Hi there Valiant. I'm sorry I didn't see this thread earlier as I have much to say about the subject of "social anxiety".
First, there is NO SUCH THING AS SOCIAL ANXIETY DISORDER! I thoroughly despise these big-pharma labels of issues of symptoms that occlude the problem!
I'm a developmental psychologist with a special interest in the dynamic unfolding of psychopathology. Thus, I know quite well how various disorders
emerge over development, and even more-so, I know and understand how utterly USELESS a focus on symptoms (i.e. Obsessive compulsive disorder; social
anxiety disorder; and other affective disorders which are given a special, diagnostically "useful" names i.e. profitable from the perspective of the
drug companies/insurance companies) is.
So what then do you deal with? Like you, Ive dealt with social anxiety for years, probably since I was a kid. And like you, no doubt, the emergence of
this feeling is very much law-based: there is no "gene" that makes one person more anxious than another person. Human development (like all mammalian
development) occurs in whats called a "dyadic context", which means, when you're born, your brain continues to develop WITH REFERENCE to the types of
social cues you're given (as as infant) as you, with your infant needs, struggle to regulate endogenous needs, such as temperature regulation, and
continued organ development (immune system brain, gut etc) while in interaction with immediate others.
There's a whole science behind human development, and the unsurprising verdict is: it's law-based, which means, when things go wrong early on, or
later on in life (such as with your social anxiety) it has very much to do with the evolving "phase space" of your nervous system. To give an example
from early infancy. When a infant makes the effort to connect with it's mother, it'll express this through a smile or some other gestural action that
indicates that they want to be stimulated. If the mother is sensitive to the cue, she'll respond, and in responding, she will help "create" an
experience for the infant of being "effective". In the brain, at this moment, the infants want for connection (an affective, arousal state) will be
"matched", or whats termed "time-locked", with the pleasant response of the mother. This "links" the two states together in the brain - happy feeling
+ happy response from mother - helps create a positive anticipatory state for the infant.
Now, no doubt, you can probably imagine what happens when things don't go right. When the infants state is "dysynchronous" with the mothers, or, for
example, when the infant wants to sleep but the mother wants to stimulate her, or the infant wants to eat but the mother wants to pick her and play
with her, or even more often, when the infant seeks playful connection but is rebuffed by an anxious, overwhelmed mother, these states, the internal
experience of the infant + the dissonant response of the mother, also become "time-locked", that is, linked up neurologically in the brain. If these
types of experience happen very often, and, depending on things like "inborn temperament" (which has much to do with the stress-levels of the mother
during fetal development) which tinkers with 'reactivity', the infants mind will become sensitized to negative cues, which will be experienced by the
infant as an increase in anxiety and a cognitive focus on the relevant behavior.
With this background in mind, you can probably see why I find the symptom-focused label of "social anxiety disorder" to be useless, as it obfuscates
and renders enigmatic the "micro-traumas", or for many people who deal with social-anxiety, the full blown social traumas (such as in bullying) that
created the response to begin with.
The people we become as adults isn't some pre-formed platonic "entity" that precedes our becoming. We are animals which exist and evolve in
environments. Our biology - and the physics it is "nested within" - makes certain demands from us, and, as Darwin so astutely emphasized, we are
constantly ADAPTING to the types of environments we interact with; inevitably, our body's (and not US! As this is completely unconscious) and in
particular, the right brain, encodes the type of signals that are normally produced in human infants - the want for connection, the need for warmth,
the need for feeding, for cleaning etc - with the types of responses we receive. The responses, very much like the scaffolding that surrounds a
building, either allows or prevents the emergence of a positive, cheerful, trusting mind, or conversely, a guarded, fearful or apprehensive mind.
You are an adult, with a mind that "thinks" and is probably incessantly involved in "contents", thoughts, concepts. This concept-focus, which is of
course normal for a fully mature human being, obscures the PROCESSES that SELECTS and defines what you should pay attention to. In neurological terms,
the right brain "frames", while the left brain "holds". The left brain is the part of you that hears what you say, what you think to yourself, what
you fear. You "know yourself", you say, but I would be willing to bet, knowing what I do, personally, in myself, as theoretically, with the science I
am wholly committed to, that you are OVERLY-IDENTIFIED with a particular state of yourself, or what psychoanalysis calls a "self-state"; translating
this idea into psychoneurological terms, when you find yourself feeling this way, you are in a 'deep' basin of attraction, a state in your brain that
is deeply subtended (probabilistically biasing expression).
I can write more later as I'm at the end of my laptops battery life, but what you need to develop, inculcate, and increase as a capacity, is
self-awareness, or whats more popularly termed "mindfulness". What you DO NOT and SHOULD NOT do, but which appears to be the basis of your malady, is
become too effortful in your attempts to get away from this experience (the anxiety). In neurological language this is what we call a "positive
feedback". The right brain, following basic homeostatic programs conserved from all lower organisms, basically increases awareness of the threats that
have in the past caused you pain. When you increase conscious focus on this, you EXPAND THE EXPRESSION of it. You CANNOT overcome a negative
self-state by reacting in this anxious, fearful and frustrated manner. The really only affective means to bias the system (the self-state) is to RELAX
your awareness of it, DEVELOP A COMPASSIONATE relationship WITH IT, and overtime, you will discover that you can TOLERATE the anxiety in social
situations, so much, and with such ease, that it will melt away from your awareness, allowing you to live and experience yourself in more joyous,
playful and self-expressive states.