I didn’t want to think this was how it ended. 27 years old. A good looking guy. High functioning on the outside.

By appearances my life should be perfect. I had spent the last four years going to war against my severe social anxiety and to a pretty big extent I had pushed it back. I had created a much more confident persona of someone who looked and acted basically normal. Who could come across ok around people. Who hit all the right cues and who, on the surface, seemed to be fine in himself.

The signs were there for people to see. I’d still slipup occasionally and trip over my words. I’d say something out of pocket and make things awkward. But for the most part I had my social anxiety under control. I felt it in the background in most social situations but I could handle it. I could use my willpower muscle to push past it and present myself in a mostly positive/outgoing/happy light.

Except when I couldn’t. Except when an attractive girl popped into view. Except when it came to sharing personal things. Except when it came to being emotionally available to have friends.

These were all still problem areas.

Very big sore spots in my life despite how well I could hide and look socially fine.

Attractive girls is where it had gotten me.

making friends

Who seemed to be fine in himself.

the persona of someone who looked confident and acted normal.

who looked and acted normal

But internally crumbling.

But at an absolute impasse

27. Traveling the world and so many opportunities happening around me. But I couldn’t get past this fear to save my life.

At 27 and my whole life before me,

Social anxiety feels totally baseless.

It feels irrational to be having this reaction.

A deeper side to my social anxiety

It wasn’t irrational and all in my mind. It was based off of old feelings in my body, a store of old emotions from past events where I’d been wounded/overwhelmed/shamed/made to not feel good.

This realization came just in time.

I thought suicide was the only way out of this pain. This loneliness. This absolute feeling of brokenness.

I had tried everything. Exposure therapy, fitness, cognitive reframing, fake it till you make it. I had been going on in good faith trying to solve this problem for over four years by this point.

And when all I did is mask it better and realize there was no solution, well,

None of which had changed how I felt on a deep inner level.

When you use up all options and the problem hasn’t been fixed it naturally makes you think there isn’t one.

Four years of my nose to the grindstone and I was still anxious, stuck behind a wall, trapped inside myself.

A prison of which I saw no escape.

I had put my heart and soul into

There was a deeper side to my social anxiety. It wasn’t irrational and all in my mind. It was based off of old feelings in my body, a store of old emotions from past events where I’d been wounded/overwhelmed/shamed/made to not feel good.

I had never been more lonely, felt more lost. My hardest efforts hadn’t fixed it. Backpacking in Europe for 8 months hadn’t fixed it, it had only confirmed I was broken, beyond repair, no redemption or saving someone like me.

I was at my lowest. I was backpacking in Europe and trying harder than ever to overcome social anxiety.

I’m Ben Brewer

I gave up on trying to overcome social anxiety. I wasn’t changing from exposure therapy or self-improvement.

I was still struggling after 4 years of pushing out of my comfort zone and thinking positively.

I almost killed myself. I saw no reason to live while my social anxiety stayed around.

When it stopped me from connecting, from reaching out, from being comfortable in my skin.

Social anxiety is sometimes so deep that no amount of exposure or self-improvement can take it away. It feels permanent, like you’ll have it forever.

Your experience keeps showing you’re defective, not like others, always have a hard time being yourself.

Yeah, you may improve. You may get better at hiding it. But it’s not gone. It’s still there around people.

So… why try? Why work so hard when it doesn’t go away?

Because in my experience there’s a way to address it.

To resolve what’s making you insecure.

To change how you feel.

Throw out what you know about social anxiety

Irrational fear, all in the mind, incorrect thinking, born this way.

All bullshit.

All based on false premises that (a) you can somehow think/logic/convince yourself out of it or (b) you’re permanently stuck with it and change isn’t possible.

I spent 4 years on road (a). Exposing to thousands of social situations so my brain could “rewire” and learn people were not to fear. Doing a lot of cognitive reframing and trying to convince myself there was no danger. Wrestling constantly with my brain to get myself to see there was no reason to be this way.

And after this strategy failed me and only brought a surface improvement, managing symptoms better, I bought into idea (b) I was born this way and there was no saving me.

Both were wrong.

The body and mind are vastly intelligent and there is order behind the chaos. There’s reasons even if you can’t see them why you’re experiencing such deep distress.

It’s not random.

A deep change I didn’t think was possible.

We are products of our environment. Yes, most likely there’s an element of sensitivity. There was for me. I’m a highly sensitive person.

But we are shaped by our experiences. As Peter Levine says, our sensations are shaped by our experiences, distressing moments we have, all which affect how we feel. Things happen and they get incorporated. Emotions get stored in the body. Pain builds. And over time we find ourselves struggling with all these “mental health issues” like social anxiety and depression. We find it so hard to be ourselves and to think and act clearly. Everything becomes muddied and doing simple things like talking a person becomes a nightmare. It’s not just this simple situation causing us to react in this massively disproportionate way. It’s all the experiences that have built and been incorporated into who we are as a whole. All of THIS is leading us to have this reaction to this simple situation.

Good and bad news.

How did I do it? Through a lot of meditation and body awareness and actively moving attention out of my head. I lived chronically in my head. Getting into my body is what helped dissolve my trauma, helped to resolve old feelings, and release a lot of tension. And then it was just a practice of learning to exist more from my center and not my head. Loosening my physical body as a whole.

Mind and tension were connected.

Resolving trauma/old feelings and embodiment. Learning to be more in my body and not my head. Living from a place in myself where I was loose in myself physically and not trying to grip myself tightly, not trying to control with my mind. Body and mind are connected. By becoming aware of the tension in your body you can get out of your mind. You can create a pathway out, a way of dissolving your social anxiety and insecurity. You can embody a state of presence and looseness and ease and a place where conversation and quips flow effortlessly. You just “know what to say”. It feels weightless. You don’t have to try or think. You just do. You just say. You just are. Rejection doesn’t even matter anymore because you’re not trying to get anything. This state is full in and of itself.

Yes there may still be nerves, some fear. But it’s more of an excitement than dread. It’s a positive expectation. It makes you come alive. It feels fundamentally good. It puts you on your game.

Sharpening your awareness

If you can’t see the problem there is no solution.

There’s only blindly searching for relief and hoping something helps. Hoping something takes away this pain you’re feeling.

If a thorn is buried in your foot from long ago and you no longer see it because it’s incorporated and become a “part” of you, and you mistakenly believe it’s just the way you are, this pain is you, then all your efforts to remove/control/manage that pain will be guided by this assumption.

Most people are looking in the wrong place

Someone asked on reddit “How do people socialize so easily?”

And this is how I replied:

They have a healthy and regulated nervous system and they are embodied / not in their heads. They aren’t suffering intense emotions because they have gotten well socialized and not had the traumatic social experiences. Their internal world is more calm and thus they can more freely and easily be themselves.

To actually move forward and become self-confident.

This blog gets to the specifics.

Because in my experience there’s a way to ADDRESS it.

To actually fix it.

To get to the bottom of this fear and break it down AT THE ROOTS.

This blog tells how.

Is it easy? No.

Is it possible? Yes.

It’s not easy.

But it’s possible.

how you’ll never make it, how you’ll always be this way.

I know because I spent 4 years trying everything in my power to overcome it.

I failed.

When I couldn’t connect with anyone. When I felt so lonely.

I gave up on trying to overcome social anxiety. There was no reason to keep putting myself out there when no change came from it.

When I still suffered the same anxiety, the same nervous anticipation, the same inability to connect with anyone past a superficial level of “hi” and “bye”.

Four years of getting out of my comfort zone, thinking positively, transforming my body in the gym, making so many self-improvements… and all for what?

To mask my problems better and appear “ok” when inwardly I was still trapped?

I almost killed myself. There were days where the pain was so intense I didn’t think I’d survive it.

Emotional numbness.

There was so much pain I didn’t think I’d survive it.

The pain of realizing I’d never be free of social anxiety was so intense I didn’t think I’d survive it.

That month of binging Breaking Bad and laying on my bed and barely leaving my apartment because the emotional pain was so intense

broke me.

of realizing I’d never overcome social anxiety

The pain of learning I was still just as socially anxious inside as when I had started

The pain of being trapped behind this wall after 4 years of trying my hardest to break out was so intense.

inside myself

behind this wall

From 13-23 I struggled with panic, shame and discomfort around people.

After spending 4 years on all the advice (think positive, fake confidence, push out of your comfort zone) but seeing poor results, I was ultimately able to undergo a real change by learning Vipassana meditation.

Now I feel sure in myself, confident around people, much more relaxed inside.

All thanks to resolving old feelings in my body that were subconsciously affecting my view of others.

For 14 years I struggled with social anxiety. After trying all the advice like think positive and push out of your comfort zone but only masking it better, still being very tense and insecure in my body, I was ultimately able to resolve my social anxiety by learning Vipassana meditation. Now I can walk into social situations confidently, without any hesitation, with the feeling inside I can handle it. All thanks to changes I made to my body, aka my subconscious mind.

I believed overcoming social anxiety was impossible. There were 4 years of hard evidence of me fighting this fear (and losing) backing that belief.

and on almost all accounts losing. Other than masking better still being anxious.

so much evidence proving I was a lost cause. There were 4 years of me trying my hardest to fight my social anxiety showing

4 years of evidence of me trying my hardest to fight and actively confront my social anxiety

It started with the realization it wasn’t all in my head. There were roots to these fears I had been struggling with. They weren’t entirely irrational. They were based off of old feelings in my body, a store of old emotions from past events where I’d been wounded. This is mainly what my mind was hung up on. And it’s why cognitive reframing and exposure only helped so much. The fear was baked in deep. So my initial efforts didn’t reach or get to the bottom of it.

It required a different approach.

It involved getting into my body. Putting attention and awareness into my body. It involved learning to allow my instincts to do the driving instead of my thinking and calculating mind.

What is the foundation? The foundation of overcoming social anxiety is developing a new relationship with your feelings and your body. The body and mind are connected. A regulated nervous system is the foundation of good mental health. The body is the subconscious mind. Tension and body armoring. Suppressed and buried emotions. So much of this level is responsible. It’s a dysfunctional relationship to your feelings and emotions. It’s about learning a new relationship to them. Resolving old feelings as well as realizing you can act even when you don’t feel like it, when you feel anxious. Not resisting your feelings which is the ordinary state. You’re resisting your feelings as you try and force yourself to socialize. This doesn’t work in the long run. It’s learning you can act even when you don’t feel like it. Learning your feelings don’t dictate your behavior and actions. Realizing you can do things even if you don’t feel well. But the key thing is not resisting your feelings. Flowing with them. This is how change happens. This is where freedom lies.

Acting in your present state. Being one with it and not resisting it. You don’t act in your present state. You resist your present state and try to act on top of it, act over it. This doesn’t work. What you resist persists.

Your best lessons come when you’re tired or anxious and you do it anyway. Not forcing yourself to do it. But acting through your feelings. Acting within that tiredness or anxiousness. Being one with it and not resisting it. And finding that you can still do it well.

A new way to address social anxiety

Most advice doesn’t address social anxiety.

It masks it. It helps you hide your true feelings so you fit in and look normal.

But underneath the same anxiety is still driving you. It hasn’t gone anywhere. It’s only been suppressed.

You’re at war inside and there’s no end in sight.

I’m sorry to be so blunt.

But I’m speaking to myself.

I’m speaking to someone who spent 4 years on conventional advice like exposure therapy and positive thinking and fake it till you make it only to learn I hadn’t gotten anywhere. I had only been spinning my wheels and pretending to be someone else.

I was still the same; social anxiety was still the story of his life; I couldn’t be who I wanted around others. Everything about me was filtered and I was still under so much pressure.

, stopping him from reaching out, making connections, relaxing in his body and feeling like a regular person.

Every time he went outside it was there in the background, a silent dread holding him back. Seeing a cute girl. Attempting to be one of the guys. Trying to extend himself to make personal contact with cashiers or people he encountered. The fear was always there putting up an invisible forcefield, making it feel impossible.

He tried the advice to “pull himself together” and “just do it” but something inside wouldn’t let him. Something made it physically impossible. Something made it feel like sheer death.

blocking him, stopping him, holding him back.

And it ate at his soul.

keeping him so limited.

A reality that almost made him commit suicide.

It makes it seem like you’re confident and ok

and makes it seem like you’re more okay on the outside. It creates a more confident persona

creates a more functional front to “fit in” and look “normal”.

It covers it up and creates a more functional front to “fit in” and look “normal”.

It masks it in my experience.

A truth I found out the hard way when, after 5 years of exposure therapy, cognitive reframing, self-compassion and radical lifestyle changes, I looked in the mirror and realized I still lived in a world of anxiety. I couldn’t actually put myself out there. All I had was a mask.

was still in a world of anxiety

It wasn’t all in my head

It was in my body.

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

This is mainly what my social anxiety was about. A subconscious fear that was affecting how I saw people, that was changing my behavior, that was putting me off myself.

I tried a conventional approach – to think positively and put myself into lots of social situations – but it didn’t resolve the fear. It only desensitized and helped me to live with the stress.

I’m Ben Brewer

I bombed a presentation in college at 23. That spectacular failure set me off on a journey of self-change and trying to overcome my decade-long struggle with social anxiety. Unfortunately I ran into a lot of snags. I spent the next four years building up a mask of perfectionism and the facade of someone ok, all the while my fear underneath was still running the show. I learned the hard way that masking doesn’t solve the problem. Fake it doesn’t make it.

That may be hard to hear but it’s the truth. A truth that needs airing because, like me, you can waste so many years not actually getting anywhere with your efforts.

This is the bottom line:

You can’t transform your life if you don’t get to the bottom of your social anxiety.

You can create the appearance you’re better.

But you will keep coming back to it – the sense inside that something isn’t right – until you right the ship at this foundational level of yourself.

I won’t say I have THE answer. But I have made substantial improvements in my life, in healing my social anxiety, in becoming a much stronger person at my core. I’ve basically resolved that deep sense of fear and uneasiness inside of me, that feeling of being self-conscious and on edge in social situations.

I am comfortable in my skin, capable of acting in the world, confident living my life.

And it’s all thanks to…

Identifying the Root Cause

I thought for many years something was irrationally wrong with me. My brain was doing all this stuff for no reason. I was getting anxious without cause. I looked around and saw no one was looking or paying any attention to me. No one cared. Yet as hard as I tried to convince myself of this reality?It never sunk in.

