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Areas › Worry and anxiety › Being seen and judged
Change of this kind arrives so gradually that you stop noticing it, and then you treat today as the baseline and feel you have got nowhere. Take one specific situation and run it twice, once as you are now and once as you were then. Keep it concrete: a particular message, a particular room, a particular person you would not have spoken to.
you were afraid of people, but it is more fitting that you fear God (Quran 33:37). Even a prophet is shown having been afraid of what people would say, named without shame and then moved past.
الأحزاب
وَإِذۡ تَقُولُ لِلَّذِيٓ أَنۡعَمَ ٱللَّهُ عَلَيۡهِ وَأَنۡعَمۡتَ عَلَيۡهِ أَمۡسِكۡ عَلَيۡكَ زَوۡجَكَ وَٱتَّقِ ٱللَّهَ وَتُخۡفِي فِي نَفۡسِكَ مَا ٱللَّهُ مُبۡدِيهِ وَتَخۡشَى ٱلنَّاسَ وَٱللَّهُ أَحَقُّ أَن تَخۡشَىٰهُۖ فَلَمَّا قَضَىٰ زَيۡدࣱ مِّنۡهَا وَطَرࣰ ا زَوَّجۡنَٰكَهَا لِكَيۡ لَا يَكُونَ عَلَى ٱلۡمُؤۡمِنِينَ حَرَجࣱ فِيٓ أَزۡوَٰجِ أَدۡعِيَآئِهِمۡ إِذَا قَضَوۡاْ مِنۡهُنَّ وَطَرࣰ اۚ وَكَانَ أَمۡرُ ٱللَّهِ مَفۡعُولࣰ ا
When you [Prophet] said to the man who had been favoured by God and by you, ‘Keep your wife and be mindful of God,’ you hid in your heart what God would later reveal: you were afraid of people, but it is more fitting that you fear God. When Zayd no longer wanted her, We gave her to you in marriage so that there might be no fault in believers marrying the wives of their adopted sons after they no longer wanted them. God’s command must be carried out
Qur’an 33:37read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
The looking back that usually happens is not this. In a clinical sample with social phobia, replaying an encounter afterwards and picking over your perceived failures formed a coherent measurable pattern tied to symptom severity. Scale development work suggests that habit, worry about the future and rumination about the past are largely one process wearing different clothes. Deliberately comparing yourself with a year ago is a different use of the same backward look, and it has not been tested the way the replaying has.
McEvoy PM, Kingsep P. (2006). The post-event processing questionnaire in a clinical sample with social phobia.. Behaviour research and therapy doi
McEvoy PM, Mahoney AE, Moulds ML. (2010). Are worry, rumination, and post-event processing one and the same? Development of the repetitive thinking questionnaire.. Journal of anxiety disorders doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Progress you cannot see gives you nothing to keep going on.
When something good comes out of a conversation you started, say plainly that you started it. Chance may have put the person there. You were the one who spoke.
Social fear does not always look like hiding. Some people are the ones organising everything and talking to everyone, running a hard commentary on themselves the whole time.
Give the ladder a name that sounds like yours. Challenges you set yourself land completely differently from tasks you have been handed.