Lyrics from Linkin Park’s song, Leave Out All The Rest. Words which I strongly resonate with because it’s precisely the template I followed when I first tried to overcome social anxiety. I tried to create a strong image of myself around people by faking confidence and trying to appear all put together even though internally I was dying and dealing with so much fear.

It worked, to a certain extent. It allowed me to get along and behave more functionally and “normally” around people, to present myself as a person who wasn’t struggling.

But it was all built on an internally weak foundation – which everything I did to try and address my social anxiety never touched upon. The deep insecurity and weakness inside me persisted throughout the years even though I put myself into so many social situations and tried to fake my way to a more confident self. I never reached the place of “making it” and feeling confident.

Which leads to another line in this song.

“Forgetting, all the hurt inside you’ve learned to hide so well.”

This is what it was really all about. The hurt inside from past events around people where I’d taken things to heart. The times I’d been teased and embarrassed and put down, used as a stepping stone so other people could look cool and have something to laugh about.

I had forgotten about it.

But a deeper part of me inside hadn’t. My body remembered exactly how it felt to be in that position of great emotional pain. Feeling humiliated. And that’s precisely what the problem was about. My anxiety was coming out of these old feelings my body hadn’t forgotten – that lived somewhere deep and dormant inside of me. And my attempts to overcome social anxiety only tried to write over this unprocessed pain inside of me. Mask it. Cover it up. Become strong at the surface as a way of skipping past facing this pain that was driving me to feel so chronically insecure around people.

It’s something I think about sometimes – what if instead of trying to become strong at the surface and appear socially normal, I had instead gotten straight to the work of becoming strong all the way through? How might that have changed the course of my life and allowed me to capitalize on numerous opportunities for love, romance and friendship? All the encounters I was never ready for because this deep weakness inside wouldn’t allow for anyone to get close to me? What if I had just solved that weakness from the beginning?

How might my life be different?

That’s the message I wish I had gotten at the beginning of my journey to try and overcome social anxiety.

Do the work to become strong all the way through because no amount of surface change and becoming strong in appearance can solve the real problems you’re struggling with inside. It can only delay the time when shit will inevitably hit the fan in your life. So don’t wait for that day. Do it now.

I’ve come to learn that conventional advice for social anxiety doesn’t address the problem. It puts a bandaid on it and teaches you to live with it; to go on existing and putting yourself out there despite feeling in pain and out of sorts because the most important thing isn’t feeling ok, it’s looking ok.

Deception becomes the new game when you look to the common advice out there for social anxiety. What can you do to appear confident and normal around the people you see? What can you do to hide the panic you’re feeling and put on a mask like everything is fine?

Because the theory goes if you can “fake it” long enough then eventually you’ll make it. If you can just think positively and pretend as if you’re already someone confident then soon it will become your new reality.

So you focus all your energy and attention on fixing your appearance and behavior and how you show up around people. You direct all your conscious effort to acting in a more pro-social and outgoing manner. You push out of sight all the stuff that doesn’t fit the mold of this new person you’re trying to become – all the feelings and thoughts about yourself you don’t like – and you try to create a new person on top, believing this is the key to leaving behind your past.

But it never quite goes away inside. As good as you get at stuffing away how you feel and putting forth a more confident side of yourself, it still nags and eats away at you and causes you to experience a deep doubt and uncertainty and background anxiety; a fear of relapsing and losing all your hard won progress and people seeing through to how it really is.

It’s a Losing Game

Who wins when you try to fake and be something you’re not? Not you. Not the people around you. It makes connection impossible. It creates more fear and tension because now you’ve got the added worry of people seeing through the mask. Which, if that happens, opens up a floodgate of shame because people find out you’re not who you’re presenting yourself to be.

And at that point the jig is up and it makes you want to hide away your face forever. It makes you feel like all your hard work is for nothing. That is, until you redouble your efforts and try even harder to keep the mask in place the next time you’re around people.

And on it goes.

The cycle continues.

When you could’ve just avoided all that crap in the first place and actually worked on your issues instead of avoiding and trying to cover them up. Yes, it’s harder. Yes, it’s not an immediate change that instantly makes you into the person you want to be.

But it’s real. It allows you to actually change and grow. It addresses the fear inside in such a way that it permanently goes away. It enables you to be yourself around people because you have the internal sense you’re ok. You’ve addressed the emotional weakness and built a strong foundation that gives a real feeling of security inside.

Become Someone Truly Strong

It was the best thing that happened to me, when the facade I had built up of me being this super-friendly and outgoing and confident person finally crumbled. When I finally realized this front wasn’t going to get me what I desired in life – real relationships with people and a sense of actually being ok in myself.

It hurt. It caused me to become suicidal for a month. It spelled so much doom to my world and feeling like it was all over – all my hard work to try and overcome social anxiety had been for absolutely nothing. But it was the thing that allowed me to finally realize – if you want to change your life you MUST fix the foundation and get to the heart of it. You can only cover over the problem and pretend to be someone different for so long. Eventually your deeper issues will catch up to you and bite you in the ass.

So better just to work on them in the beginning. Pop the blister and let the pus out. Don’t just wrap around it – because that will still leave you with a sore area you have to tread so carefully around.

Otherwise…

An explosion of pain will result.

I was at the gym this morning playing pickup basketball, and while resting on the sideline between games, I reminisced back to how insecure and tense I used to be in an environment like this around other guys.

This bodily state of tension affected my game, how I shot the ball, how I moved up and down the court. I felt very rigid, especially in my shoulders. And it just didn’t feel natural to be on the court.

I didn’t feel like I belonged.