My body still made me feel anxious. Like something bad was about to happen and I needed to be ready for it. I needed this adrenaline in my body because shit was about to hit the fan. That’s how it felt on a basic instinctual level.

I kept putting myself into social situations to “desensitize” to them. I kept thinking positive thoughts like “no one is judging me” and “people are friendly”. But it made no difference beyond keeping my nerves in check and helping me get by in the situation.

Underneath nothing actually changed.

I had it all wrong. There was an intelligence to why my body was doing this. There was a reason I was getting so anxious and uptight in everyday social situations. They triggered something in me. They made surface a deep shame and embarrassment about myself, feelings in my body that, no, had nothing to do with this singular situation, but DID have something to do with people as a whole and how in the past embarrassing things had happened in front of others and I had been made fun of. I had been shamed and put down. I had been made to be the butt of the joke and have everyone laugh at me. And to my sensitive brain? This felt like death. It felt like absolute destruction to stand there and be seen in this revealing and shameful way in front of people.

My mind may have forgotten the pain of those events. But my body didn’t. It carried that emotional memory somewhere inside and it created a “shadow mind” that was always on the lookout for something painful and like to happen again. It was essentially a totally subconscious fear that had been created. And my anxiety and negative thoughts ran downstream from this. This fear in my body gave impetus to think and see people as this dangerous presence that needed to be handled with utmost caution, else I might sink into that same deathlike-state where it felt like my world had been annihilated.

Maybe I sound dramatic. But tell that to a 5 or 8-year old kid when his whole classroom makes fun of him. Or when his family shames him for trying to impress and win approval. These events seemingly get forgotten… on a conscious level. On a subconscious level the body still carries the trace of that pain that was felt. Some part of you still lives with it underneath where it affects how you see, act, think, behave. Everything. Your total worldview and identity. It’s all being formed by feelings in your body and how past situations in life shaped you.

This is why Vipassana made such massive difference. Because I was finally bringing awareness to this subconscious level of myself. I was bringing up stuff by putting attention on my body. I was creating a nonjudgmental space where feelings (bodily sensations) could arise and where I could feel and process and let go of them. And a greater sense of peace and flow started to get restored. I started to feel substantially better and lighter in myself, like I could breathe easy again. There wasn’t so much internal baggage and tension and restriction anymore. It fundamentally changed how I viewed people and social situations, from a much freer place. As the inside changed, so too did the outside.

I knew people weren’t this scary thing my brain were making them out to be. I knew – logically – I was safe.

Understanding what was causing my social anxiety

Identifying the issue

All real change proceeded from understanding my social anxiety and how most all of it was based off of old feelings in my body, not because I was thinking or perceiving people wrong. Old feelings were subconsciously affecting how I viewed others.

Bringing awareness to this deeper level of yourself. To your body. When you put attention here things begin to resolve and work themselves out. Attention is all that’s needed. Your body does the rest. Attention is healing. Your attention as of currently is all lodged in the mind; it’s outwardly focused.

Unless you get to the bottom of your social anxiety you cannot transform your life.

You can play at it. You can pretend you’re someone different. But underneath the truth is still there; your insecurities will chip away at you and eventually bring you back down.

You cannot transform your life if you don’t get to the bottom of your social anxiety.

A truth that nearly made me end my life.

on bandaid solutions for my social anxiety, only getting better at masking it. This nearly made me take my life. At the last hour I decided to pursue one last thing.

I spent from 23 to 27 on bandaid solutions for my social anxiety. At the basic level I saw no change in how I felt around people. I only got better at pushing my fear out of view.

conventional methods like exposure therapy and cognitive reframing trying to overcome my severe social anxiety. At 27 I came to the realization I had only masked it better. Underneath I was still the same deeply anxious, insecure and lost person. After nearly killing myself, I found a way to get to the bottom of my chronic social anxiety and transform how I feel around people.

I didn’t feel at home.

In this time I only managed the symptoms and masked it better. I got really good at hiding my fear from people and pretending to be someone confident.

trying to conventionally to overcome my social anxiety. After a lot of exposure, cognitive reframing, and self-improvement

I spent from 23 to 27 trying hard to overcome my social anxiety. In this time I only masked it better. I got really good at hiding my fear from people and pretending to be someone confident.

It helped, but it didn’t change me.

At the center I was still the same anxious person who struggled. There was never a moment of peace or a real good feeling in sight.

I hated being me.

And because of it I almost killed myself.

At 27 I couldn’t take living with myself anymore, this loser good-for-nothing guy who couldn’t talk to girls, who had no personality, who was so emotionally fragile and weak.

I wanted ACTUAL freedom from this fear, not this hollow shell of “confidence”.

What follows on this website is how I got to the bottom of my chronic social anxiety and transformed how I felt around people.

How I got my life back.

Because of this, it directs us to a much different way of treating social anxiety. Not trying to “change our thoughts” or force our feelings away and convince ourselves that what we’re feeling is wrong, trying to convince ourselves there’s no threat. Fundamentally this doesn’t get to it. The fear is in our body and THIS part of it believes it’s real, based off the emotional memory of our collective experiences as a person.

I hold myself up as someone who made it out. I am substantively better nowadays than anything from the first 4 years using conventional methods like exposure therapy and positive thinking. That stuff changed nothing under the surface and only helped me to manage my symptoms and behavior better. Underneath I was still the same. I had to find a way to work at THIS level of the issue, the level of substance and matter, the level of emotion and sensation in my body, the CONTENTS of me, not just the surface of me and the outward image/behavior.

This reality ate at me. The fact that

I learned pushing your problems from view and “faking it” isn’t a solution, isn’t a way to change how you feel inside.

For 14 years I was a socially awkward and anxious introvert. I dreaded being seen and felt embarrassed to exist. After going on a journey to try and change my life but only masking it better, I was forced to look deeper within for what was going wrong with me.

This blog documents what I discovered, lifechanging things I learned.

It flies in the face of conventional wisdom.

It has little to do with “pushing out of your comfort zone” or “thinking more positively” or “faking confidence”.

These things, in my experience, only put a bandaid on it.

That’s because the problem isn’t your behavior or thoughts.

It’s that you’re suffering a deep internal emotional injury.

Or more simply:

You’re hurt inside.

And your outward anxiety is a projection of a way you feel about yourself at a deep level.

The true journey is realizing and healing this.

These things are just a symptom to which is a deep internal emotional injury.

It’s deeper.

It’s that you’re suffering a deep internal emotional injury.

what is a deep internal emotional injury.

seeing poor results, I was forced to look outside conventional wisdom for answers.

After spending a lot of effort on exposure therapy and self-improvement but seeing poor results, I was forced to look elsewhere for answers.

After finding a lot exposure therapy and positive thinking couldn’t fix me, I was forced to look elsewhere for answers. This website is about what I learned.

Resolve old emotion/regulate your nervous system/live and be more in your body

Understand Social Anxiety

Social anxiety is an emotional issue.

99 out of 100 think social anxiety is a logical issue, one of seeing people/situations incorrectly, of thinking about them wrong. The answer being you just have to think better and realize people aren’t threats. You have to train your mind through a lot of exposure therapy and cognitive reframing that your fear is irrational.

It’s all in your mind.

This sounds right. It has the ring of being true because most of the time you can see with your own eyes there’s no apparent reason to be anxious. You know it’s all in your head and these people aren’t judging you. But your body still does it anyway. It gives you all this reason to be afraid and feel like the house is being set on fire.

You need to run.

So what gives? Why does your body do this even when you know you’re safe?

It’s because the fear isn’t on that logical level of the mind.

It’s deeper.

It’s on the level of your body and your instincts and all the stuff that is beyond logic and reason.

It’s emotional.

It’s of your feeling mind.

Peter Levine said it best. “The body initiates and the mind follows.” In other words it’s a

The body initiates and the mind follows.

you’re being set on fire and you need to run, that there is a clear and imminent danger.

still your body makes you anxious regardless.

Social anxiety is not just a thought. It’s what that thought brings up inside of you. It’s an internal issue. You are a product of your experiences in life.

It’s deeper than thinking or an incorrect mindset.

It’s in your nervous system and your whole body. It’s of your subconscious mind and the way things sit in you at a deep level. The thing to know is how painful emotions felt in life get stored in the body. If you underwent overwhelming, hurtful, or shocking experiences – things you couldn’t handle and properly digest at the time – it got stuck in you on some level. A level you can no longer see and that you’re not aware of because it has become baked in to your perception of life. It’s running in the background, beneath your awareness. You just assume now that this is how it is and how it has always been. But it’s not true. It just seems that way.

You know this is true because mindset and thoughts never stick. It’s deeper than just the conscious thinking mind. It’s emotions in the body. This is what needs to be addressed and assimilated, returned into the fold.

Thus it requires a fundamentally different approach.

My Social Anxiety Transformation

I bombed a presentation in college at 23. That day set a fire in my heart to confront this issue that had been controlling me since 13. I couldn’t take the shame of being seen like that in front of 25 people.

It made me realize just how bad it was. How messed up that I, as an adult who was about to graduate, couldn’t speak publicly without breaking down.

Fuck me.

The fury with which I attacked my social anxiety was real. I did things I never thought I’d do, like hold a job waiting tables and survive 5 hours talking to people every night. Train 3x/week in the gym and transform my skinny body. Change my critical self-talk and the way I treated myself completely.

I did so much in those first 2 years, including moving out of the house and the most scariest thing of all – leaving behind my life in Arizona and moving to Texas where I knew no one. I quit my job, packed my car, and drove 1000 miles without any job lined up, no place to stay, just a will to figure it out and reach my potential.

I thought Texas was my ticket out

See, 2 years had passed and I was 25. And though a big change had taken place in this time in me becoming more functional, I was still behind.

Behind in my social ability, my comfort level, my life in general.

Social anxiety whether I liked it or not was still ruling me. It was keeping me scared of women, of relationships with people. It made me uncomfortable all the time, even if I could mask it better by smiling.

And that’s what had led to this move. I was stagnant and couldn’t force myself any further. So I thought moving cities might force it out of me. I’d be around new people. I’d have a clean slate. No one would know me as the shy/awkward/insecure guy I’d been.

Scary doesn’t begin to describe that new foray.

I cried that first night at a Motel 6 in Austin. I felt like I had thrown away everything and there was no getting it back. All the people I’d known, my family. I felt so alone and like I had made a terrible choice.

But in my mind this was it. If I didn’t make it here, I wouldn’t make it anywhere.

I soon found an apartment to rent. I tried my hand at commission sales (made $0) selling credit card processing payment systems for a few months (terrifying cold approaching businesses). And finally I landed on a job serving tables again because I didn’t know what else to do. And oh yeah, this whole time I had basically been doing what I did back in Arizona, only talk to people when I had to, just to avoid the buildup of stress and anxiety in my body.

I also looked into pickup. I thought it might hold some answers for getting better with women.

Wrong.

That road led nowhere. I rarely did a single approach. And it only made me feel more defeated.

I found myself sliding, or maybe never even leaving, back into the same rut. Stay at home as much as possible and avoid contact with people because it pained me.

Moving home

I tucked tail after that year and moved back in with my parents. I was confounded. I thought I had done enough to combat this fear but clearly it still had me.

Clearly something was still in the way and stopping me from reaching out.

Some cavity deep in my chest.

And that’s when the next thing happened.

At my old job I saw her, a girl who captivated me. Who made time stop. I couldn’t get over how she made me feel every time I saw her. I wanted nothing more than to say hi, take initiative, talk to her. But there was something inside that just wouldn’t let me. It was visceral. It was sheer terror flooding my body. It was a feeling something terrible would happen. I would make a fool of myself in the biggest way and reveal what a shameful idiot I was at my core.

And so I missed out again. I managed to fuck up something that could have been so good for the both of us. Me. I let it happen. I stood there and did nothing as she gave all these signals.

And I just couldn’t live with myself anymore.

Fix it, or find out

It all came down to this. This one trip. All my hopes hung on solving these fears by backpacking across Europe and doing whatever it took. There was seemingly no lower I could go after what just happened with my crush.

Yet again I was wrong.

Lower is exactly where I went. To the deepest depression ever in my life because 8 months of traveling and trying to make it happen only confirmed what I knew:

That I WAS broken.

Of which suicide was the only solution.

And suicide seemed like the only solution.

Flawed at the core.

and pushing myself harder than I ever had.

I had no other choice.

So one month before my 12-month lease ended, I said to hell with it and moved back in with my parents.

I was too blocked for it though.

It didn’t solve my emotional issues. I couldn’t get past the fear to save my life.

I delved into pickup stuff as well. I was lost with women, didn’t know the first step to attracting them.

That road led nowhere. The problem? I couldn’t actually approach and talk to women. The anxiety was HUGE.

Ah. I looked into some pickup stuff. I tried to go out and cold approach women. But nothing ever came of it. I rarely did a single approach. And it made me feel more defeated the more I did it.

There was a wall still in my way and for the life of me I couldn’t figure out how to get around it.

Not even this scary leap of moving cities could get me to break the ice with women and just people in general…

So it came to that point again. It was Christmas and I’d been in Austin for 9 months. And I just couldn’t do it anymore. I couldn’t do another year here with nothing happening.

So I caved.

One month before my lease ended I moved back in with my parents in Arizona. The only question on my mind… what the hell was it going to take for me to fix my life?

The answer came not long later. At my old job serving tables which I had resumed once again, I saw her. A girl who worked there who stopped all time. Holy fuck. Something caught in my chest and I couldn’t run from it. The feelings were electric. And I knew in my soul I couldn’t fuck this opportunity up.

I’d never forgive myself.

Some things in life are too deep of a betrayal. You do it, and you can’t ever go back. You make the mistake, and it haunts you forever.

I still think of her to this day, the life that could have been if I wasn’t terrified out of my mind to talk to her and start something up. The saddest thing is that she tried. She held eye contact. She had the gaze where she clearly wanted me to make a move. She was waiting for me to do something and I just couldn’t. The panic it set off in my body was overpowering. The sheer fear I felt at putting myself out there made me just go completely mute and shut off.

And as I went home that night, the last night where I had given myself the ultimatum it was now or never, I got hit by shock. Shock at what I had done, what I had just let happen. The opportunity of a lifetime, of a hundred lifetimes, and I blew it.

The last try

Two strikes. Two failed efforts to fix my life. And if this third didn’t fix me, I saw putting a bullet in my brain. That’s the level of desperation I was now at in life. 26 years old. Lost out on my crush. And doing the only thing I could think of – travel the world and do some serious soul searching to figure out my situation once and for all.

