Overcome shyness with daily affirmations
There is shyness and then there is extreme shyness. If you are interested in overcoming shyness, we are probably talking about the latter. I grew up a normal kid, a little shy, but not terribly shy. However, when I got to college, I developed a fear of speaking in class. I was afraid to say something stupid and have everyone laugh at me. In graduate school it got worse. I lived in a dorm-style dwelling and used to listen on my door until all was clear before sneaking out of the building. I never used the community kitchen for fear that someone would strike up a conversation with me.
Eventually my extreme shyness blossomed into full-blown social anxiety with real panic attacks. I was almost scared to death and felt like my life was completely out of control. Of course, I immediately sought help and, over the course of several years, I received a lot of therapy and tried many different medications. Now I realize that much of what I received from my doctors was detrimental to my recovery.
The first thing they told me was that I had social phobia or social anxiety disorder. Okay, I have a disorder. There is something wrong with me. I am broken and I need to be fixed. Take this drug, try that one, and if those don’t work we’ll keep trying until we find something that does. What I have learned, on the contrary, is that the first step in overcoming shyness and social phobia is not to see it as a “problem.”
Yes, if you think you have a shyness or social anxiety problem, then you do have a problem. But the problem is not your shyness or anxiety, it is the fact that you perceive it as a problem. I know when I was at my lowest point, I felt doomed. My shyness was so acute that I had no self-confidence or self-esteem. I felt betrayed by my body (heavy sweating was my biggest obstacle) and ashamed of the person I had become. In a word, I had come to see myself as a Victim of social anxiety.
The Victim is the worst self-image available to us among the many archetypes stored in our subconscious minds. As an archetype, the Victim represents a self-perpetuating and self-destructive emotional and behavioral pattern, so deeply ingrained in our subconscious that we will continue to live it daily until we rewrite the subconscious script. The subconscious runs on automatic pilot; it is a pattern that is repeated out of habit because we allow it tacitly.
Victims see themselves at the mercy of forces beyond their control. They do not have both feet on the ground. The Victim’s mind is frozen in self-awareness and fear and is not comfortably rooted in his own body, which he needs to effectively interact with the outside world. The Victim is disconnected and self-centered in the sense that all he can think about is his problem, how unbearable it is and the injustice of it all.
The only way forward is to take a position. We first have to take responsibility for ourselves, and that means realizing that we are not powerless: we have options. We can regain control of our lives! Although most of the time we do not control our own thoughts and feelings, it is something that we are capable of doing. It takes some practice, but we can consciously derail any habitual train of thought before it builds up. We can look at ourselves in our anxiety, without judgment, and view our anxious thoughts and feelings as objects of consciousness. This gives us a bit of distance between our self and our anxiety. Now, in this moment of observation, we can own our anxiety, accept it, see that we no longer need it, and let it go. And repeat. And repeat. And it will start to get better.
The archetype of Mother Earth or Father Protector is the positive archetype necessary to counteract the archetype of the Victim. This does not refer to taking more care of others, although that may be a consequence, but to taking more care of yourself. The archetype of caring parents teaches us how to take care of our basic physical and emotional needs and how to love ourselves. We all have an inner child, and that child needs to know that they are safe, protected, and loved. By nurturing your inner child, you will soon begin to see positive changes in your life.
One way to reinforce the positive as you begin to regain control of your life is through affirmations. Repeating affirmations on a daily basis can also help rewrite those emotional and behavioral scripts that are still a part of you on a subconscious level. If you stick to your affirmations, you can literally reconfigure your brain!