When Did Shyness Become Social Anxiety Disorder?

My therapist did use that label to describe some of my symptoms, but I don't know if that counts as a formal diagnosis. I do have flashbacks to a narcissistic abusive relationship I was in last year as well as from being raised by a narcissistic mother. I moved away from my parents a few years ago, and I just formally cut ties with the ex-boyfriend. That seems to have been the final piece in the puzzle of how to clear my head and start thinking straight.

I don't think I have full-blown PTSD, though. It's not that severe. I have a friend that was diagnosed with something that was described to her as PTSD's little cousin, because it has similar symptoms. It's called Acute Stress Disorder. Usually it only lasts a few months. I think I might be somewhere in between there, because my symptoms have decreased significantly since we cut ties, but the monsters still tend to get me in the morning when I first wake up and I don't have my defenses up, and sometimes little things will trigger flashbacks while I'm driving or watching a movie. It's not so bad that I have nightmares or drive off the road (though it used to be). It just tends to make me depressed. I have a tiny mourning period after every episode, but I bounce back fairly quickly these days, as opposed to before when I would spend weeks in bed, or at the very least in isolation because I was perpetually exhausted and couldn't cope with human interaction. I certainly wouldn't have been able to figure out a math problem during one of those periods...

Anyway, back to the topic at hand, I've always had this stuff going on to a degree in my life. The teachers at my school did want to slap me with the ADD diagnosis, but my mother became infuriated when they tried, and immediately took me to my pediatrician, who laughed it off in a very "kids will be kids" kind of way rather than really looking into whether or not I should be evaluated. I probably dodged a bullet in that I didn't grow up medicated and sedated during my formative years, rather than addressing the other issues in my life, but at the same time, would they have uncovered the environmental factors that were distracting me in the first place and help me work through them? Could things have gone differently? How often is this happening to kids who are just in shit environments where they are just put on pills and put in a corner rather than having the outside factors dealt with?

 

Good questions. I had some severe anxiety issues as a kid, and had a very good experience of, when separating myself from the environment in which I grew up, having the anxiety largely dissipate. So much in life is situational. I'll always be an anxious person, but I don't take it quite so seriously these days.

 

I'm not sure that they are the same thing

 

Since you know your own body better than anyone else, I'm not one to challenge or deny your experiences regarding side affects from ADHD medication. However everyone's body chemistry is different. We all have different tolerances and sensitivities to various chemicals we put into our bodies. There are a few side affects from such medications, that pretty much everyone I've know who's ever been on it have claimed to have a few of them. Including the Adderall hangover at the end of the day. The generic side affects range from dry mouth, sweating, anxiety, stomach pains, etc. People with high and low attention spans have felt these side affects. So I don't think it's safe to say people with ADHD don't ever experience them. Perhaps you were just able to tolerate it better than I or most people could.

In my situation I was on these medications for so long I couldn't tell the difference between a side affect and a natural tendency. After 2 months of detox did I start piecing it all together.

 

Dr. Karen would be a pillhead's best friend

I had problems with keeping organized, meeting all my appointments, not losing important items, staying on task, etc. I also had a hard time stepping outside my comfort zone and talking to strangers without being with someone I trusted. I assumed it was just a symptom of ADHD for many years. Whenever bad things happened, I catastrophized it as them all as the worst case scenario, but I didn't do that so much when I was off the medication. When in reality, the best way I overcame these things was not through pills, but through cognitive behavior therapy with a psychologist. It was a more holistic approach which seemed to work a lot better than talking to any psychiatrist I met. Modifying your environment by getting yourself your own apartment away from the distractions and negative energy is a good start, as it was also mentioned in my CBT program. If you think a medication will work for you, just bear in mind the side affects can include some that aren't listed. You and I may have completely different backstories, but I would suggest a psychologist and a non pharmaceutical approach.