Put this fear behind me.

And I really thought I’d have the proper motivation now. With her face in my mind, I thought I’d have the fuel to finally propel myself to the life I should have always been living. I thought it would take me out there, to these new cities and places in Europe where I could meet women, approach the cute girls I saw on the street, and just build a full life for myself where I was in control and not my fear.

I had another thing coming. I didn’t know it, but these 8 months backpacking and pushing myself harder than I ever had would result in the deepest spiral into depression and suicidal thinking I had ever experienced. What had started off so full of hope at 23 to fight and win against this fear, was turning into my worst nightmare.

The reality I was unfixable.

Flawed at my core.

The core flaw in my approach

The core problem with my approach is that I was doing all these things to change on the outside, and all the while deeper issues were remaining unaddressed. And thus there was always more fear to encounter and deal with no matter how good I got at suppressing and managing the symptoms. There was always another war to fight. My identity as a person was still based on anxiety. I was essentially running from the fear inside even as I went out and talked to people. I was using all my energy to fight it and try to fan the flames. This didn’t actually put out the flames. It only created the illusion I wasn’t burning and I was functional and “fine”.

Changing my thinking and transforming my body and forcing myself to talk to people was a good start. But it was nowhere near the solution.

The solution was much deeper, in my feelings and my identity. Even though I did all these things I still identified as someone anxious. I still came from this frame and worldview in all that I did. I was still attached to this person even as I presented myself as someone different on the outside. The same motivations were still driving me: to avoid pressure and being seen because these things overloaded my system and threatened breakdown. So I was constantly deflecting and doing things to avoid pressure and being seen. I “survived” social situations only because I mastered the art of deflection, playing hot potato with my fear so it didn’t burn me too badly, so I kept the fear under wraps. This wasn’t a solution, only a survival technique. Better than nothing, but not even close to the life I wanted to live.

The deeper solution to my social anxiety

Two parts.

Bottom-up: release trauma and old emotions and tension in the body.

Top-down: change your identity and who you see yourself as through conscious practice.

Healing trauma and reworking my identity. Resolving old feelings in my body in meditation and being more consciously aware of how I was identifying with this person, this story; how I was coming from this place inside which was basically preventing me from breaking loose and living my life and just being. Everything was still about protection. Preserving this identity and keeping things in place. Not doing things that put too much pressure or threatened me. Fundamentally I was still fragile in myself. When I noticed this and changed my identity there was no longer anything to protect and that’s what gave me the true freedom to act in the world and just exist.

When you’re someone else and you no longer identify with this personal sense of self – when you see yourself as just another person in the world – it liberates you. It takes practice to come into this. Your mind will want to shift back to personalized mode where you deeply identify with yourself. But with awareness you can shift out of it and see yourself as just another person, which lifts the burden and allows you to be and just show up as you are without putting on anything extra. People can actually connect with this. It’s YOU that gets in the way of it. All the things you THINK you need to do in order to be perceived well. But it’s bullshit. It’s what gets in the way. It’s what keeps you trapped in yourself and isolated from everyone, this feeling and sense that you’re yourself and others aren’t like you. But when you see yourself as just another person, suddenly the barrier breaks down and this sense of separation sheds.

Get outside of yourself altogether. This is the solution to so much of it. Stop identifying with and seeing yourself as you. Start seeing yourself as someone else. And suddenly your feelings and thoughts no longer hold so much importance and weight. Something shifts. Somethings breaks up out of you and you find it much easier to exist.

Start identifying as another person.

It had roots

I found for me, it wasn’t irrational, it wasn’t all in my head. It was based off of old feelings in my body, 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 other people weren’t a threat.

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

In September of 2017, I got backed into such a tight corner I thought about killing myself, my hardest push to get past social anxiety hadn’t done it. I had backpacked in Europe as a last resort because nothing else was working. 4 years confronting the fear, changing my thoughts, faking confidence, improving myself had only pushed it out of view. I had left America in February with a fool’s hope that maybe leaving the country would change me, change this pattern of fear that was so deeply entrenched. I had realized within a few months just because I was somewhere else… didn’t mean my fear was.

It had followed me here and put up just as strong of a barrier.

A steel wall that felt impossible to get around.

I had given up and resigned myself to fate and was waiting to build the courage to end my life when I decided to take one more chance on something.

A 10 day silent Vipassana meditation retreat.

It was a long shot. And it probably had no chance of helping me. But I had come this far and had nothing to lose. I could still kill myself if this also failed.

I had all but given up and resigned myself to this fate

I just didn’t see a solution. In my mind I had tried everything, even getting professional help.

I had fought with all my might but it didn’t seem to matter. The simple fact is that this fear was stronger than me. And the sooner I could accept that and realize this life wasn’t meant for me, the better.

Willpower didn’t work. Exposing to social situations desensitized and made it sting a little less.

I had persisted a little longer but I couldn’t run from it forever.

The truth I was broken.

and really putting myself into an all new environment

Out of sight.

But not out of mind.

As I had learned the hard way, as I had been running into it again and again, the most irrational sense of fear. It was there in situations I’d been in hundreds, thousands of times.

Get this: I had waited tables for 4 years and I still got afraid going into work.

as time and time again I had run into it, the most irrational sense of fear that made no sense why I should be feeling like this. I was an adult in my 20s. Yet I still felt like a child in my body.

But sadly for me, not out of mind.

I had come to realize just how much social anxiety was still the center of my world, and how every action of mine proceeded from fear.

Out of sight but not out of mind.

working out, faking confidence

I’d been confronting the fear,

despite my hardest efforts I couldn’t break through my social anxiety. I had taken this backpacking trip to Europe because nothing else was solving it. Gym, exposure, positive thinking, all the advice. I had basically gotten better at masking it.

my hardest efforts to overcome social anxiety were getting me nowhere. I had tried

In 2017, my life crashed down. I realized all my hard work to overcome social anxiety had changed nothing. I still felt insecure, embarrassed to exist, afraid to be myself. I had basically only put a bandaid on it.

In 2017, I thought about killing myself, nothing was solving my social anxiety past a very superficial level.

I spent so long believing it was an irrational fear. That it wasn’t real. That it was all in my head. That there was no logical reason I should feel this way – I know people aren’t a threat and I’m imagining it.

But stay with me, what if it wasn’t?

For 14 years I struggled with panic, shame and discomfort around people. After putting a lot of effort into thinking positive and pushing out of my comfort zone but seeing poor results, I was surprised to learn 80% of my social anxiety lifted on a 10 day Vipassana retreat.

After going on a long journey of exposure therapy and self-improvement but seeing poor results,

After putting a lot of effort into thinking positive and pushing out of my comfort zone but seeing poor results, I was surprised to find 80% of my social anxiety disappeared on a 10 day Vipassana retreat.

resolved by learning Vipassana meditation.

went away on a 10 day Vipassana retreat.

ultimately able to permanently lift a lot of my social anxiety by going on a 10 day Vipassana retreat.

a real change on a 10 day Vipassana retreat.

The way out of social anxiety

A guide to curing social anxiety

Heal your social trauma and learn to be more in your body and not your head. Social anxiety thrives on emotional trauma as well as being in your head.

This is how I cured a 15 year social anxiety disorder. By getting out of my head and into my body and resolving trauma. It wasn’t irrational. Knowing there’s no reason to be anxious didn’t fix it. That’s because there WAS a reason, I just couldn’t see it. I couldn’t see into my body into all the things that were going on, how old fears were coming to life, dormant emotions awakening.

Most advice for social anxiety is useless and ineffective

It doesn’t actually get to the bottom of it. It doesn’t actually change you. It doesn’t make you a capable human being who has the inner substance to go about life.

All it really does is create a more functional shell of yourself with the same fear at your core.

I know because that was me.

I was that person who spent 5 years on exposure therapy and cognitive reframing and radical lifestyle changes and saw no change beyond the surface.

Underneath I was still that insecure guy who couldn’t talk to women, was unable to connect with people, and felt a lot of anxiety in the background of every social situation.

All I could do is mask it better and create the appearance, the illusion, that I was ok.

It nearly cost me my life.

I almost killed myself because it was so painful living this lie. The loneliness, lack of human touch, and brick wall that was still in my way made my life such a living hell.

I wanted out.

Luckily I found a solution, a way to actually address the fear and weakness inside me. A way to actually become strong not just in appearance, but substance.

All the way through.

A real solution to social anxiety

The first step is diagnosing the issue correctly. If you can’t identify and pinpoint what the problem is, you’ve little chance of successfully addressing it.

I found for me, my social anxiety wasn’t an irrational fear, it wasn’t all in my head. It was based off of old feelings in my body, a store of old emotions from past events.

What was most important wasn’t changing my thoughts or mass exposing to social situations. It was addressing my body and how things were situated on an emotional level inside me.

Emotions can get stored in the body.

And what I learned is that this is a huge cause of mental stress and dis-ease.

Social anxiety is often a deeper issue. It’s related to the past and to painful events that occurred. Experiences your mind may have forgotten but your body still remembers. Emotions still flare up out of nowhere even though you’ve changed your thinking and put yourself into thousands of social situations. Something uncontrolled and untamed still lives inside you, beneath your conscious mind, in your subconscious. And all your energy goes into trying to contain this fear, this feeling, so it doesn’t spill outward and ruin your carefully crafted facade, so it doesn’t reveal what a mess of a person you really are inside.

Better than to mask and use all your energy to contain this fear, is to address this fear and focus on resolving these feelings in your body. This is how you actually move past it. This is how you become strong in substance and not just show. This is how you make it instead of just fake it.

of seeming

I seemed “happy” on the outside but inside I was secretly being eaten alive by fear and insecurity.

A better way to treat social anxiety

It was a lie.

One that nearly cost me my life because I found myself at 27 in a very dark space.

Healing painful experiences from my past that were keeping me anxious and unable to connect with people. My story

The #1 key thing to move on from social anxiety. Addressing fear on an emotional level.

I’m Ben Brewer

I was socially anxious for 15 years. I tried all the advice. None of it addressed my problems. I was still focused on fear going around people. This core sense didn’t change. I couldn’t be myself. Finally I learned it had little to do with exposing to social situations and changing my thoughts. Both of these things were symptoms. It had everything to do with my focus. Bringing conscious awareness to how my attention was being used. Instead of unconsciously sliding into it, I learned how to consciously keep myself out of it. And this is ultimately how it died off, basically completely. I learned how to loosen my focus and be in a space of allowing. Of not trying to be in control of myself or this moment in front of me, but let something deeper take the reigns, my instincts, my body. And that’s how I exist now for the most part in daily life, this space of allowing. Of being more in an observing/allowing mode instead of being myself. I let something deeper complete and do the movements instead of me. I don’t act. I allow my body to act. I allow a deeper sense and intuition to act through me. I let go of my mind and the grip I try to put on things and I allow. And thus I act with far more intelligence. Something carries me in social situations effortlessly and I don’t have to think of what to do. I’m just in this space where it’s happening and things come to mind and I create a clear channel so it just comes out. I operate in a fundamentally different space/way than to before.

Acting on feeling/instinct instead of thought

Getting yourself/your mind out of the way so your body/deeper self can do it, your deeper spontaneous intelligence that’s far smarter than you. This is basically the way of it.

Social anxiety is a matter of focus

It’s how your attention is being used. As of now, your attention is being used unconsciously. You just get pulled into it. Your attention gets lost in the threat you feel/perceive/see. With awareness you can bring your attention back and not allow it to unconsciously be manipulated and used against your will.

Your focus narrows and gets caught on the threat you feel and perceive.

It’s unconscious.

Your attention is basically getting caught, hung up on the threat, on the feelings/images/thoughts. You can consciously learn to untie your attention.

What happens? You grip yourself and you try to take control as a way to combat these feelings. This only ties you up in it. It only knots you further into a ball.

The way out is to not grip yourself but to allow. Give yourself the space to operate in this moment. Don’t try to control. Let yourself function and move. Let yourself do it, don’t try to do it. Let your body and instincts move you, even if you feel afraid or nervous. The moment you try to grip yourself and take control you get trapped in it. Your focus narrows.

It wasn’t irrational

It was based off of old feelings in my body, a store of old emotions from past events where I’d been wounded/overwhelmed/shamed/made to not feel good.

I returned to my apartment in the city center of Bucharest. It was 11 in the morning on September 5th. And to every indication it was over. After trying my hardest to overcome social anxiety these 8 months of backpacking in Europe, I saw it couldn’t be done.

, this was the end of the road. I had tried my hardest to get past social anxiety these last 8 months of backpacking in Europe but not even this desperate measure could seem to save me.

I returned to my apartment in the city center of Bucharest. It was 11 in the morning on September 5th. And to every indication it was over, this was the end of the road. I had tried my hardest to get past social anxiety these last 8 months of backpacking in Europe but not even this desperate measure could seem to save me.

I collapsed on my bed from the sheer weight of it, realizing it had all been for nothing. Four years of confronting the fear, thinking positively, improving myself. At the core I was still the same, insecure and anxious. Fundamentally I was still so scared of people. All I had done is get better at hiding it, masking it, making it seem I was ok.

I wasn’t.

I was dead inside.

I was 27. I had been working on my social anxiety since 23.

And I had gone as far as I could go.

had been taking all kinds of steps to confront the fear and improve myself including serving tables, lifting weights,

One year ago I had reached a crossroads

On February 15th I had flown from Phoenix, Arizona and landed in Belgrade, Serbia, my first stop on this European travel tour.

this was the end of the road. I had tried my hardest these last 8 months of backpacking in Europe to get past my social anxiety and fear of being seen. I had gone out every day with the intention to strike up conversations and put myself out there and almost every day I had failed.

it was over, there was no further to go.

September 5, 2017

11am

I returned to my apartment in the city center of Bucharest. It was 11 in the morning on September 5th. The defeat had never felt this real.

The realization had just hit me: it was over.

And I had come to the end of the road.

and I realized it was over. This journey I had set out on 4 years ago in 2013 to fix my life was finished.

saw it all slipping away: the life I envisioned free of social anxiety. I had put up my best fight. I had come to Europe 8 months ago never more determined. In my mind this was it, if this backpacking trip didn’t fix it it was over for me.

and I felt the weight of the world.

Key Realization

I found for me, it wasn’t irrational, it wasn’t all in my head. It was based off of old feelings in my body, 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 other people weren’t a threat.

