Location Taken: Arcadia, Michigan
Time Taken: December 2006
(Photo taken with a dying camera.)
I was a bit delayed writing this post today due to a small argument with my mom which included a near-miss of a social phobia attack, so well, at least that means I have a topic for today!
For most phobias, you hear about panic attacks, and my social phobia attacks may actually count as them, but I have absolutely no panic related to them, so I don’t use that term. It still has a lot of things in common with them, though. It’s triggered by things related to the phobia, it is overwhelming, and it has after effects that last for days.
For me, it’s triggered by social events, since that’s my phobia. But that covers a very wide range of possible events, so let me narrow it down some. Unlike a lot of social phobes, I’m not triggered by passive social events, such as being in crowds or having issues eating around people or the like. I tend to have more problems with active events, like talking to someone or meeting a new person. I also picked up a set of issues relating to authority and paperwork because of past traumatic events. But the thing I’m most prone to having an attack triggered by is issues of power imbalances.
I’ve long had the tendency to think myself as a low-power person. That’s normal when you’re a kid – you’re solidly under the authority of your parents, and every adult has a higher status than you. And as a college student, I was under the authority of the teachers as well as still obligated to my parents to do well as they were paying for a large part of it. I didn’t always do well, which started to build up stress points of failed obligation that were one of the many factors to the breakdown I had my last semester of college. And after that, I was in no condition mentally to go off on my own. So I moved back home, once again solidly in obligation to my parents, with further obligation since they were no longer socially required to take care of me and were doing it anyway. And then I tried and tried to get a job, barely getting any interviews at all and only seasonal work at all. It was right after the economy tanked, so everyone was having problems (and still is), but it just made me fall in to the rather low status of unemployed bum living with my parents.
I’ve been trying to pull myself out of that rut. And part of that is claiming more power. When you think of yourself as low status, you act as low status, which makes people treat you as such. So part of what I’m doing is convincing myself to act as higher status, by making more decisions on my own and actually getting angry when people treat me as low status.
Which leads back into the social phobia attacks, alas. When I get angry, it burns through my barriers and willpower reserves very fast. And if I don’t shut it down before long, it burns through them all, and I shut down. It really is a burn-out situation. One hot blaze of anger, then blank ashes. I will be unable to deal with people for days, I’m crying out of frustration, I have a nasty headache, and I’m not able to do anything mentally stressful for weeks. It wipes me out.
For most of my life I dealt with it by both trying not to get angry with anything and by clamping down on the anger the instant it appeared, far too fast for me to really realize why I got angry. But anger is a healthy thing in moderation. There are slights and issues out there that are quite worth getting angry about. And by not doing so, I was letting them slide past and in many cases making it seem as if I didn’t really exist as a person, like I was just a lump of mobile flesh that couldn’t be hurt by words. Now, I’m trying to step forward and say “Yes, I am a person, I did care about what you said and I was hurt by it.”
But that’s really tough to do when you’re used to being of secondary concern, and when it bears the risk of overwhelming myself and setting me back for weeks at a time if things go wrong.
I won’t be able to gain higher status until I do. And the higher status I’m seeking is that of a functional adult, capable of choosing her own path and supporting herself. It’s not much to ask for.