A big contrast to today. Where I had basically no tension in my body. I was free to move around the court and make good decisions. I wasn’t in my head thinking about what the other guys thought of me. I was just playing and being in the moment and feeling good in myself, which made all the difference in how I played.

What’s different now?

Over the years I’ve learned to get more in my body. I’ve dealt with a lot of the repressed emotion and stress I was carrying from past events around people where I’d been hurt and shaken badly. I’ve reintegrated these emotions that were disintegrated and I’ve learned to let go of nearly all the tension I was holding in my body (you know, that feeling as if I was about to “attacked” by an invisible enemy).

And it’s made all the difference in how I feel and how I am around people. I’ve become so much more confident in myself because my body is no longer the enemy giving me reason to fear.

How to Become Embodied

It’s not a quick fix process. It’s been a journey getting back into my body. It has meant facing all those uncomfortable feelings and emotions in myself and learning to process them. It has meant sitting with the discomfort when it arises and not running from it. Not going into my head as a way to escape it – just sitting with the full intensity of it and letting it wash over me.

For around 7 years I’ve on this path to learning to become more embodied. It all started with a decision to go on a 10 day silent Vipassana meditation retreat. It was here I learned a meditation technique for focusing awareness on my bodily sensations. And this was the start to really becoming more conscious of my body. Learning to live inside my body instead of my head.

And through this process it has brought so much peace, stability, confidence to my life. I feel so much more secure around people – like I don’t have to put on or be something I’m not. I can just relax and let things come and go naturally. There’s no more fear that arises because I’m not resisting my feelings. My emotions are finally working for me instead of against me.

You don’t have to go on a meditation retreat to experience this. You can begin right now where you are. It involves a conscious decision to move attention from your head and your thinking mind, into your body and your feelings. This can be hard initially because there’s probably a lot that is packed down inside of you that is preventing you from fully feeling and being in your body.

But you have to start somewhere. Set an intent to put attention into your body, even when it’s uncomfortable. Start noticing how your body is feeling in different situations in life. Don’t resist what you’re experiencing, try to just sit with it and let it be there. This is how it gradually begins to break down from a hard shape into a softer one.

Picture an ice cube you pull out of the freezer and what happens as you hold it in your hand. At first you experience extreme sensations of cold, but, as you stay with the cold and just hold the ice, the heat of your hand begins to transform this ice cube into a more flowing and aqueous shape, water.

This same principle applies to your body. When you first put attention there, it can be an uncomfortable place where you begin to experience all this intense and unpleasant sensation. But, as you keep your attention there, the light of your conscious mind begins to transform this sensation into softer and more pleasant sensation – where it then feels good to be in your body.

This is essentially the path to embodiment in a nutshell.

Does any of this make sense? What’s your experience? Let me know in the comments.

To solve a problem you must know what it is. I spent five years trying to overcome social anxiety without knowing what it was. I thought it was a problem in my head, caused by my incorrect thinking and poor view of people. So I took control of my thoughts and tried to picture people in a more positive light, as friendly and non-threatening.

But something deeper inside me never bought it. My emotional and hind brain refused to let me relax around people. My body continued to give me reason to keep being afraid even though I tried to convince myself other people weren’t a threat to me.

That’s because the problem wasn’t in my mind.

The problem was in my body.

The problem was in old feelings, a store of old emotions from past events where I’d been wounded/overwhelmed/shamed/made to not feel good.

It wasn’t about any sort of cognitive reframing or convincing myself others weren’t a threat.

It was about resolving old feelings that were subconsciously affecting my view of others.

A Shocking Realization

It blew my mind when I learned just how much emotion and tension I was holding in my body. I had gone through life always feeling heavy and fearful for the most part and I thought that’s just how it was. I thought it was the way my mind was wired, to make me chronically tense and afraid. I had no idea there was all this “stuff” living in my body at a mostly unconscious level.

But on a Vipassana retreat, where I learned a body scanning technique to become aware of sensations on my body, I was able to start to become so much more conscious of the internal position of my body and how much emotion and tension I was holding all throughout the muscles in my body.

I finally connected this internal situation with my past and all the things that had happened to me over my life. Painful events around people where I’d been teased, humiliated, embarrassed, overwhelmed. Living with an overbearing mom who never let me be my own person – I had to be this perfect kid. I had no idea just how much anger and sadness and other emotions that were living in my body – in my subconscious mind. I had stuffed all this emotion away and never gotten the chance to feel it or express it. So it had lived inside me and been accumulating over the course of my life.

I had become more and more tense until I was close to popping.

This is what my “social anxiety disorder” was all about. It wasn’t so much of a “mental issue”. It was a physical issue in my body of carrying all this emotion and tension from times I’d been hurt. Call it trauma or whatever you want, I was deeply burdened at the level of my body and nervous system. I was carrying so much stress and tension inside.

It’s no wonder I was chronically anxious of people!

Letting Go and Healing the Past

It only took 10 days of intensive meditation on a Vipassana retreat to majorly resolve a big chunk of this emotion / fear inside. I remember on day 10 when we could speak again to the other retreat attendees, the first person I made eye contact with felt fundamentally easy. There was no tension or uncomfortable sensations stirring in my body. There was just a peace and an easy feeling that carried me easily through this interaction.

At last I had found out what my social anxiety was all about and why the last five years of trying to overcome it hadn’t solved the problem. I had to move attention out of my head and away from my thinking mind because I couldn’t solve my social anxiety by changing my thoughts. I could only solve it by getting into my body and feeling all the shit I held down there, releasing the tension and emotion that was residing all throughout my body from stressful times in life. That’s how the problem dissipated.

What do you think of all this? Am I crazy? Does this sound too good to be true that I could cure my social anxiety in meditation? Share your comments below.