Social Anxiety

Social anxiety can be an extremely debilitating condition for those who suffer from it. It comes in various degrees ranging from mere shyness to full-blown avoidance personality disorder. I want to speculate here about what may underlie this and hopefully reach some sort of clarity regarding its conceptual classification.

First, this problem seems intimately related to feelings of shame. A lot of clinical cases identify that patients suffering from this condition have an extreme fear of blushing in public. Their concern is that this will severely embarrass them and that others will laugh at them. Other manifestations of this syndrome are the avoidance of eye contact and standing apart from others. These are strategies that these patients use to minimize their anxiety. Another fear they usually have is that they will blank out in mid-sentence and so seem stupid or socially awkward, and that this will lead to their social ostracism and humiliation. All of these phenomena point to the root of this disorder in being ashamed of oneself or of one’s social inadequacy. However, the disorder is an anxiety disorder, meaning that its positive symptom is fear or worry, and specifically fear of being ashamed in public. This may be due to earlier imprints in the memory of childhood situations where this has happened and led to a very strong emotional response. This early life experience conditioned the patient to fear the recurrence of these episodes and so to avoid social situations altogether. In other words, the classically conditioned fear leads to operant conditioning resulting from systematic avoidance, which reduces social anxiety, thereby perpetuating and strengthening the learned fear and behavior.

One question that may be asked at this point is: why should public humiliation be an inherently upsetting experience? That is to ask, what is the mechanism that leads us to be so emotionally invested in the reactions we produce in others? Cognitive behavioral therapy for social phobia revolves around trying to challenge a patient’s belief that other people are judging him/her or thinking otherwise negative thoughts. These patients will interpret others’ sometimes benign gestures and glances as evidence of harsh judgments about them. This all points to the source of the disorder as being due to wanting others to think well of us. While this is true of most of us, in these patients it rises to an extreme pitch and becomes an ever-present gnat whirring about their consciousness, issuing its continuous queries and fantasies about what others may have thought about them. It seems that for these people, self-worth is completely yoked to the judgments of others, be they of praise or of blame. Thus, another aspect of therapy is to challenge this notion and to try to get these patients to generate internal sources of self-worth.

The reason that I even bring any of this up is that I feel much affinity with these patients, and though I have never been diagnosed with a disorder of this kind, I feel that I may have at times been close to it. While never reaching the threshold of an anxiety disorder, I have always had mild fears relating to my social inadequacies. What’s more, I feel the same way about pretty much most of the psychiatric disorders that I am currently learning about. Whether it’s bipolar disorder, phobias, paranoid schizophrenia, or major depression, I feel that the roots of all of these lie dormant within my mind, ready to be activated given the requisite triggers.

Returning to the discussion of social anxiety disorder, I wanted to see if this could somehow be framed in terms of pride or some other such ego construct, where ego is not to be taken in the Freudian psychodynamic sense but in a more general self-affirming egotistical sense, as it is understood in common parlance. If we postulate that some degree of pride, whether merited or not, is fundamental to the human psyche, then it seems quite natural for the sort of social anxiety phenomena described above to arise. Pride involves the creation of a favorable mental image of oneself, and the sustenance and promulgation thereof. Therefore when situations arise that may lead others to develop an unfavorable image that differs markedly from the favored one, this leads to considerable stress. This is satisfactory for me as an explanation of the phenomenon at the adult level once the ego has been distilled and installed. And perhaps the crucial conditioning event from one’s past did not occur in childhood, but in early adolescence during that turbulent time when the innocence of childhood is passing and the pride of adulthood is fast emerging.

Now, given what has been said above, this disorder appears to be the manifestation of what I’m going to call the ‘will-to-be-liked’. This relates our subject matter to the distinction between will and representation that Schopenhauer teaches us about. Will, in his philosophy, is the kernel of existence and is not much more than blind urge or striving. Representation is the knowledge that is generated by brains in service of the will. Another framing of this particular manifestation of Schopenhauer’s ‘will’ may be to call it the ‘will-to-dominate’. Framing it this way brings hierarchical social structures to bear on the issue. Specifically, the current vertical organization of our social strata induces people to aim to reach the top of the ladder, in order that they may have power over their peers and surroundings. This is fundamental to the delusional human psyche that views its individuality as absolute. This is the ignorance that spawns the infinite phenomena of the representational world, each vying to secure a little piece or portion of the whole and call it ‘mine’, not recognizing that each and every little part is no more than its own image reflected through the kaleidoscopic lens of ego.

So, if this is the case, we may now ask the question: what is required? Since generalized anxiety is such a common experience, although not necessarily always reaching diagnostic proportions, seeking an answer for this question would seem to be a pressing concern. A commonality amongst all the anxiety disorders that underlies all of them is fear and worry. Any fear that is not due to immediate bodily threats is specifically what is referred to here. That is to say, fears that are anticipatory and not related to any specific sense datum. This can only come about if two conditions are met: 1) the individual is fixated on thoughts related to the future, and 2) the individual is fixated on the self/ego. If the first condition is not met – i.e. if the fear is aroused by a real danger currently present to the individual – then it becomes a matter of biological necessity that aversive reactions are evoked, the so-called ‘fight or flight response’ that is instigated by the sympathetic autonomic nervous system. If the second condition is not met – i.e. if the individual is currently in a trance-like or expansive state of mind that is not restricted to self-thoughts – then anticipatory fear cannot happen because there is no framework of self-preservation, as the mind is not centered in any one spatiotemporal locale. Thus, when the mind opens up to the whole with which it is identical and loses its restrictive ego-centeredness, it is freed from all worry and negative states of mind. In fact, another anecdotal report of why patients with panic disorder have panic attacks describes their feelings of helplessness and lack of control over bodily and environmental processes. But the notion of control is precisely the delusion that stems from an imagined independence from the whole and an arbitrary autonomy that is quite simply fantastical. Fear of death is another potent trigger of these panic attacks; but do these patients fail to recognize that death is certain, and that fear of something certain is ludicrous? In short, all of the self-preservation thoughts and behaviors are related to individualistic consciousness that believes in an absolute barrier between itself and the whole and therefore wishes to secure its livelihood, even if at the expense of the whole and if this entails taking advantage of others. So to answer the question we began this paragraph with: what is required is to correct this optical illusion of consciousness that discretizes the continuous whole, splits an inseparable singularity, which rips itself violently apart in tortuous acts of self-cannibalization, and spins an ever-thickening veil of self-deception with which it blinds itself from reality. May we unveil nature’s face and learn to recognize one in all and all in one.