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

Background

I’m Ben Brewer. I struggled with social anxiety for 14 years. I tried all the advice like think positive, push out of your comfort zone, go to the gym. Though I improved over 4 years, I found I only got better at masking it and making it seem I wasn’t afraid. Deep down I was still tense and insecure in my body.

This got to me, the fact I wasn’t myself around people. I was too afraid to approach girls. I dreaded being seen. I couldn’t let down my guard around almost anyone.

And I almost killed myself because of it. After traveling for 8 months and finding not even going abroad could solve these fears, I really thought about suicide. I didn’t see the point in living.

After one month of extreme depression, I decided to follow up on one final clue.

A 10 day silent meditation retreat.

And it was here the lights turned on and I discovered a deeper side of myself, of my issues, of my chronic fear of people and being seen. I finally realized what my social anxiety was about. Not so much a “present fear”. More so a “past fear”. A fear that stretched back to times in my life I had been humiliated and teased and hurt.

I wouldn’t have believed it if not for seeing how much came to the surface while sitting in meditation those 10 days. I had no idea how much was packed inside me. But on some level it registered and made sense. A part of me knew that yes, it was trauma. And yes, it was real. And yes, I had to get back into my body and feel in order to process and let it out.

I found myself breathing so much easier after those 10 days.

I found myself feeling like a real human.

Which there was no greater gift.

A fear that was internalized and that had become etched into me, into my body, from when my feelings had been deeply hurt.

Full Post on How I Cured Social Anxiety: Detailed Analysis of my Journey Using Vipassana Meditation to Cure My Social Anxiety

For 14 years I struggled with social anxiety. After trying all the advice like think positive and push out of your comfort zone but only masking it better, still being very tense and insecure in my body, I was ultimately able to resolve my social anxiety by learning Vipassana meditation. Now I can walk into social situations confidently, without any hesitation, with the feeling inside I can handle it. All thanks to changes I made to my body, aka my subconscious mind.

I understand my recovery is unusual. And I understand I’m just one person. That’s why I don’t make the claim to have “the answer” for your or anyone else’s social anxiety. I’m simply sharing my experience and what turned my life around – after reaching a point where I was strongly considering killing myself.

For me, a different approach was required other than “force it harder”.

For me, softer was needed. Figuring out what was behind my social anxiety and untangling core issues that were causing me to feel and behave in this hyper-insecure way.

And this meditation technique provided the means to do that.

I owe my life to it.

Because my recovery is unusual, and because I am just one person, I make no claim to “the answer” for social anxiety. I only write this to present an alternative, another possible route if conventional advice has failed you.

Sometimes it takes a different approach. Sometimes it’s a square peg through a round hole and the solution isn’t to force it harder and push with all your might.

Sometimes a softer approach is better. Figuring out what’s behind it and untangling core issues that are causing you to feel and behave in this hyper-insecure way.

A journey to figuring out what the hell’s actually going on.

a one-size-fits-all social anxiety solution. I only write this to present an alternative, another possible route if you’re like me and tried the usual advice with poor results.

Social anxiety is a complex and multi-faceted problem.

My only goal is to present my story in the most clear way possible

have no claim to a “silver bullet” for everyone’s social anxiety, your own.

success

Because my recovery is unusual, and because I am sure I’ll be met with suspicion that meditation could bring about this level of change, I don’t want to convince you

About this website

It’s not your conventional self-help social anxiety advice. It’s about a fundamental revolution in your life and actually solving the fears and hangups you hold INSIDE. It’s hard. It’s not easy. It requires a certain type of person who is made for figuring it out themselves.

My only aim in creating this website is to make the whole process just a little easier. A little more straightforward. Because ultimately, this stuff took me so many years to figure out. It was a journey of my life and really being tested in all aspects, almost taking my life.

And I think some of that hardship is avoidable.

I think making it to a place where you actually feel good in yourself, where you feel socially capable, is 100% attainable. I speak 100% from my experience and what one severely anxious person did. No, you may never reach perfection. But most of your social anxiety is a fear that can actually be resolved if you only put your mind to the right use.

Let me help you do that.

Next steps

In my experience the best place to start is your body. This is really the key to it all, to your mind. The body is the subconscious mind. It’s where life happens to you. It’s where emotional memories get stored. It’s where feelings get registered as either painful or pleasant. And if you’ve had a lot of upsetting experiences, even ones you’ve forgotten, your body holds it all in some “emotional form”. You may just not recognize it because it has become your baseline. Emotionally you just “feel this way”.

Well, this is what you want to focus on. You want to focus on on your emotional state which you can only do by feeling and being in your body – out of your head.

This is hard. As socially anxious people, our heads become the only place to escape when our bodies go into fight/flight and shut down, when we feel all this emotion well up.

This habit pattern is what has to be retrained. To stay present in the body. To feel and allow what is there. To not react to it and resist it.

To accept and not fight it.

This is ultimately how it changes.

Vipassana can be that bridge to doing all of this. On 10 day retreats, you’re taught how to observe your breath and your bodily sensations and just allow them to be as they are. To watch them. To observe them. To stay equanimous with them. When you do this, more stuff inside you is able to surface where you can then let go of it.

Observe it, and watch it pass away.

When you put awareness in your body you get in touch with this emotion. You put a face to it. You break it down into an observable form. Sensations are the gateway to feeling and letting out what you hold in your body. When you observe a sensation, it changes. It takes on a different quality. More flowing and expansive. There’s areas of tension and condensed sensation in your body. This is where your trauma is. Little feeling. Little flow. When you put attention on these areas and don’t run from the pain/intensity/hard feeling quality, then you find it changes and begins to take on a different shape, more open and flowing and easier.

And a lot of your thinking reflects how you feel at a basic level.

This is why I say it’s body > mind. The body initiates and the mind follows.

Notice the tension in your body. Do you feel very tense overall? Do small things really rock the boat?

Each person is individual and I don’t claim to have the solution for everyone.

I could only socialize in a very superficial sense.

I couldn’t express my personality. I couldn’t be myself. Dating was off limits. I had no friends.

My life was hollow.

I’m Ben Brewer

From 23 to 27 I tried hard to overcome social anxiety. Those 4 years of exposure, positive thinking, and radical lifestyle changes only masked it better. A truth that made me suicidal because I didn’t see a way to fix it.

It came to that place where it was end my life or try one other thing. A long shot but there was nothing else for it. So I went on a 10 day silent meditation retreat.

James, whom I’d met this summer while backpacking in Europe, told me about it, how these retreats had impacted his life in a big way.

It wasn’t my first time hearing of Vipassana. I’d come across a YouTube video of someone who’d done it. And I’d also seen it mentioned in a book. Both times I passed it off as crazy though.

Zero point for someone like me doing it. I wasn’t training to be a monk. I didn’t care a single ounce about “enlightenment”.

All I wanted was relief from my social anxiety.

That’s it.

I didn’t connect the dots to how meditating for 10 days could help with my social anxiety.

I had meditated before

I didn’t understand it, but something happened in the simple act of passing attention up and down my body and observing my sensations, bringing awareness to the physical part of me.

I learned trauma is stored in the body as tension and trapped emotion. And so often this is what’s flaring up around people, the residue of old fears. You’ve got all this accumulated emotion inside that this outer situation is triggering and bringing up in you. It’s an inner problem and thus it requires an inner solution. You CAN overcome a certain part of your anxiety just by going into social situations a ton of times. But in my experience it’s mostly a surface change. It doesn’t really resolve the fear; it only desensitizes and helps you live with the stress. And what I looked for the whole time was a way not just to manage my fearful experience, but fundamentally unwind it. And this is what Vipassana helped me to achieve. By observing my bodily sensations I began to undergo a fundamental change in how I felt. Observation brings change. Darkness and shutting your eyes doesn’t solve the issue; it keeps it there, lingering in your mind, just like a monster in the closet. You have to go over, turn on the lights, and see for yourself nothing is there otherwise your mind will keep coming back to it.

Why in God’s name would you ever go spend 10 days of your life on that. Becoming a monk wasn’t my goal.

Just freedom from my social anxiety.

I didn’t know this was a way to achieve it though. Not from the front, from behind. By beginning to bring awareness to and break down the elements that were causing my social anxiety.

I never connected how it might help me, my particular issues socializing and being seen.

Hearing it from him made it land more.

, intriguing but not something I ever saw myself doing.

It came to that place where it was end my life or try something radically different. A long shot, but there was nothing else for it. So I went on a 10 day silent meditation retreat.

I had heard of Vipassana a few different times now, since starting. This last time it had landed more though as something I needed to go explore. I was starting to suspect the answer might be elsewhere. James, a guy I’d met while backpacking in Europe, told me he’d done 6 of these retreats. Perhaps there was something to it.

I had thrown everything at it: serving tables, lifting weights, thinking positively, moving cities, traveling the world.

From 23 to 27 I tried hard to overcome social anxiety. Those 4 years proved there was something deeply wrong with me because all I did is mask it better. A truth that made me suicidal because I didn’t see a way to fix it. I had thrown everything at it: serving tables, lifting weights, thinking positively, moving cities, traveling the world.

And yet nothing had resolved this fear in me.

It came to that place where it was end my life or try something radically different. A long shot, but there was nothing else for it. So I went on a 10 day silent meditation retreat.

I had heard of Vipassana a few different times now, since starting. This last time it had landed more though as something I needed to go explore. I was starting to suspect the answer might be elsewhere. James, a guy I’d met while backpacking in Europe, told me he’d done 6 of these retreats. Perhaps there was something to it.

I still wasn’t a believer, which is why I’d waited to reach this dark place to try it.

Maybe there was something in it to help me.

his experience doing 6 of these 10-day retreats, how they’d personally helped him.

That made me think:

There might be something to it.

I didn’t see a way to actually get better.

It came to that place where it was end my life or try one other thing. A long shot, but there was nothing else for it. So I went on a 10 day silent meditation retreat.

I had done everything in my power and

exposure, CBT, radical lifestyle changes and scratched not even the surface of it.

I was beyond repair because, other than masking better, I was still anxious. A truth that made me suicidal. I didn’t see any way out because I had tried: serving tables, lifting weights, thinking positively, moving cities, traveling the world.

I had continually been on the attack for 4 years and had nothing really to show for it.

I pushed out of my comfort zone, thought positively, got in shape, faked confidence. I had a mindset of attack and never give up.

After finding myself still struggling at 26 and deciding to pursue the nuclear option: backpacking the world for as long as it took to get past this fear, and finding not even this worked, it forced me to consider suicide.

Those 4 years proved I was beyond repair because, other than masking better, I was still anxious underneath. A truth that made me consider suicide. I didn’t see any other way out because I had tried: serving tables, lifting weights, thinking positively, moving cities, traveling the world.

exposure, cognitive reframing, radical lifestyle changes.

And yet nothing had touched on this fear deep inside me.

I

In my apartment in Bucharest, Romania, I watched my dream of being free of social anxiety and living a normal life die.

Exposure, cognitive reframing, self-compassion, the usual advice. Those 4 years made me believe I was broken. Besides a surface change, masking better, I was still anxious underneath. Unable to live my life.

From 23 to 27 I tried hard to overcome social anxiety. Exposure, cognitive reframing, self-compassion, the usual advice. Those 4 years made me believe overcoming social anxiety was impossible. Besides a surface change, masking better, I was still anxious underneath. Mostly incapable of being a person, living my life.

Learning I was broken and beyond repair

Under my nose the whole time

After all I did it made me believe overcoming social anxiety was impossible. That real change wasn’t in the cards for me.

Going outside every day and have nothing happen

27 years old.

I was still so full of tension in daily life. I couldn’t easily converse with people. Dating and being in a relationship felt like the furthest thing away. Everything about my existence was still driven by fear.

I had been confronting the fear for almost 5 years. I had been taking action in areas like the gym, diet, sleep, mindset. I had talked to tens of thousands of people by this point (mostly, a job waiting tables).

I had started to wonder this year what it would actually take. To feel better. To break free of this prison. To be able to go outside and live my life. It was still so far away. It felt like nothing was actually helping. No amount of exposure or self-improvement was making a dent in this fear underneath. Impenetrable.

To be emotionally not so fragile To have the ability to date and talk to girls without shatting my pants.

And yet I still felt insecure in my body, so scared under the surface.

I thought about killing myself because nothing was solving it, this freeze pattern and fear activation around people, especially attractive women. I had tried exposure, lifting weights, reading books, meditating, eating healthy. None of it addressed the fear inside. Five years later it was still affecting me.

I thought seriously about killing myself because none of my efforts were addressing it, this freeze pattern and fear activation I felt in social situations, especially if they involved attractive women. I couldn’t get past it. And I had tried so many things. Consistent exposure, lifting weights, reading books, meditating, eating healthy. None of these things addressed the fear under the surface. They helped me to manage it better and keep it under wraps, from making me look too foolish. But fundamentally the fear didn’t go anywhere. Five years later it was still affecting me and my ability to be present and connect with people and just feel ok in myself.

I almost gave up.

I thought seriously about killing myself because none of my efforts were addressing it, this freeze pattern and fear activation I felt in social situations, especially if they involved attractive women. I couldn’t get past it. And I had tried so many things. Consistent exposure, lifting weights, reading books, meditating, eating healthy. None of these things addressed the fear under the surface. They helped me to manage it better and keep it under wraps, from making me look too foolish. But fundamentally the fear didn’t go anywhere. Five years later it was still affecting me and my ability to be present and connect with people and just feel ok in myself.

A Solution in a Place I Least Expected It

I thought the answer would be found in some mindset, or by putting myself into enough social situations that my brain stopped irrationally fearing them, or by adopting this outwardly confident exterior and trying hard to come across normal. Fake it long enough, and eventually I’d make it. This is what all the advice pointed to. Expose to situations you fear and work on yourself, and with enough time, your social anxiety will be replaced by a sense of confidence.

I thought to find the answer in my head, in some mindset or another. Turns out, the answer was in my body. It was in getting my mind out of the way so that I could bring things to surface I had been holding inside that had been deeply affecting my ability to relate and feel comfortable around people.

The truth destroyed me. I laid on my bed in an apartment halfway around the world, beaten. I had tried my hardest these last 8 months of backpacking from city to city in Europe to make real progress against my social anxiety, to finally get a grip on a fear that had been controlling my life for nearly 15 years. I had foolishly believed this trip would fix me, would somehow break me out of this freeze pattern around people, women, and just get me to a place where I felt comfortable in my body.

