said, I’ll do my best to offer a place for you to begin exploring. That place? The nature of memory, learning, and the development of social awareness. Not social skills, mind you. Social awareness.

[1] Unless a baby is startled in the delivery room, most babies arrive with little in the way of social awareness, let alone, social anxiety. Social awareness refers to having both a sense of self and a sense of others. Babies do not arrive with this. They do arrive with “world awareness,” as in a sense of how they feel. But social awareness? No. These patterns develop slowly, mainly during their first four years.

My point is, babies can and do have personal anxiety, as in that which is caused by physical discomfort. Unmet needs can cause extreme anxiety at times. Indeed, for awhile (roughly the first year of life) this type of anxiety is the main anxiety in babies’ minds. But with the onset of visual and physical mobility (at about six to nine months), babies begin to expand on their sense of the source of their anxiety. It can now come from something “out there,” as well as from something “in here.”

[2] During the second year of life, babies begin to categorize sensory experiences. Anxiety is not an emotion. Anxiety is a meta-class of physical/mental experiences. During this second year of life, about 75% of babies learn to sense that others exist. And the remaining 25%? They never develop this awareness and this limits what they learn from then on.

[3] This division, between the 25% and the 75%, becomes the basis for social awareness. To have this awareness, a baby must develop a separate sense of “the other.” This awareness cannot be taught, only honed and developed once it begins to exist. Hence the 25% are that category of people the world has come to call, “narcissists.”

In truth, this more refers to that what they learn gets limited by a pattern which exists in all babies in the first year of life.

[4] Now add to this that all learning, including social skills, is pattern-based. Patterns function like cookie-cutter molds into which we insert life experiences. When life experiences fit the mold, we assign the same meanings to them as we’ve assigned to the patterns. And most of the basics of this type of learning occur in the third year of life.

For example, I recall being a a birthday party for a one year old. I was sitting next to the baby and behind me was a father holding his two and a half year old son in his arms. The baby had a string of blocks on his wrist, and the two year old looked down and said to me, “baby watch.”

The two year old boy had strung together two patterns he’d by this time learned.

[5] Most of this should be quite easy to understand, given you can set aside any objections. The hard part comes next, the part which begins to describe the nature of learning and memory. Here, I’ll need to ask that you set aside all but the nature of permanent memories. This leaves only two classes of learning and memory. Those caused by being startled, and those caused by what I call, “emergences.” Being startled means being painfully surprised when you expect nothing bad will happen. Having an emergence means being pleasantly surprised when you feel certain you’ll feel pain.

In layperson’s terms, these two things are what we call, getting wounded,” and “healing.” Social anxiety, at least the disabling kind, is caused by getting startled while in a social setting. Here, the anxiety is the painful aftermath which occurs when people feel certain they will relive the painful event, and also, that if they find themselves in this environment again that there is nothing they can do to prevent this pain.

Eventually, they come to see avoidance as the only dependable, reliable, manageable strategy. Sadly, the things which cause people to relive their wounds are far less general than therapists yet imagine. Unfortunately, the nature of the mind and suffering is that we use sledge hammers to kill flies. In other words, our pattern recognition functions like an over-active immune system, poisoning any and all life experiences which in any way resemble the original situation.

[6] An example? Years ago, I met a man on a lunch break at a conference on anger release techniques. On learning what I did, he asked me if I could help him with his social anxiety. Me being me back then, I worried I did not yet have enough skill. But he needed my help. So I reluctantly agreed to try to help him.

He told me he’d built his entire adult life in and around avoiding people. His career? He owned a greenhouse which to his delight, was only open part of the year and required only limited contact with the public. After asking him to try to picture a time in which he felt socially anxious, we arrived at three times, the sequence of which had us moving backwards in time.

In the third and earliest time, this man was six years old. He could vividly picture being on the phone, with his father standing next to him. He’d called a friend from school and thought he was talking to this other boy. But in truth, he was talking to that boy’s father. And when that father told him this, he got startled.

After that, from age six on, he had to force himself to endure social settings. Eventually, he stopped venturing out into the world except for acquiring essentials. Clearly, I do not have the space here to go into what I did to heal that man’s social anxiety. What I can say is, when I left that lunch, I’d changed his life.

My evidence. A month later, he called (note the phone call was now normal) and asked to come visit me. He lived several hours away. During his visit, by his own admission, he exhibited none of his former social anxiety. More important, he’d employed no techniques, no medications, nor any illegal drugs. I’d helped him to have an emergence, and this had permanently altered the way his brain responded to that pattern.

Obviously, this man’s story involves a severe case. This begs the question, at what point is social anxiety normal and at what point does it cross the line? My take on this? It depends on how much of a person’s life consists of avoidance, versus how much of a person’s life is spent socially isolated and alone.

In truth, this should, for the most part, be left to the person to decide, given they allow for the possibility that someone may be able to help them to heal this pattern.

Sadly, severe anxiety can cripple people’s ability to seek this help, as even thinking of seeing someone can set it off. If this is you, please do try an online therapy. It can be helpful, and after all, you deserve to be free from this pain. We humans need our own kind in order to understand ourselves. and even limited efforts can yield improvements, given you find someone who can help.