 

The only medication I would consider at this point is an as-needed beta blocker for physical symptoms of panic attacks. My reasoning is that generally I can reason away the mental, but if I can't breathe or I'm about to puke, that's a different story. Fight or flight can't be reasoned with, especially if I'm with people who don't know about my issues and probably would not react to it well (so I can't even ask for help). I would never take beta blockers daily again. I did in high school after I had a bad reaction to SSRIs and all it did was slow me down and make me feel like I was going to die if I tried to so much as walk around the block. No, taking it as needed would be the only thing I would accept. Like taking aspirin for a headache.

 

Very shy with strangers as a kid , and it has persisted though decreasingly for many years . Fight or flight ? I
am fond of secrecy , privacy and hiding . Sometimes running away is impulsive and sort of embarrassing . And
I find the double r in embarrass is excessive like the attention from strange people being stupid .

 

I understand that everyone's body chemistry is different, but like Karen said, that actually used to be a way of diagnosing adhd. Around here if a kid experienced all the symptoms you did after taking a medication, it was determined they didn't actually have adhd and we're taken off the pills. This actually happened to a few friends of mine in grade school. It sounds like doctors in your area were just blindly handing out pills.

 

While i concede that a vast amount of, typically teenage, people who are merely shy or introverted become fooled into believing they have social anxiety either by themselves as a ploy for attention initially that spirals into placebo borne true illness, or those around them looking for an easy label to avoid tending to their needs someone who is shy/introverted does have a higher propensity to develop social anxiety with recurrent negative experiences as they relate.
Social anxiety is characterized by more than an awkwardness, or difficulty initiating contact with friends/new people. Simply being in public even with the company of a person considered a safe zone can be attack triggering, and overwhelming to a true sufferer. Engaging in day to day contact with members of the service/retail industry can cause immense inexplicable discomfort. Standing in lines or crowded areas, drawing any measure of attention to ones self, and in any way breaking the cycle of movement in the world around can be triggering in the same way.

For all anxiety including social that is the root which drives the disease. It feels much like clausterphobia. Im fucking uncomfortable in this situation, so uncomfortable i want to crawl out of my skin and run away. It feels like i can't breathe, and I've forgotten how to think beyond the panic im experiencing. I may very well start screaming bloody murder, or burst into tears, or both any second now and i dont think I'll be able to stop myself. On top of having these feelings, i have no fucking clue why i have them and I'm very much aware it makes no god damn sense so please stop staring at me. (even if literally no one is looking)
For example, one of my worst social anxiety triggers is attempting to collect and organize my change, receipts, and purchased items while still at the counter of an establishment. Even if im certain no one is waiting in line behind me to check out this process is so chaotic that my stomach instantly climbs into my throat, my temperature sky rockets, and i temporarily lose the ability to speak or even think straight until im at least away from the counter. This obviously is a nonsensical reaction to an every day activity that ive been preforming since i first handled money, but it happens every time. I get the same way when lines build up around me in fast food establishments on the side of the facility where customers must herd to wait for their food to arrive, and the smaller the provided space the worse the anxiety.

 

I find it somewhat annoying how cashiers tend to hand your change to you with the coins on top of the bills, and then give you the receipt. Not sure how this has anything to do with social anxiety, it's annoying because it makes it take longer for me to put away my money. I also find it annoying when cashiers ask if "I want a bag" when I've only purchased one item, that of course already comes in packaging. I have enough bags accumulated already that I have to take to be recycled. Seems like a waste of plastic.

Most of my anxiety seems to be about situations that I cannot control, or situations that I cannot predict what the outcome will be (I don't like playing with chance), or the fear of making mistakes or failure.

 

That about the coins on the top of the paper money when you get the change is very recognizable haha. I wouldn't call it an social anxiety issue by far, indeed it is more somewhat annoying.

 

Sometimes I can circumvent it, when they put out their hand with the change, sometimes I will pick the coins off and put them in my pocket, then take the paper notes.

 

What I hate about getting change in the checkout line isn't the way it's handed back by the cashier... It's the person next in line expects you to just disappear off the face of the earth as soon as you get the change in your hand. They could at least wait until I put the change away before ramming me with their cart because I'm in their way.