I was 27, and I had been confronting my social anxiety for four years by this point. I had actively been going out and improving myself in areas like physical fitness and mindset. I had taken major steps to get out of my comfort zone by moving out of the house and eventually moving out of state and starting over. I had tried to stay hopeful and positive and never get down on myself, to always be looking forward and keep the momentum going at any cost.

I had had setbacks. I had had rough patches where shit happened. I had had times where I felt like giving up but regardless I kept pushing forward. I kept putting myself around people and hoping that with enough time a real change would happen. I would feel comfortable in my skin and enjoy being around people.

I still hadn’t made it though. As good as I’d gotten at faking it and making it seem on the outside like I was completely fine, a confident guy without insecurity, I hadn’t broken free of it. Social anxiety was still the story of my life, stopping me from living, stopping me from being myself, stopping me from reaching out.

from comfortably going out and just existing.

And I had reached my limit. After all this time I couldn’t in good faith go on and keep putting myself out there when nothing came from it other than more disappointment and setback.

The same result every time.

Fear holding me back and preventing connection.

Still living my same old insecure self. Underneath the facade no change had happened. And it led me to the truth I was beyond repair. If all this shit hadn’t changed me, nothing would.

As good as I’d gotten at masking it and making it seem on the outside like I was completely fine, a confident guy with no insecurities, it was tearing me up from within.

It had weighed on me though. As good as I’d gotten at masking it and making it seem on the outside like I was completely fine, a confident guy with no insecurities, it was tearing me up from within.

This trip had made it evident what a shitstorm I was still in after all this time. How nothing substantive had really changed; I was still the same fearful person inside. I couldn’t open up for the life of me. I couldn’t let loose around people. Everything was still so self-conscious and calculated and fear was driving everything.

And I was sick of it. I couldn’t take it anymore. It should be changed by now. My 30th birthday was nearly here and my 20s had passed with nothing changing.

I had started out at 23 after bombing a presentation in college, so determined to get a handle on these issues and change my life.

things, that by staying

finally win against my social anxiety and make real progress.

My best efforts hadn’t made a dent in it.

It took me under, realizing my efforts of 4 years to overcome social anxiety had been for nothing.

my hard work of 4 years had been for nothing.

It burned a hole in my chest, realizing my hard work of the last 4 years had been for nothing. I was 27.

At a basic level I hadn’t changed.

I bet it all on a backpacking trip around the world as a means to overcome my social anxiety because nothing else to that point was fixing it.

I found for me, it wasn’t irrational, it wasn’t all in my head. It was based off of old feelings in my body, 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 other people weren’t a threat.

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

I found for me, it wasn’t irrational, it wasn’t all in my head.

This is where my focus had been on the entire time, on trying to solve the problem in my head, in trying to make myself believe the fear was irrational and wrong and that there was no threat, that it was entirely imaginary. But this didn’t take into equation the fact I’d been hurt before in my past and that my body remembered how it felt to be judged and humiliated. These old feelings were highly affecting my present view of life and people. They were leading me to think in negative ways. And nothing substantive in my situation changed until I acknowledged and brought awareness to this deeper level of myself, of my body and these feelings I was holding inside, this store of old emotion that was subconsciously affecting my view of others.

It was an emotional feeling issue, not a logical thinking issue. I was a prisoner in my body. I held emotion and tension in my muscles. It was muscle memory and visceral, not a logical thinking issue. This is why I never made it past these feelings. I tried to gaslight myself out of them and make myself believe they weren’t important or rational. But there was a reason I felt this way. It was my body serving a reminder that I’d been hurt before in situations like these. It was my body keeping me protected.

It was a journey primarily of healing old hurts. It was about learning to inhabit my body and let go of the conscious grip I had taken over myself as a way to protect myself from feeling certain ways. Getting out of my head and feeling without judgment.

Vipassana was a huge stepping stone to introducing myself to feeling and being in my body again. This is how so much of the baggage I was carrying inside began to drop. By focusing attention on my body. By focusing attention on not holding such a tight grip on myself.

It’s all in what you focus on.

Are you focusing on letting this present moment in front of you play out – not trying to control it and tense yourself – or are you protecting and defending yourself from it? Fear amplifies when you tense yourself and fight what’s happening. You resist and react and you unconsciously fuel it.

Your focus is currently unconscious. It’s wrapped up in thoughts and in the momentum of what’s happening. There’s no “conscious you” that’s even there. You’re just in the grip of it. It’s happening to you. You can learn to consciously change your focus so that you no longer feed into the fear – so that it resolves.

You’re focused on the wrong areas. You’re focused on trying to change your thoughts and expose yourself to more social situations so you can “overcome” the fear. You’re focused on doing things to stop feeling this way. And this is wrong. There’s a deeper game that’s going on inside you that is currently unconscious, that you’re not aware of. It’s happening in the background. Unconsciously tensing your body and response to uncomfortable feelings that get triggered. All your attention goes into overdrive to try and solve this “threat” that you’re feeling. You fight and resist it. You try desperately to get control over it.

This deeper game is where a real change can happen. When you become aware of how you’re living in your mind and tensing your body and trying to control this moment in front of you instead of let it play out and happen. You’re trying to prevent it from happening because you sense danger. You’re hihgly avoidant and deflective.

If you can learn to loosen up and not control your bodily movements and what you’re doing within this situation. Take a lighter hold on yourself and let your deeper intelligence operate. Your instinctual self.

A different way to overcome social anxiety

Force in my experience doesn’t work. Forcing yourself to socialize, think positive, be confident, act happy.

As a SOLUTION to social anxiety?

Force isn’t one.

When you’re severely anxious and you have to FIGHT AGAINST your body and FORCE yourself to do it when everything in you is screaming not to, it doesn’t change you.

It may desensitize if you do it enough times, if you push yourself hard enough.

But desensitization isn’t real change.

It’s a surface improvement only, a way to keep the fear down.

Down but not out.

Not actually gone.

It’s still inside you, making it difficult to be yourself and function and get anywhere substantial in your life.

And that’s why a different approach is needed.

Not force, but UNDERSTANDING. Understanding the reason why you’re so anxious and scared to talk to people, to be yourself.

This is the bottom line in my view:

People are able to socialize easily because:

They have a healthy and regulated nervous system and they are embodied / not in their heads. They aren’t suffering intense emotions because they have gotten well socialized and not had the traumatic social experiences. Their internal world is more calm and thus they can more freely and easily be themselves.

So this is how you backwards engineer it. This is how you change on a deeper level, the only level that actually counts.

This website is about how to actually get the fear to go OUT, to get it GONE.

This

And containment is suppression.

so you can do the socially perceived normal thing

I found the usual advice didn’t work. Talking to more people, thinking positively, improving myself. After four years

force didn’t work. Forcing myself to talk to people, be positive, act confident. It changed me on the outside, but inside I was still just as anxious.

How I cured my social anxiety (after struggling 15 years)

My story is a bit different. I found the usual advice like talk to more people and fake confidence

I’m Ben Brewer

I found for me, the usual advice (talk to more people, think positive) only helped so much because I was suppressing a lot of fear/trauma/emotion. There was a silent war inside me to deny my feelings and present myself as “ok”. But this just kept the problem at bay and from ever being able to CONNECT with people because I was holding back the very thing they could connect with, emotions and energy.

I had to take a much different path in order to resolve my social anxiety. I had to get in touch with this deeper level of myself where the problem was happening.

Not in my head.

In my body.

That’s the most powerful thing I learned.

It wasn’t irrational or all in my mind. It was based off of old feelings in my body, 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 other people weren’t a threat.

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

That’s when my anxiety lifted and the walls started to come down.

I felt human again.

putting myself into social situations and self-improvement still left me fearful at the basic level.

after following mainstream methods I was still fearful at the basic level.

It wasn’t irrational, it wasn’t all mental. It was based off of old feelings in my body, a store of old emotions from past events where I’d been wounded/overwhelmed/shamed/made to not feel good.

And that was the key, realizing things like exposure and cognitive reframing could only take me so far.

Ultimately to heal from my social anxiety…

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

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

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

Talk to more people, think positive, fake confidence. It didn’t fix my social anxiety because because I was suppressing a lot of fear/trauma/emotion. There was a silent war inside me to deny my feelings and present myself as “ok”. But this just kept the problem at bay and from ever being able to CONNECT with people because I was holding back the very thing they could connect with, emotions and energy.

I found for me, the usual advice (talk to more people, think positive) didn’t work all that well because I was suppressing a lot of fear/trauma/emotion. There was a silent war inside me to deny my feelings and present myself as “ok”. But this just kept the problem at bay and from ever being able to CONNECT with people because I was holding back the very thing they could connect with, emotions and energy.

The usual advice didn’t work for me.

I tried talking to a lot of people, thinking positively, getting in shape, faking confidence. I found other than masking my anxiety, it helped no further in making me feel normal.

That’s because I was suppressing a lot of fear/trauma/emotion. There was a silent war inside me to deny my feelings and present myself as “ok”. But this just kept the problem at bay and from ever being able to CONNECT with people because I was holding back the very thing they could connect with, emotions and energy.

I was still basically muted inside

The usual advice didn’t work for me

I tried all the advice: talk to more people, think positive, fake it till you make it. I found it didn’t work (other than to mask my anxiety) because I was suppressing a lot of fear/trauma/emotion. There was a silent war inside me to deny my feelings and present myself as “ok”. But this just kept the problem at bay and from ever being able to CONNECT with people because I was holding back the very thing they could connect with, emotions and energy.

I learned I had to take a much different path in order to make headway against my social anxiety. I had to get in touch with this deeper level of myself where the problem was happening.

Not my head.

My body.

That’s the most powerful thing I learned.

It wasn’t irrational, it wasn’t all mental. It was based off of old feelings in my body, 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 other people weren’t a threat.

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

A Real Road To Recovery from Social Anxiety

Guide for social anxiety that goes in depth on how to self-heal trauma and old feelings using nothing more than the power of your own mind and awareness. Basically, it involves learning to get your mind OUT of the way so your body can self-regulate and resolve the processed and compacted shit you hold inside from your life.

I had to look within to what was MAKING me this way. I had to get in touch with all these feelings in my body I was scared to death of. I had to feel and let that poison up.

down under that I was constantly battling with and fighting as if for my life.

I bombed a presentation in college at 23 and broke down worse than ever before. That day set a fire in my heart to confront this issue that had been controlling me since 13.

It was the spark that set off a torrent of changes, joining the gym, getting hired at a restaurant, moving out of the house, eating healthy, meditating.

I bombed a presentation in college at 23.

I attacked it from all angles. I talked to people, challenged my negative thoughts, got big in the gym, moved cities, traveled the world.

I arrived 4 years later at the realization I had masked it better.

I thought about suicide.

I tried one last thing.

A 10 day Vipassana silent meditation retreat saved my life.

It put my focus where a real change could happen.

I changed on a 10 day silent Vipassana meditation retreat.

I got to the root cause: old feelings in my body from past events where I’d been wounded.

I saw a real change on a 10 day silent Vipassana meditation retreat.

I got to the root cause: old feelings in my body from past events where I’d been wounded.

I resolved a lot of my anxiety on a 10 day silent Vipassana meditation retreat.

I got to the root cause: old feelings in my body from past events where I’d been wounded.

I found real relief on a 10 day silent Vipassana meditation retreat.

I didn’t know it, but these 8 months backpacking would reveal a truth that maybe underneath I had known all along.

That I was unfixable.

Flawed at my core.

It took a lot of deep inner work and discovery. Discovery of what was at the root of my chronic social anxiety and fear of women. I had some deep-seated trauma I was in denial of. I looked at my social anxiety as this isolated issue I could treat by talking to a lot of people and improving myself, but this thinking was flawed. My social anxiety was rooted in my past and things that had happened to me. Times I had been hurt, humiliated, let down, shamed.

This is where Vipassana meditation took me – to doing this work on the inside to resolve old feelings and emotions in my body that were subconsciously affecting my view of people. It was all mostly an inner issue.

I did find my mind was equally important though. My identity. Even after doing Vipassana some fear stuck with me and it kept me from really “being myself” and operating in the world fully. I had to change my identity also. I had to start viewing myself the same way I did other people. Somewhere subconsciously I thought a normal life was only for others. I still viewed myself as anxious and separate and different. But by seeing myself as others, it helped to bridge this gap and feel more connected and like others. It helped me to see that approaching women and people is not so scary and that it’s normal and ok.

It’s like in a way that I stopped being myself when I did this. I stopped viewing myself from this personalized sense of self and I started having a detachment to myself. I started to almost view myself as another person, as someone I had no attachment to. This really helped me to operate more freely around people and to take action with women. I was still too attached to myself even after a lot of deep inner work and letting go of traumas and old emotions. I had to sever this attachment by viewing myself as someone else. By almost seeing myself from outside of myself, as if I was viewing someone else and their story that was playing out.

This helped to neutralize that self-consciousness and low-level anxiety that still existed in me. It helped me to stop placing such great importance on the outcome and what happened. It helped me to be more present.

What is the one thing social anxiety revolves around? YOU. So if you can get outside yourself and see yourself as another person, you can change the trajectory of your mind, your thinking and emotions. You can shed the trauma when you stop fueling it and reacting to all these sensations and feelings in your body with the story you put around them.

I’m Ben Brewer

My story is maybe not unlike yours.

I struggled for 10 years with severe anxiety and discomfort around people, really held me back in life. At 23, after bombing a presentation in college and badly embarrassing myself, I had a wakeup call to work on these issues. I tried all the advice: talk to people, think positive, love yourself, go new places, work out.

I saw considerable improvement over a time of 4 years. I got better at handling the fear around people and basically keeping it under wraps. This helped at my job serving tables and generally in life to at least FUNCTION and GET ALONG.

But what I found?

It was mostly false security. It was the ability to act “fine” around people, but underneath I still felt so insecure. I didn’t feel right.

What I had done is MASK my anxiety better and use a lot of energy to keep it under control.

I had not actually FREED myself from my anxiety.

Which was an important difference, as I learned the hard way.

And more than just a feeling, I was still missing out on life. All these opportunities with women were passing me by because I still didn’t feel ready.

Fear still controlled me, is what it came down to.

I had changed on the surface, but not underneath.

Four years into all my efforts, I didn’t feel secure in my skin. I didn’t feel comfortable around people. I didn’t have the ability to approach or date women.

It was still far too scary, to actually be myself.

