Loading practices
Loading practices
Areas › Worry and anxiety › Being seen and judged
This is where families and clinicians get it wrong most often. Someone speaks well in a quiet office, so the fear gets marked down as mild, and the person is left to manage the canteen and the group project on their own. If you are the one being under-rated, it is worth saying out loud which situations are the hard ones, because nobody is going to guess from how you sound sitting here.
God is aware of the most furtive of glances, and of all that hearts conceal (Quran 40:19). What no one around you can read is nonetheless fully seen, and that is meant as comfort rather than exposure.
غافر
يَعۡلَمُ خَآئِنَةَ ٱلۡأَعۡيُنِ وَمَا تُخۡفِي ٱلصُّدُورُ
God is aware of the most furtive of glances, and of all that hearts conceal
Qur’an 40:19read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
Reviews of the cognitive behavioural literature describe what maintains social anxiety as attention swinging onto threat, ambiguous signals read as bad news, and a distorted image of how one appears. Every one of those is internal. None of it shows up in how fluently someone talks in a calm room, which is why an office impression is a poor guide to how they manage in the settings they dread.
Morrison AS, Heimberg RG. (2013). Social anxiety and social anxiety disorder.. Annual review of clinical psychology doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
What keeps social anxiety going happens inside, so it is invisible to anyone judging by how well you speak.
If most of your talking happens somewhere everything gets counted, likes, views, replies, then of course a room full of people feels like a scoreboard too. The habit was learned somewhere real.
Sometimes a parent who seemed cold or impossible to please turns out to have been working with a different wiring altogether. Learning that can loosen something no amount of arguing with yourself would.
Rehearsing your lines makes things worse rather than better. It hands you a fresh way to fail, delivering the line wrong, on top of the conversation you were already dreading.