Social anxiety, no matter how bad, is curable. Seriously. Unfortunately most people with it don't believe this, which prevents them from ever doing the real work needed to change.

The anxiety was somewhat relieved after my brain matured. Most people's brains are not mature until age 25-35. Mine took 5 years longer than average.

Caring about what peers think in a desperate way is part of being a teenager/young adult as science shows:

This supremely human characteristic makes peer relations not a sideshow but the main show. Some brain-scan studies, in fact, suggest that our brains react to peer exclusion much as they respond to threats to physical health or food supply. At a neural level, in other words, we perceive social rejection as a threat to existence. Knowing this might make it easier to abide the hysteria of a 13-year-old deceived by a friend or the gloom of a 15-year-old not invited to a party. http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2011/10/teenage-brains/dobbs-text/2

Being a late-bloomer is not always a bad thing because I never was told that I'm great or would succeed in life but either my parents, because they hated my autism because they did not know I had it; so they denigrated my behavior and feelings in order to "improve me/ motivate me", I guess. The motivational denigration was not true of my peers, most used me as the butt of jokes, right in front of me. Saying I was a "retard" from the age of 12 upto 18 this is what I heard and saw. The late-bloomer advantage is that you do not start off in life thinking you are a know-it-all, it humbles you so you can be open to learning at any age.

I started trying to figure out what was "wrong" with me [because everyone said there was something wrong with me--everyone] at an early age. I read every non-engineering book my parents had in the house [my father is an engineer a very typical profession of those in the BAP (broader autism phenotype)--he passed up big raises and/or promotions at work because he did not want to have to manage people so...] to find out my problem. They had no serious psychology books/textbooks in their house until my mother went back to college.

So, I started going to the public libraries to help find a description of myself and find a cure. This, sadly, had me coming in contact with people. I was able to handle the professionals, the librarians, but the men and boys scared me to death --I found way too many mastrubating in the library or exposing themselves to me -it made the public look like the den of monsters; it confirmed my fears. (librarians were not in my list of monsters--so there was hope for humanity-a tiny bit). The books I did find were either "motivational" books or textbooks that were way over my head as a 12+ year-old. It took a college education to help me read psychiatry textbooks.

Still, I did not find myself in those books (because aspergers was not added to the DSM until 1994). The quote from National Geographic was only something I found recently. Finding about who I was neurologically, was highly obscured by professional confusion itself, apparently. I went to at least 5 psychologists/psychiatrists over the years, but none of them recognized my aspergers[autism] until a crisis in my life where I was locked up in mental wards after being jailed for defending myself from my father's beatings of me [due to an autistic meltdown I had-- I did not touch him --he tackled me and started punching my face/head apparently to knock me out. But my bruises did not show up until ~24 hours later: therefore I was the person who assaulted him by biting his arm as it covered my mouth and nose in an arm-lock[?] I could not breath, seriously. After my diagnosis at the clinic (where finally they interviewed me and my parents about my life up to that point, then a panels of psychologists and psychiatrists DXd me) both of my parents apologized for the beating and the 40 years of abuse I got for being autistic.].

The motivational books actually hurt me deeply because I saw that I was not amenable to what I thought everyone else was. This is part of why I reacted as I did to this thread. Panaceas make me angry, because it is not "pan" for me[pan=all], I was the "odd one out" (until I met other autistics online). Being a fan of skepticism also primed me to dislike panaceas --cure-alls are an indication of pseudoscience. Telling people that "everyone can be cured" makes some people like me so discouraged that they self-harm, self-medicate, or kill themselves. "If everyone can be cure by following 'these 5 steps' why can't I ?" " I must be a hopeless case" people think. I do not think this now that I have seen the whole picture and have seen cure-alls/motivational books debunked several times. [[[BTW I thank anyone that has read all of what I have said here--I know it is long and confusing --my autisticness gives me certain tendencies especially to follow long tangents etc. .]]]

/r/socialanxiety Thread Parent