What’s the easiest thing you can do? You can start to change how you view yourself. This is such a major part of social anxiety, your identity and the frame from which you view yourself and people. Basically, you want to get outside yourself and start to see yourself more neutrally, from another person’s eyes. You want to see yourself like someone else. View yourself in this way and so much of the weight lifts. So much – not all – of anxiety is tied to how you view yourself. Stop viewing yourself as you and start viewing yourself as someone else. Keep this picture in your mind that you’re no longer yourself – you’re someone else. Think of yourself as another person you know. Embody this feeling that you’re no longer you. You’re just another person in the world.

This is the start of a change. Though you will slide back into seeing yourself as “you”, this anxious person, you need to consciously practice seeing yourself as someone else.

What does this do? It depersonalizes things. It makes things more impersonal. Right now, everything is very personal and tied to your identity. It all affects you.

You take things too personally.

A lot of this anxious identity results from trauma and being hurt and being taught to think and see yourself negatively.

I don’t know everything but I do know I that, at 27, I underwent a drastic change as a person. I had been trying to overcome social anxiety for 5 years by that point. I hadn’t seen much success beyond a surface level. I had gotten better at masking my anxiety around people. Useful, but only so much in the grand scheme.

False security vs real security. Consistently facing the fear and changing your thoughts creates a false sense of security, because you’ve pushed the fear back. You’ve gotten it under your thumb. But it’s tenuous. It can spring out at any time. If you stop your efforts, it will all come back.

The freedom to be, express yourself, and move through life easily. That is the aim of this blog, to help you achieve this state in yourself where you’re not inside yourself, trapped, but you’re outside yourself and moving through life with grace and ease and with a bounce in your step. Where things don’t faze you. Where people can’t get to you. Where you’re larger than life and free in yourself. Where things like social anxiety are no longer even a thought in your mind. Where nothing can penetrate. When you’re not yourself, you finally ARE yourself. It’s paradoxical but true. You can only be yourself when you stop being yourself. It’s the you that gets in the way of yourself, that prevents life from flowing and moving, that keeps your feelings stagnant and negative, that keeps you trapped and from seeing any other possibility. When you get outside yourself, there’s finally possibility and expansion and opportunity for new things to arise. You’ve let go of the old, and now the new can be born. Dying to yourself and being reborn to who you really are.

You have to kill off your anxious identity. And you can only do that by no longer seeing yourself as it, by actively perceiving yourself as someone else. Then there’s no more separation between you and others because you are them. You’re like them. You see yourself as them. And thus speaking to them feels easy. There’s no separation or anxiety that gets in the way.

Social anxiety has a cure

But most are looking in the wrong place. They’re talking to people, they’re thinking more positive, they’re trying to put their best foot forward and fight this thing so they can reach a better place in their mental health and interactions. So they can feel like they’re getting somewhere and making progress. So they can date and make friends and get a good job, live a full life.

It’s well intentioned.

But it’s fundamentally misguided in my experience. It’s not addressing the actual problem and the reason they’re so anxious in the first place. It’s only putting a bandaid on it and managing symptoms.

What is the problem?

It’s their whole self to begin with. The person inside that is anxious and insecure, most likely due to traumas and suffering wounds from people in the past. This is the person inside they are deeply identified with and that affects their worldview, how they see people. It affects how they proceed into social situations. They are essentially always coming from this place of being anxious-identified. And what they do in their effort to fix it is they try to build on top of this insecure foundation, this insecure self.

They try to become someone else while still being identified at a core level with anxiety, with the person they’ve always been.

So it follows them into each new situation. They always sense a fear in the background around people, even if they get better at hiding it and smiling and faking confidence.

And they can’t figure it out for the life of them. They take all this action and work so hard to change their thinking – but it doesn’t give. This fear inside doesn’t go away. It doesn’t budge no matter what they do.

It’s still baked into who they are.

That’s because they’ve been going about it all wrong. Rather than try to to build on top of their insecure self – they should learn to see themselves differently. They should learn how to stop being identified with their insecure self. Because that’s how they can begin to shed their insecurity and actually become someone strong on the inside. This path is much different than willpower and pushing through discomfort and thinking positively. It involves learning to stop identifying with yourself, with who you’ve come to know yourself as, this anxious person. It involves learning to see yourself like other people.

They are still coming from this anxious place while going around people. They are closed down. They are hunched and in a fetal position and thus no real change can take place. Nothing can get through to them. Though they may build better shields to handle the intensity of being in this situation, fundamentally no change happens. An identity shift has to occur first. You have to feel like you’re not yourself and you’re another person, you’re someone else. And this is how you begin to open up at a core level and shed the insecurity and toxins that are keeping you trapped and fragile and small in yourself.

When you feel like you’re someone else, automatically an expansion occurs. You expand and you open up more. You’re not so personally identified and attached and needing to protect any longer. Who cares if you’re someone else? What is there to protect? Suddenly the divide comes down. The wall disappears and you’re finally able to be real around people and connect and not be coming from this deeply insecure and self-conscious place where you’re extremely fragile and on edge and barely holding it together, feeling like any moment disaster might happen.

Traumas and wounds dissolve a lot faster and easier when you’re not personally identified with the wounds and protecting them. It still might be painful to let things up. But mostly it’s a physical pain and not a mental/emotional pain where you’re identity is in it and it shakes the whole foundation of you.

A more free self

I was anything but free. I was still chained by social anxiety, insecurity, a deep dread in my body. I had been confronting it for over 4 years by this point. I had served tables, lifted weights, faked confidence, thought positively, made major lifestyle moves like travel and start over in a new city. And I hadn’t been able to put it behind me. It still weighed on me. It still subconsciously affected my view of people. It still steered me in a direction in life I didn’t want to go.

And at 27, I was tired of it. I was lonely. I was exhausted from having run on this treadmill and essentially stepping off and being right where I was – the same anxious and vulnerable person in my core.

What was it going to take? Was freedom even possible?

I didn’t believe so.

And with that realization, it clicked. Killing myself was the only way out. As much as I hated the idea with every fiber in my body because I knew there must be more to life than this shallow existence I’d been living…

… I couldn’t see around it. I couldn’t imagine anything but fear in what I did, in how I was around people, in who I showed up as.

Social anxiety whether I liked it or not was my identity.

It defined me.

The secret to more easily being yourself is, paradoxically, not being yourself. When you are NOT yourself, yourself can shine through. You stop fighting and resisting. You stop trying to control everything that comes out. You let loose. And this is when life feels good, when you’re not restricting the flow of emotion and energy, when you’re not trying to hold on and control everything so tightly.

Look at yourself as someone else, as another person. View yourself in this manner, from outside yourself. And this is the start of acting from a new place. This is the start of new feelings that can begin to blossom. Feeling good in your body, when you’re not so personally identified and attached to what’s happening, when you view it more impersonally, when you can view it as if it’s happening to someone else, as if it’s someone else’s experience and not your own. If you can see it like this, things begin to loosen. The rigid structure of your anxious self which currently underpins everything you do/see/feel/behave will begin to breakup. Something greater will begin to blossom and come through.

A more free self.

The solution is simpler than you think

It’s all about understanding how your mind works and how you get stuck in these moods/trapped in yourself. You get anxious and you start reacting and feeding your anxiety. You think about a social situation or something you’re about to do and you freeze to the emotion and the feelings in your body. You get overwhelmed and lose yourself. Things race out of control and the rest is out of your hands.

It’s all in how you see yourself, how you view yourself. Whether it’s from this personalized sense of self where it’s you inside here vs everyone out there. Or whether it’s from seeing yourself as another person. Whether you’re in yourself in you’re behind yourself, viewing yourself as you would someone else. Fundamentally cutting off that personalized relationship, the one that is tied to all that thought and emotion. This is how you ACTUALLY digest and process all that buildup of fear and energy and thought. When you get outside yourself you can see clearly. You can act more fluidly and responsively. You stop reacting and taking things personally because you’re no longer personally identified.

It’s all about learning to stop being personally identified. And it’s not difficult. It just requires some awareness. It requires viewing yourself in a different way. It involves seeing yourself as another person and living from that new space. Yes, thoughts and emotions will try to pull you back in and make you re-identify with this self. But that’s normal. You just have to recognize this and, once again, see yourself as someone else. This takes away the shame and embarrassment of living. This gives you the permission to act with so much more confidence and authority. When you’re someone else, you aren’t attached. You don’t care as much anymore. Things don’t affect you.

You can’t solve social anxiety from inside yourself. You can try to fix yourself. But your world will still be based on fear and uncertainty and emotional fragility. You’ll still be scared of relapse and falling back into it.

The solution to social anxiety is outside yourself. It’s in no longer identifying with yourself but seeing yourself as someone else.

You don’t have to do years of exposure therapy, or take medication, or talk it out in therapy.

Social anxiety makes you believe you’re different than others, that there’s this divide, that everything you do is being carefully scrutinized and judged. It all comes from this fundamental misconception in your mind that you’re different. Seeing yourself like others. This is really what it comes down to.

Right now you are trapped in your mind and in this deeply personalized prism.

This is a way to get outside yourself and feel good. This is a way to deal with shame and all kinds of negative emotions. This is how you free yourself from that personalized sense of self that is tied to your anxiety and depression and other negative moods. This is how you get outside yourself again and live life.

You can’t do it from inside yourself, inside your mind and this world that has been created over the last however many years. You try to solve social anxiety from inside this. But it can’t be done. You must get outside yourself. And you can only do that by seeing yourself like you would someone else.

You have to get outside that personalized frame of self. It’s almost like you’re living as someone else. You stop identifying with yourself and you see yourself as just another person. This is what frees up all your energy and thoughts and motivation. It’s what gives you permission to go out and do things. Permission to be a person.

The core issue is one of identity and how you see yourself. The whole problem is that you see yourself as yourself, as this broken and anxious and flawed person. When you stop seeing yourself as yourself, but as someone else, you take on a new relationship with yourself, less personalized and attached and invested. More open and explorative and enthusiastic.

You try to improve on what you perceive as broken. You try to change your anxious personality and mold yourself into a more confident person and someone you like. But the whole time you carry your problems with you. Underneath it all you still identify with this self. The solution isn’t to go to war with this self or to change it or build on top of it, it’s to dis-identify with it altogether and see yourself as just another person, as someone you don’t know.

Live as if you’re someone else.

The solution to social anxiety is easy

It involves seeing yourself as someone else.

I had tried everything

I had served tables for 4 years. I had moved out of the house. I had gone to work on my negative mindset. I had transformed my body in the gym. I had moved cities. I had traveled the world.

I had done all these things and I still couldn’t initiate with women. I couldn’t go into social situations without feeling nerves returning. I couldn’t just be myself and act naturally around people. Everything about my existence required careful calculation and planning and mental energy because the fear wasn’t gone.

It was masked better.

It was suppressed through physical tension and holding myself.

I had been in denial of it for a while. I had tried hard to pretend everything was good. That I wasn’t anxious. That I felt fine. That I was past my fear because, outwardly, I could function and talk to people and get along “well enough” that no one really noticed.

But I noticed.

I noticed how hard and difficult it was, even while doing ordinary things like grocery shopping or ordering coffee. There was chronically a fear and an angst in the background. A feeling like things might turn and people might see through my cover. A sense like I might get exposed. That people might see me.

My worst fear. Feelings in my body I literally couldn’t handle.

Severe shame that felt worse than death.

So I did everything to make sure that didn’t happen. I worked endlessly to suppress the fear and stay calm on the surface and act like nothing was going on.

As you can probably figure, that strategy only delayed the inevitable; the day it would all crash down and I’d realize these efforts had been getting me nowhere. Inside I was still the same anxious person.

I never once considered myself a traumatized person. I looked back on my life, my upbringing, as normal and having a good childhood. I didn’t see any major things that stuck out that might explain why I became severely anxious as a teen, deathly terrified of being seen in groups or intimately, scared of authority figures, all these issues around women.

That’s what trauma does. It blinds you to the fact you’re traumatized and suffering deep emotional wounds. It tries to explain it away as an “irrational fear” or a “mental health issue” or whatever the reason may be. All the while it’s actually trauma underneath that is accounting for this disproportionate fear response in situations that logically you know you are safe. No one is out to get you. It’s all in your head, seemingly.

Actually, it’s in your body. The body keeps the score of the things that have happened to you in life. Though you may think you’ve “moved on”, emotionally you haven’t. You’re still trapped back in that time when you got hurt or overwhelmed or shamed or made to feel bad for things you did. A part of you is still frozen in the past. THAT is trauma. That frozen aspect of yourself emotionally speaking is the trauma. It’s feelings in your body that are blocked, that you never processed or got over. Just like physical indigestion, you can experience emotional indigestion. If your body is too upset you can’t really process and move through feelings. They get trapped in you. They stay there. They keep you in that place emotionally.

Then I started remembering things. My trauma was coming closer to the surface and I started recalling events with my mom, how she’d do certain things and use love as a weapon when I behaved bad/good. Other things as well like getting teased by my family relentlessly for the time I broke my arm while swinging off a rope one-handed (trying to copy what my older brother just did seconds before me). All my cousins were out there watching and they teased me for so many years after for showing off. It was things like these that had a deep scarring impact on me, a naturally sensitive boy. I didn’t connect the dots for so long as to why I felt this way in situations I knew I was safe in. But somewhere deep inside these situations were stirring unresolved trauma and feelings, making me sense that same danger and feeling of unsafety, like something bad was about to happen all over again.

This is why I had to throw out the conventional playbook of “thinking positively” and “exposing to social situations” as a strategy to deal with my social anxiety. It simply didn’t address the trauma at my core that was causing me to feel so deeply fearful. It only helped me to create a more powerful hold over it so it didn’t come out and so that I could function and make it through these situations without breaking down. A “solution”, I suppose. But not a very good one. It still left me devastated at the core, feeling terrible in myself.

Trauma explained my chronic social anxiety. It wasn’t irrational and all in my head. It was in my body. It was based off of old feelings, a store of old emotions from past events where I’d been wounded.

Which is why things like cognitive reframing only helped so much. It wasn’t about my thoughts. It was about old feelings that were subconsciously affecting my view of others.

I had gone to all this trouble to create a “new self” without realizing the foundation I was building on was rotten.

. None of them had meaningfully changed the way I felt around people.

At the basic level I was still uncomfortable.

I could only mask it better.