 

See i struggle with anxiety at least i think i do. It's hard to explain but its like i can be doing something but my mind is focused on the three other things i have to do that day. It really makes what im doing at the time not fun. Then again growing up even now i'm really shy as well. I tell you during highschool when my acne was bad i couldnt even keep a convo with a girl because i cant look at her in the face.

 

so how are they supposed to give you change? put the change in your hand, then put the bills on top of the change? that seems like more overall effort to me.

i used to find it annoying when i lived within walking or biking distance of stores and they didn't offer me a bag. even with just one item, it's so much easier to carry back home in a bag than without the bag.

 

hand me the change first, then the bills. like i said though, i can just pick the change off the top of the bills, and when I'm well and ready I can take the bills.


a backpack is a bag of sorts.

 

All this discrepancy about how change is handed over is an irritant is not at all the same as the intrinsic fear of this simple activity I described, and the divulging of the discussion does no justice to reaching a conclusion on the main point this thread was started for... But okay

 

When I smoked pot I would have bursts of anxiety so bad that I referred to it as "the fear". (Oddly, I absolutely loved "the fear" and could never seem to get enough of it... Sometimes I miss it dearly)

I remember I was once in a grocery store and found myself walking down the "health/hygiene" section... There was a group of people looking at toilet paper and I thought to myself "Jesus Christ, you disgusting animals... Don't you realize where you are right now?". It sounds trivial, but I couldn't make eye contact at all and would start smirking (my ability to hold laughter has never been great).

Since I've quit it's gone away completely.

One of the last times I got stoned was absolutely horrifying... I was finishing a hike on an extremely hot summer day. For some reason I was wearing a toque and pants (as well as mirrored sunglasses, which I always wore to avoid eye contact). I began approaching a stair case which leads down the escarpment (it's essentially a miniature mountain... or humongous hill), when I noticed that there were a ton of people exercising and jogging. I thought "Great, these bastards are out here jogging with their jingling key chains and sexy yoga pants, all the while ruining my stone... Why the fuck don't they realize what they're missing out on?"... As I moved into their midst, I puffed furiously on my cherry colt cigar and slugglishly made my way down the stair case. All I could think was "Shit, these people must hate me... Here they are trying to make the best of life, running the stairs and drinking water, while I interrupt them in a stoned haze leaving behind a cherry scented trail of smoke". I was convinced that people were yelling at me and telling me to hurry up down the stairs (although I had headphones in and couldn't hear a sound over the episode of Cosmos I was listening to).

 

Sativa strains can give a paranoid side affect, that's for sure. Back when I smoked daily, I would make sure to avoid certain strains that caused anxiety and paranoia. But when your mind and body develop a tolerance to the bud, then those extreme side affects become more manageable. Of course when you smoke yourself up a strong tolerance, it takes a lot more hits to get you stoned. I haven't smoked bud in several months, but my roommate smokes every day, and we have 3 plants growing. I bet if smoked a small bowl right now, I'd get too high to functio because my tolerance is that low..

That's how it was during those dark years on adderall. Like bud, when you pop amphetamines every single day, you develop a tolerance. And a dependency. So over the course of time my dosages got bigger and bigger as my doctor prescribed them, so I could last longer throughout the day.

Several weeks ago I took a 20 mg adderall from my old stash I hadn't touched in years. I did it to study up and be sharp for an exam at my new job. And holy shit did that get me going! It was an energy explosion. I studied, cleaned my house, had tensed muscles, high blood pressure, zero appetite, and then crashed hard like a rock. It brought back a physical memory of how my body felt every single day for 20 years. But not exactly to THAT extent mind you. But like smoking marijuana every day, your body adapts to it and the affects of the drug become more mana gable. During my time taking those pill cocktails and adderall, those side affects were more manageable because I took it regularly and developed a tolerance. So when I gave these pills to my non ADHD friends so they could study for finals back in college, smaller doses impacted them way more than it impacted me. We all assumed it had a bigger impact on them because I had ADHD and they didn't. That's bullshit. They just had a much weaker tolerance to the drug.

 

That's just plain rude behaviour. Everybody would find that annoying. I hope that's not a common thing because really, it's not a normal thing to do (unlike giving change back with the coins on top )