What’s wrong with social fear?

  Social fear is a wonderful phenomenon unique to humans that is not seen in the animal world. If they reject each other, it is most likely for the sake of survival boundaries, territory, food and mates, or the habit of living alone. While such rejection by animals is outward facing, social fear appears to be a rejection of certain people, but is essentially inward facing, a rejection of oneself by oneself. Feel themselves in the eyes of others imperfect, ridiculous, funny, and even from the eyes of others to read their own inner shameful, despicable, sick, the normal behavior of others, voice, expression as a disgust, contempt for themselves. The person standing across from himself is unaware of this, and the true meaning of social interaction disappears, and he objectively becomes a demon mirror of the self. A person is caught in an almost insoluble psychological dilemma of rejection of oneself, a dilemma that inspires an intense neurotic conflict, accompanied by pronounced tension, fear, blushing, sweating, agitation, and even flight. How can one escape from a dislike of oneself? The inner pain, shame, self-denial, and even self-hatred triggered by social fear would amaze a veteran psychologist! Sometimes it feels as if the only way to slightly quell that kind of anger you feel toward yourself is to desire death.  Whenever you are faced with a socially fearful person, there is an inner awe of the culture. People with social fears have a transcendent, perfect, authoritative me inside them, which controls itself with harsh “musts”, and when there is a slight imperfection in social life, a strong self-denial, devaluation, condemnation arises. Who makes such a strong superego inside a person is naturally the culture that animals do not have. Culture inspires man’s excessive pursuit of self-esteem, idealized self, and honor, which results in a kind of reverse, a neurotic repression and denial of oneself. The shame of Eastern culture may be one of the major reasons for the creation of self-rejection, so social fear of yellow people is so much that Japanese psychologists simply call it anthropophobia.  However, there is a deeper meaning to social phobia. Generally intelligent, sensitive and somewhat neurotic people are prone to this dilemma, and these people happen to be creative people. Just as a bee colony needs only one queen, natural elimination will eliminate early those bees that might become the queen. Neurotic conflict is a shortcut to self-destruction, and good people become mediocre and uncompetitive through such torture. Then how the self interprets social fear is important, if you think your social fear is a disease, you get frustrated, pathological behavior and failure. If you interpret it as I don’t love socializing, then you get time, knowledge, and inner peace. It takes energy to socialize, and most people who are philosophically, politically, literally, or scientifically accomplished are a socially disinclined group.  Treatment for social fear is mostly not directed at the fear itself, but often at how to accept it and overcome avoidance behaviors towards social situations. In the clinic, a 22-year-old girl was seen. Her problem was that she was afraid to fall in love and whenever someone tried to introduce her to a friend, she would faint from panic. The doctor had diagnosed her with social phobia, because social phobia starts with a specific person and then the fear generalizes to many people. In psychotherapy, at first the girl was fluent in talking to the doctor about her problems, then the doctor pointed to me and said to the girl, “Okay, you can do desensitization now by thinking of him as your boyfriend.” As soon as the words left her mouth, she suddenly became very nervous, her face shabby red, her eyes buried, her voice trembled, and she seemed to be dying.  The girl’s mother had introduced her to a date and wanted her to go to a meeting next week, so she came to seek treatment for fear that she would become ill. The doctor said to the girl, “Don’t rush to talk to him as a friend yet, just go and meet with him, ask his name and age, and come back and tell me.” At the follow-up appointment, the mother said that this time she did well and talked to the boy for more than half an hour. The girl said of the scene, “Because all I thought about was going to ask his name, I didn’t think about it that much.” In fact, the doctor was doing progressive desensitization therapy. It was just that the doctor changed the meaning of the act of going to see her boyfriend; she used to see him to get married, but now she was seeing him to ask for information the doctor wanted to know. The doctor shifted her inner anxiety by reconstructing the meaning of the blind date, so that her social fear was reduced.  Honestly accepting oneself, admitting that one is socially inept, allowing oneself to be imperfect or even willing to be somewhat different and obnoxious, is the cure for social fear.