I had been in denial of it for a long time. I had tried so hard to put on a happy and cheery persona and pretend everything was good. That I wasn’t anxious. That I felt fine. That I was past my fear because, outwardly, I could function and talk to people and get along “well enough” that no one really noticed.

But I noticed. I still dealt with chronic fear in the background. I still struggled to take any kind of meaningful action towards building relationships or making myself noticed. No matter what I did or where I went, my anxiety was always there waiting for me, making it hard to be myself and just feel okay in my body.

And I couldn’t put my finger on it. After all this action and continued effort, after trying ALL THE ADVICE, shouldn’t it be gone? Shouldn’t I be out there, living my life, dating, enjoying myself, having experiences and making memories to look back on?

I was 27 by this point. And I wasn’t getting any younger. My 20’s were almost gone.

And yet I was still trapped behind this wall.

For the life of me I couldn’t push these feelings away that were silently wreaking havoc on my mental health.

I was like a mannequin, dressed up all nicely but there was no life to me. There was only fear in my core.

But somewhere underneath it was still affecting me. As much as I lied to myself and tried to deny reality, this fear was still massively affecting my life.

This blog shows a new way to address social anxiety and actually move forward

Most advice doesn’t address social anxiety; it masks it. It doesn’t help you move forward, it keeps you where you’re at and creates the illusion of change/that you’re further along. In actuality, you’re still anxious. Under the surface, you’re still in deep conflict with yourself. You’re still battling internally and constantly at war with your feelings and thoughts. You’ve only experienced a cosmetic change that, yes, is an improvement, but hasn’t solved anything.

My aim is to help you SOLVE your social anxiety. To FREE you from the struggle. To actually get you to peace of mind in yourself, to where you can act with your full capability and easily move through the world. Not just LOOK like it. But actually BE it. Not FAKE it. But MAKE it.

My aim is to untangle you from this altogether. To free you from the struggle.

I won’t tell you what’s possible. I’ll let you determine that for yourself.

My story:

I struggled with SA for 15 years. I tried for 5 years to overcome it. Ultimately, I failed. I found out my efforts had only covered it up better, had pushed my insecurities out of view. Yes, this was a certain improvement, not looking as outwardly like a catastrophe. But inwardly, it still messed with me greatly. It caused so much turmoil and buildup of regret and negative emotion that, at the basic level, I was still in the same fix. I was still the same flawed and dysfunctional person. I was still the same guy who couldn’t receive love or let anyone in or show anyone I liked them. It was too vulnerable and scary. It felt like death. It felt like I’d be rejected once again at the core and that was too painful to bear. So I was so closed off as a person still. All my change was superficial, surface level, cosmetic. And it killed me to realize this. To finally acknowledge my efforts hadn’t been getting me anywhere. That I’d been building on top of a crumbling foundation.

And that’s when it all crashed down. I saw the futility. I gave up on trying to overcome social anxiety. I gave in to the depression and thought strongly of killing myself.

I overcame social anxiety on the outside. But on the inside I had not. And this realization made it all crash down. Without a change in substance, it meant nothing. It solved nothing. It got me nowhere.

and keeps you where you’re at.

For ten years I struggled with panic, shame and discomfort around people. After spending a lot of energy on exposure therapy and radical lifestyle changes but seeing poor results,

How I cured my social anxiety & found real confidence

At 27, I thought my life was over. I had spent 4 years on all the advice for social anxiety (exposure, CBT, self-improvement) and still struggled.

What is this blog about?

It’s about internalizing a real sense of confidence and authority in who you are. It’s about getting behind yourself fully. It’s about digesting emotional states of fear and insecurity. It’s about coming into your full potential and living the life you were meant to. It’s about clearing the blocks that are preventing you from speaking to women and making friends. It’s about becoming comfortable in who you are so that you can share intimacy with another and feel fine in that space.

It’s about becoming a real and actualized human.

With social anxiety and all this hang up, you are so limited. You are a husk of yourself. Your life is so hollow and incomplete. So much feels missing. And it will eat away at you forever until you get it fixed. You must focus on solving this issue or nothing else will matter. This blog is about connecting the dots and getting down to what it is that drives anxiety, that keeps you stuck where you are, that prevents you from making real forward progress in your life. And it’s about doing it in the simplest and least painful manner. It’s about skipping all the hard shit that only puts a bandaid on the problem anyways.

Internalizing the ability to see yourself in another person. To take you outside of yourself and the emotions/thoughts you live in. Don’t do war with yourself, with your emotions/thoughts. Get outside yourself, your emotions/thoughts. This is the key to actually winning the battle against your social anxiety.

See yourself as someone else. Imagine another person looking and feeling just like you and embody that look/feeling. Fully be it. Get behind it. Realize it’s normal because this other person is doing it. This is how you hack your brain and get into the mainframe underneath and actually begin to change. These feelings/thoughts of anxiety can’t stay long when you normalize how you look and how you feel and see it in someone else, when you see someone else doing it, when you give yourself permission to embody and be it. Fear cannot survive in this environment. Source: myself.

Conventional advice essentially advocates you to do war with yourself. Push past your discomfort and “just do it”. Think positively to counteract your negative thoughts. Fake confidence when you feel afraid. Go against what you’re feeling/sensing/thinking and try to overcome it through willpower and force and pushing through. This doesn’t work, sad to say. It can help to manage the symptoms, but it doesn’t address the core problem. You cannot overcome social anxiety by going to war against yourself. You must learn to get outside yourself and to normalize what you’re feeling/thinking/doing. You must get behind yourself. This is the only way the fear actually begins to dissolve, when you stop fighting yourself and resisting so hard what you’re experiencing. When you begin to embrace yourself and normalize what’s happening in you, that’s when the shift occurs. And not a moment before.

I spent 5 years trying to overcome my social anxiety by force and by changing/improving myself. It only helped me to mask better. It changed nothing substantive or real underneath. It left me starved for real connection and a real sense of safety in myself.

The core flaw in most advice for social anxiety

Most advice doesn’t treat social anxiety; it manages it

This is the core flaw in most advice. Advice like exposure therapy and cognitive reframing and medication and fake it till you make it. It manages the fear and helps get it down in size so you can function better, but it doesn’t resolve the problem. Not only that, it requires a ton of combative energy to fight the issue, to even get yourself into the arena. You must either be highly motivated and have suffered A LOT so that the motivation is there to go to war with it, or you must somehow try to exert that. Either way it’s not really sustainable. It can work for a couple of years or maybe even longer, but eventually you will run out of steam. And when you do and you finally let up, you see that the problem isn’t even solved. It hasn’t even gone anywhere. This whole time you’ve basically been suppressing it and holding it in and trying to prop up a confident image/self to other people. You’ve “changed” on the outside. But inside you’re exactly where you were. In substance you’re no different. And this is a bitter pill to swallow. It can be life-ending potentially. It almost was for me. I nearly committed suicide after learning it was all for nothing.

Basically, I’m leaning away from presenting Vipassana as the solution. It’s a stepping stone. And it’s one that may be needed for a severe anxiety sufferer. To help heal inner traumas and wounds that are causing a bodily sense of fear. I’m going more towards presenting this as the solution, this mindset/reframe to see yourself in other people and normalize what you’re doing and experiencing and feeling. This ultimately creates the conditions for surrender and non-resistance/acceptance, which is what transforms difficult states in the body. Vipassana mimics this as well. But it’s not needed. It can be done totally in one’s mind.

I can still be authentic with my story though. I can still share everything.

Something about my mind was still wrong. I didn’t feel like I had the internal strength. I still felt so weak and shaky inside. It took a lot of effort to put on a confident front. It wasn’t easy. It wasn’t natural or me. It was this conscious mode of mind I had to live from in order to survive around people, actively try. And that wore at me. It made me realize, as far as I’d come, I still wasn’t anywhere close to being where I wanted. I kept pushing and kept taking action. But nothing substantive changed. Under the surface it never got any easier. Those feelings were still present at all times around people, making it hard, making it a chore to be myself, making it impossible to connect and reach out. I simply didn’t have the internal stability. I lacked a basic feeling of safety, of which I was still desperately searching. It never materialized. Even when I moved cities and traveled the world, it evaded me. So eventually I gave up. After nearly 1 year of traveling I realized the futility of what I was trying to accomplish, of where I was trying to get in life. It simply wasn’t possible for a person like me. I was lost, beyond repair, not destined to live a normal life or have things like love and friendship. Life would basically continue on like this – fear always preventing me from reaching my potential. And it was too much to bear. I couldn’t live with the thought it’d always be like this. So I planned to commit suicide. It was the only thought that gave me any relief, ending my life.

There’s a way out

I don’t care how long you’ve struggled. I don’t care if you think you’re lost. I don’t care how deeply social anxiety is your identity.

You can reverse it. You can fundamentally change the pattern. You can revolutionize your life and act in such a simpler and more free manner in your social interactions and everything you do.

You don’t have to be self-conscious and stuck behind this wall forever.

You can be the person who easily goes out and expresses himself and strikes up conversations with anyone. You can approach people you like, find romance, feel connected.

There’s a way to do this.

Suicidal to Full Recovery: My Story

At 27, I almost killed myself. I had tried exposure, positive thinking, weightlifting, all new habits and lifestyle. I had been actively confronting my social anxiety since 23. In which time I had basically suppressed it better. I had constructed a mask, a facade of being normal and ok. But it still weighed on me immensely. Fear was still the main emotion, making me a prisoner of myself. I had come to realize just how much it was still affecting me and my ability to live life.

Women. Friends. Meaningful connection.

All of which I still lacked. Of which I had been avoiding because it caused so much dread.

Long story short, I didn’t see a point in being alive in this hollow and meaningless state of existence where I wasn’t comfortable holding a conversation and it took mental effort to stay on track.

I wanted to feel free in myself. I wanted to act easily in the world. But I saw it wasn’t possible. No amount of effort or willpower on my part could make it happen.

So better off if I was dead.

It was under my nose the whole time.

I just didn’t see it. I was too close in it. I lived from this self-conception, this person I saw and knew myself as, every time I went around people. And it was keeping me trapped. It was keeping me confined to this very narrow range of behavior and expression. It was still totally based on fear. Fear of being perceived and judged. It kept my energy so small. But then I started to see myself like others. I saw them doing this and acting this way. And it unlocked something inside me. A strong sense of self. It gave me the permission to fully embody what I was feeling and how I was being. And this changed everything about the way I went into social situations, from much firmer ground, from a feeling like something was propelling me and making it effortless.

It all comes down to getting behind yourself, whatever your feeling. You’re in deep resistance and you don’t believe it’s normal to feel/act this way and you resist it and try to act and feel in the way that you do believe is normal. You’re against it. And this strips you of all your power. This completely undermines you. But when you see your feelings/actions as normal and you can picture in your head other people doing this and the behavior being totally normal, it puts you behind it. You align with it. And in that the shift happens. When you’re not resisting it.

If you can see another person doing this, it can help you to normalize it in your head and come into alignment with it instead of resisting it and trying to be different.

It all comes down to getting behind what you’re feeling and doing and what you see yourself doing in the future. Even if you feel anxiety and all kinds of bodily nerves, if you can NORMALIZE the anxiety and not make it enemy, if you can see another person being this way and it being something normal and that others do/feel, it instantly changes the quality. It puts you on the same side of it. It puts you behind it. It allows you to act through it. And that surrender is what allows it to almost instantaneously change, what allows you to act with more self-permission and authority and to fully embody who you are. To be totally with yourself.

And this is the quality that is magnetic to other people. They can sense when you’re like this. There’s a freedom inside you that draws others to you. There’s an opening. There’s an ease that is so attractive.

Vipassana meditation and being able to digest the fear inside me. Being able to get out of my own way. Being able to take myself out of it. I was so in the fear and emotion in my body, identified and tied to it, which kept it perpetually fueled and alive. With Vipassana I was able to depersonalize from this emotion and bodily tension, aka fear. And this is what helped pass it through.

Vipassana was the platform for me to learn more deeply about myself and what was keeping my social anxiety alive.

Ultimately it came down to getting out of myself, this narrow self-conception I identified with. It was about seeing others in myself and embodying that and giving myself permission to act and be. Retooling my identity. Taking myself out of it.

Vipassana was the bridge to me first being able to do this, impartially observe my bodily sensations without any mind or reactivity or self. This allowed a great release/change of energy. I didn’t know it but I was chronically getting in my own way and keeping the fear, these feelings, inside me. I was in a cohabitative relationship with it. It needed my participation.

This wasn’t all though, because there was still a part of my mind that clung to this anxious self-identity. I had to learn to see myself like others, imagine them doing this behavior and then embodying it totally.

And I thought seriously about doing it.

And I was just waiting for the courage to do it.

It wasn’t all in my head

It was in my past, in how events had affected me, in how other people had emotionally damaged me.

This is basically what it was all about, my severe social anxiety and discomfort being seen.

It wasn’t irrational.

It was real.

My first (failed) effort to change

From age 23 to 27 I tried to gaslight and talk myself out of it. I tried to convince myself people were friendly and not a threat. That it was all in my head and no one cared. This, along with a lot of exposure and pushing through discomfort, was my main strategy for addressing these feelings that set my body on fire.

It helped.

It brought the intensity from 10 down to 5.

It allowed me to function better around people and keep my fear under (somewhat) control.

Social anxiety defeated, right?

Not exactly.

Because it never went out. As good as I got at hiding it and pushing it out of view? Those embers were still there inside me. I could feel my anxiety at all times wanting to flare up and cause issues. Any social situation, even those I’d been in many times, I could feel it trying to rekindle. Trying to set me ablaze again.

This presented a few problems: the fact that I had to always be on guard, always putting out flames before they became a bigger issue. And that I couldn’t ever just “be myself”.

“Myself” was all this fear inside I was feeling and I didn’t want ANYONE to see how much I was struggling. So I constantly tried to act confident and positive to counteract these feelings. I was constantly exerting a false persona to makeup for this deep internal deficit I felt in myself.

And it just. didn’t. work.

It didn’t takeaway my pain. It didn’t solve my issues. It left me in the same fundamental discomfort. And four years later I finally pulled my head out of the sand because I was at a crossroads in life. It had still been happening this whole time. The story of my life and chronically missing out on opportunities with women was still playing out.

And I couldn’t pretend any longer it was all fine.

It wasn’t. I was so angry with myself, so deeply ashamed of myself and my inability to be normal.

Great, right?

Yes and no. Being able to function felt A LOT better.

But it never went out. As good as I got at hiding it and pushing it out of view? Those embers were still there inside me. I could feel my anxiety at all times wanting to flare up and cause issues. Any social situation, even those I’d been in many times, I could feel it trying to rekindle. Trying to set me ablaze again.

So it was constant vigilance. I had to always be on my guard. I had to always be putting out flames before they became a bigger issue.

The embers were still there inside me. I could feel my anxiety at basically all times wanting to flare up and cause issues. Any social situation, even those I’d been in many times, I could feel it trying to rekindle.

This caused a lot of discomfort. As good as I got at hiding it and pushing it out of view, it still affected me.

It affected how I felt, as well as my ability to be present and relax around people, as well as my ability to talk to attractive women. I didn’t feel all there around people. I felt like something was still greatly holding me back and preventing me from being my full self. It still felt hard. There was a constant friction rubbing at me.

it was just waiting for the right moment to rekindle and set me ablaze again.

In short, I had not extinguished the fear. I had just contained it.

I could feel it wanting to flare up, my anxiety

waiting to be rekindled. I hadn’t extingquished m yfear

Through consistently reshaping my thoughts and trying to see people in a more positive light, the fear died down in size.

But it never went out. The embers were still there inside me. I could feel it wanting to flare up, my anxiety, at basically any time.

It helped. It made the intensity much more manageable, from 10 down to 5. It gave me the ability to function and get along at my job (serving tables) as well as other social situations like the gym and coffee shops.

It made the intensity much more manageable, from 10 down to 5.

But even with this relief?

I still had issues around people. I still battled with a lot of fear on the inside.

But I couldn’t help but notice even with this relief? It never went away. It was always there inside me, these dark feelings, this discomfort that wanted to spring out of my body. I got better at holding it in and keeping it together. But it took a huge effort to control and maintain. I couldn’t ever let up even for one second lest it catch me off guard. It burned so much energy. It caused so much silent mayhem. It kept me from ever connecting with anyone on a true level because I was still so closely guarded.

I spent 5 years believing it was illusionary, these feelings. That there was no rhyme or reason why I should be feeling this intense discomfort when logically I knew there was no threat.

So I tried to gaslight myself out of it. I told myself all kinds of things like “people are friendly” and “it’s all in your head” and “no one cares”.

But it never worked. It never actually sunk in. My body never believed it.

It kept fearing on just the same, even if I did get better at hiding it and pretending I was someone confident.

Until I just couldn’t anymore. Until I finally collapsed and the weight of it hit me: how much I was still holding onto inside. All this fear and insecurity. Stuff that was making it impossible to connect meaningfully with anyone. Stuff that was keeping me in the shadows, so scared to step into the light and be seen.

The terrible truth that took me under

At 27, I almost killed myself. The pain of still not being past social anxiety after four years of actively confronting it and working on myself, and the regret of having missed out on dozens of opportunities with cute girls (most recently my crush, a girl I felt crazy about) because they scared the shit out of me, weighed on me so heavy. It felt unbearable, the fact that nothing had really changed. I was still the same person at heart. I had just gotten better at masking it.

Making it seem I was ok.

But I felt crushed. I felt stuck between a rock and a hard place because nothing was taking away this fear inside, this dread that seemed to seep into every cell in my body as I went outside, as I saw chances to approach girls, as I did regular things like order a coffee. The fear was constantly looming. I couldn’t escape it.

Thousands of social interactions, situations, people I had talked to. It had been my fucking job… for four years. I had served tables as a form of exposure therapy to finally get over this fear, in addition to lots of other things like meditation, weightlifting, reading books, changing my thoughts, being kind and compassionate to myself.

All the “advice” people mention for social anxiety.

Yeah… that shit had only put a bandaid on it. It had helped to cover it up and make things seem nicer on the outside, like I didn’t have all these problems on the inside, like I was functional and fine.

But that “functionality” was just a facade. A really good cover story for how I felt inside, so fucking fearful.

That’s why it had come to this nuclear option, killing myself, something I had never before thought of doing. Even though I’d been struggling with social anxiety since 13 and had some pretty rough moments, truly embarrassing, I had always been able to move on for the most part and hold onto hope that tomorrow, the future, would bring something better.

Freedom from this fear.

Well I had been smoking that copium for over four years and yet here I still was, the same miserable and anxious person at my core. Feeling like I was carrying around a hundred pound emotional weight vest. Unable to shrug it off for the life of me.

The burden was so heavy.

And I just wanted relief from it, by any means.

Something different

As I laid on my bed in my AirBnB apartment halfway around the world for nearly a whole month, only leaving to stock up on more water and groceries, binging Breaking Bad for the third time as well as chocolate and pasta, anything to numb this emotional pain I was feeling, it came to me. The idea to go try this crazy thing I had heard of for the third time now.

A 10 day silent Vipassana meditation retreat.

I had been traveling, backpacking in Europe. I had left America 8 months ago because I didn’t know what else to do. That’s when I had fumbled the opportunity with my crush, a girl who clearly liked me too. And it had hit me harder than ever. I just couldn’t stay and sit around and let this fear destroy me. I felt like I had to do something DRASTIC.

So it had come to this, the decision to travel for as long as it took to get rid of this fear and actually change myself, not just mask it better and pretend I was ok living this way.

I had thought surely this would be the solution, doubling down and going harder than ever at confronting my fears. In these 8 months I had done a couple hundred cold approaches, I had gone on a dating bootcamp and gotten help, I had tried with every fiber to destroy these fears of mine once and for all.

And it had all failed.

That’s what I had found. None of it resolved this fear in my soul. And that’s when I knew the road, this journey I had begun at 23 to overcome social anxiety or die trying, had come to an end. I had tried and given it my best shot.

But in the end it was stronger.

This summer I had met a guy named James, one of my dating instructors, who’d mentioned Vipassana to me and how he’d done 6 of these retreats and they’d helped him. That’s when it had intrigued me and registered a lot more, how there might be something to this wacky idea of meditating in silence for 10 days.

But I still wasn’t ready to give into it. I still believed “more exposure” was the answer. So I persisted for a few more months and tried to break through on my own. To which I found impossible.

The experience of my life

I showed up to a retreat center back in America not knowing what to expect, only knowing this was it. If this didn’t help me in some tangible and meaningful way, it was over. I would kill myself.

And that’s the intent I had going into it. To take it ultra seriously and focus like I never had. My intent was to restore emotional flow. Somewhere inside I recognized how deeply blocked and backed up I was. I just knew for any change to happen I’d have to do this, restore this sense of flow and time and make it back to the present moment.

I was trapped in the past.

I lived in my head as a way to avoid my feelings, so much inside which was unresolved wounds from my past, things that had happened to me as a sensitive child.

But with a Vipassana retreat I got out of my head and into my body. I started to finally feel all that I was holding down under. I started to bring things to the surface where I could address and deal with it instead of my old strategy, which was to repress it with all my might.

Vipassana helped me to deal with my demons. Not through positive thinking or any kind of symptom management. But through actually facing and coming into contact with my bodily sensations, the raw substance of my fears, the emotional energy I held inside that I had never been able to process or digest because I had been too hurt/overwhelmed in the moment. My feelings had been deeply wounded by things people had done to me and Vipassana was a way I could begin to repair them, mend them, give them healing attention, let go of the pain and tension I was holding and bracing against as a way to keep my world “standing”.

Feeling and letting the poison up was the only way past it, unfortunately. Popping the blister and letting the pus ooze out. Simple body awareness was enough, as unbelievable as that sounds. Vipassana retreats are like meditation bootcamps. That sustained focus and attention causes a buildup of energy that can begin to cut through these emotional injuries in the body and perform something like a surgery on them. Trauma release.

It’s like an ice cube. Simply holding it in your hand for a few minutes is enough to begin melting it down. The heat of your hand naturally transforms it to a more flowing and aqueous form, water. The same thing happens when you hold awareness on your body for a sustained time. These dense pockets and areas of energy where your trapped emotions lie, begin to thaw and unfreeze. Circulation begins to come back. Feeling and time and a sense of flow begins to get restored.

That’s what a Vipassana retreat does. It helps you to slow down your neurotic mind and come into your body and your senses. It allows things to come up where you can process them instead of engaging in your habitual pattern which is to repress and resist what you feel. And this is what I found to be the solution to social anxiety, a chronic pattern of fear around people and avoidance activity. You must get into your body. You must begin to feel and process what you hold inside. Otherwise it will continually drive your life. You’ll run forever and always find excuses.

This is the exact opposite of what your mind wants. It doesn’t want to feel and process the things in your body. Those things are scary and come with so much fear, terror, raw dread. But it’s the only way to change on the level of substance. The body is the subconscious, deeper, mind. It speaks a different language than thought and reason. And this is why so often conventional methods fail. They try to treat the conscious thinking mind as if this will solve for the emotional level of how you feel. But it only puts a bandaid, a stopper, on the issue. You must get on an emotional and feeling and sensation level to actually address this negative emotion and feeling inside you, to let it out, to resolve it. You must come into contact with your physical body. And to do that, you must get out of your head. You must observe your physical sensations and resist the pull of your mind to go into thinking and try to explain away, put a story around, everything you’re feeling. This only creates separation from the issue and keeps it from being solved. It gives a little ease and release of pressure, but it’s just letting steam off. The core feelings in the body that are creating the issue don’t change. They persist. They keep creating more pressure, more anxiety.

But I did.

I absolutely still feared being seen. It felt so exposing and terrifying at a bodily/visceral level. It felt like doom. It felt like I would be frozen and paralyzed and turned to stone. It woke so much in me I couldn’t handle. It shook the very foundation and heart of me. It was something I viscerally dreaded with my whole body.

And I couldn’t pin why.

I couldn’t figure out what the fuck was going on to make me this way, a scared and vulnerable animal.

I just knew I couldn’t live much longer like this, watching life pass me by, watching all these opportunities escape me because I never felt ready.

It was torture.

I had tried everything for my social anxiety: exposure, positive thinking, gym, travel. In which four years I had masked it better. I had created a “confident self” on top of my insecurity and called it “overcoming social anxiety”. I had been able to hide it from myself for a long time. But at 26, three years in to my efforts, it had started to catch up to me, the fact I still struggled with a lot of anxiety in the background and couldn’t open up.

At all.

It filled me with such dread, for people to see anything about me. To put myself into any kind of vulnerable position where I could be revealed and, thus, judged.

around people and failed to connect with anyone past superficial levels.

I was in Europe, backpacking, trying harder than ever to get past my social anxiety and fear of being seen. And I had realized after 8 months of traveling it couldn’t be done.

I couldn’t be fixed.

I hadn’t reached this conclusion on a whim. I had reached it based off of 4 years of data and evidence. Serving tables, lifting weights, thinking positively, moving cities, trying everything in my power to shake it off… the fear that had been on me since the age of 13. And despite all this? Despite traveling the world?

It was still the main sense. A fear inside that I wasn’t able to move past, not even to save my life.

That’s what was at stake on this trip. Before coming, I had basically concluded if this didn’t work I wasn’t long for this world. It was too lonely and pointless without love and relationships and even basic friendships, without the ability to just be myself and feel comfortable in my skin around people. All of which I still lacked despite putting in the work.

Work that people had all but guaranteed me would fix it. They said “go out, think positive, look happy, stop caring” and it will all work itself out, the fear will go away.

Well, it was still here.

It was still putting up a HUGE roadblock, impassable. And honestly suicide sounded better than a lifetime of this. Of regret and loneliness and feeling so fucking cowardly.

After spending a month thinking of suicide, spending all day indoors and rotting, feeling like the most worthless piece of shit, it came to me. I decided to go out on a limb and try one last thing. It was a long shot but there was nothing else for it. So I went to dhamma.org and signed up for Vipassana retreat.

10 days of silent meditation.

Radical, yes. But I didn’t see another choice. My strategy was clearly not working. My angle of attacking this fear head on and putting myself into uncomfortable situations every day wasn’t doing the trick. I was still uncomfortable, only hidden better.

At 27, I became suicidal, nothing had fixed my social anxiety. Exposure, cognitive reframing, weightlifting, self-compassion. 4 years of fighting hard only to mask it better. That’s the realization I had inevitably reached. As hard as I tried to fake confidence and pretend I was fine, my inner reality didn’t lie. It revealed a terrible truth, how regressed I still was as a person, how stuck I was on these feelings and thoughts and unable to move past social anxiety for the life of me.

I tried to rationalize my way out of it. I tried to convince myself people weren’t a danger and that my senses were wrong, that these feelings were totally out of place. But my body never bought it. It never believed the lie I was trying to convince myself of. My body wasn’t wrong. People WERE a danger based on my past experiences, things that had happened to me, times I had been betrayed and shamed and let down. These experiences were coded inside, stored as old emotions in my body. And they kept firing up every time I went around people, reminding me of the danger that was present. Yes, in the light of just this situation, the fear was irrational. This was a new situation, with new people. But in light of my past the fear was rational. It was RIGHT to feel this way, not wrong.

This radically changed my approach to trying to solve this issue. Instead of fighting against my feelings and interpreting my senses as wrong, I started to accept my feelings and senses and work WITH how I felt. And this made all the difference. It helped me to let go of this old pain inside that kept affecting my present interactions and to ACTUALLY move on from it. Fighting only fueled the fear. Going against my body and natural senses only reaffirmed the fear was real.

I was suicidal and on the brink of ending it. My plan of traveling the world as a way to finally overcome my social anxiety wasn’t working. I had been in Europe for 8 months, backpacking through various countries and going out every day to try and talk to people/approach women. In short, I had gotten nowhere with it. I had realized very quickly upon landing in my first stop, Belgrade, Serbia, that just because I had left America didn’t mean I had left my anxiety.

It was fucking brutal.

To face the prospect every day of waking up and thinking about taking action – it was daunting to say the least. It was like climbing a mountain. Being on the streets showed me just how much fear was still inside me.

I was at a crossroads in my life. 10 months earlier I had made the biggest mistake of my life. I had missed out on the chance of my life with my crush, a girl I felt so deeply for. That’s when it hit me how little had actually changed in the last 4 years of working on my social anxiety. I was still the same fucking loser. If I couldn’t speak to a girl who CLEARLY liked me and made every indication she wanted me to talk to her, then what the fuck was I? Absolutely pathetic.

It broke my heart to lose out on that chance.

It made me realize the level of drastic action that was needed to get past this fear.

But even doubling down on my efforts by going to Europe didn’t change anything. And that’s when I realized how truly fucked I was.

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