My Story...The pages on this site I’ll try to keep as short as possible. But this one is going to be a bit long, so please bear with me. OK, my social anxiety journey… I've developed my social phobia around the time I hit puberty. Before that I’ve never been the shy kid or anything. To the contrary, I’ve actually always been the complete opposite. I was very confident and outgoing and I loved being the center of attention. I was always having fun, joking around. An all-around popular kid basically...
So Why Am I Writing On Social Anxiety?!Well... I changed a lot. I've gone from pretty much no social anxiety when I was young, to developing an intense social anxiety disorder when I hit puberty.I've then suffered from a social phobia for years. But I "got lucky" and stumbled on some information that motivated me to do whatever is necessary to become socially confident again.
It took me almost a decade to overcome my social anxiety disorder, and I like to give you the shortcut on my site. I want to show you a way to become socially comfortable/confident as well.
How I Developed My Social PhobiaThere have been a lot of things that have contributed to my social anxiety and I’m going to speak of the 3 that have most impacted it.This is very revealing for me, because I’m now showing my previous insecurities to the world. Back then I could have never believed I would ever do such a thing. I was deeply ashamed of them. But it’s OK, I’m over it now. I’ve learned from it and it has brought me where I am now. I’m glad I can write this and still feel good about myself. As I said earlier, I’m going to tell you about the 3 things that I believe have had the most impact on my social anxiety during my suffering. After that I will tell you about my journey in overcoming it and why I am building this website (and how I can help you to overcome it)… Here goes: Up until the age of 12 I was a popular kid. I was loud, funny, confident and obnoxious at times. I had many friends and I was very cocky. Nobody really stood up to me and basically nothing would get to me. It was all fun. Saying anything that was on my mind and having fun was all me. And I was a pain for my teachers and parents... One day -this is the first time I can clearly remember becoming embarrassed- we where sitting in the class about to watch a video. I was sitting in front of the screen and it was dead silent in the class. Then my teacher jokingly said from the back of the class: “Sebastiaan, please move away because due to your big dumbo ears people cannot see the screen over here”. The whole class busted out laughing. Pointing at me and laughing. For very, very long. So long that I felt that everyone didn’t like me and I became ashamed. Tomato-faced. And then I got confronted by it. BAM, first real blow to my self esteem... I got teased with my ears for maybe a good year. Several negative social experiences. I got ashamed and embarrassed a couple of times. More people started to know it was my weak spot. It was frustrating. So frustrating that I was considering to get my ears fixed (The weird thing is that I actually don’t have big dumbo ears. Well... Maybe a bit! When I told my friends that I was about to get my ears fixed, they laughed and told me that if I did that they where going to call me Barbie (my friends did have a sense of humor)! So…. That was actually great to hear because now I knew it wasn’t about my ears, but about people having a need to find something to tease me. I actually felt strong because I now knew they just didn’t have anything to tease me about. The teasing didn’t get to me anymore at all. And once it can’t get to you anymore there no fun for the teasers in teasing you anymore right? So that stopped. I was in some situations still anxious to get teased and was a lil’ more cautious than I used to be, but it was much better.
I did something really stupid... Something that I’m definitely not proud of. But hey, I did it. I discriminated some people at my school in a not so nice way (I‘m definitely no racist, but I was just foolishly trying to be cool back then). And I got my punishment... ... I got my ass kicked by 2 guys on that same day and I was being stalked by a group of them for months. They where at my school and lived in the same village that I lived in. They where threatening me everywhere they saw me and waited for me. I walked the newspaper and had to pass them every day. It was anxiety provoking for a long period. I guess I deserved that. But it did increase my social anxiety. I thought everyone was out to get me or at least make fun of me. Because other kids not all of a sudden started to try to tool me as they knew I was afraid to get my ass kicked by this group of guys.. Again, lots of negative social experiences. By now I was about 14 and had already experimented with drugs for a while. After all, at that time “being cool” was very important. And the “cool” thing to do was to start smoking, drinking, smoking weed and doing drugs. It made me feel great and I could escape reality for a while. I have experimented with this world for about 2 years until I got the hang of it and did it extensively for a full year. Then around age 16, 17 it all of a sudden started to become cool to get a cute girlfriend. And that’s where new trouble began. I had barely spoken to girls in the past 2 years, and if I had it definitely wasn’t romantically. And now I wanted a girlfriend because I didn’t want to lose my “cool” status. (Isn‘t it sad that we have to think like that?). The situation was, I almost never went out. In a normal weekend we would hang out with a group of guys, use XTC and get high and talk about how awesome the high was and what not. And now I had to get out and talk to women? But... What the hell will I talk about? And then they’ll know that I want something from them, they see that I’m insecure and then I’ll risk getting rejected! And that will make me look bad and... (here it comes again) ...“un-cool”! So I didn’t talk to women when I was out. I just got very drunk with my friends and most of the time ended up so wasted that I had no clue how I got home. The first thing I did after I came home after a night like that was to look in my pockets if I didn’t lose my wallet and phone. And then call my friends to ask what had happened and how I managed to get home. That kinda wasted... I did still have a different friend-group from my school that I started to hang out with more and there where a few girls that I was kinda into. One of them I fell for. Hard. We kissed a couple of times and I thought “If I can get her to be my girlfriend, then all my problems will be over”. So I did everything I could to get her. I’ll spare you (rather me) the embarrassing stories, but I basically chased her like a love lost puppy. Which obviously made her run! There where several other let’s just say “unsuccessful experiences with women” like this within the year and this all added up to the previous negative social experiences. And at this age I developed my worst stage of social anxiety. By then it was at the worst. I felt that everyone knew what a loser I was with women. I felt more “uncool” than just about anyone out there. Even strangers could pick up on it (at least I thought they did). I had a whole bunch of things that would trigger me blushing and feeling insecure. Laughing it off was impossible because my face would basically freeze. If the attention was on me in a group setting (more than 1 other person), I was in trouble. When I did something stupid, I was in trouble. When I 'heard' or 'saw' people talking about me, I was in trouble. When people would disapprove of me or something I did, I was in trouble. When there was talk about relationships or sex, I was in trouble. When ... etc. It was bad. At first I didn’t want to go out and be confronted by my issues and eventually I didn’t want to go to visit friends anymore. I was afraid the conversation would go to sex or relationships or that I would become ashamed and embarrassed for some reason and they would see it. I avoided parties and going out whenever I could. When I did go I got wasted quickly and when the subject of relationships came up I tried to change it in a way that wasn’t obvious (but probably was). I felt less than people. I had extreme fear of becoming ashamed. I felt everyone was judging me. I was afraid of maintaining eye contact with a guy because I was afraid that his friends (not the guy per se, rather the friend group) where going to threaten and fight me and my family. I had intense negative thinking. Paranoia thoughts. Maintaining eye contact with a girl wasn’t optional also because I was afraid I actually had to talk to her and then would have nothing to say. And that I would become insecure and embarrassed and that she would laugh at me and more weird thinking like that. I felt everyone thought I was a loser. I avoided social situations and just smoked weed and watched TV all the time. I was pretty depressed. It was a messed up time in my life.
The Road To RecoveryAt age 17 I got a psychology book from some book club I subscribed to. This book opened my eyes. I saw that what I had was actually something that existed in my mind. Something that I could change!This really gave me hope. I now knew (well, I was of course somewhat skeptical at first, but at least I had something to hold on to) that it was possible to become my confident self again.
I read, studied and applied. This improved my confidence a fair bit. At age 18 I “had sex” for the first time. By luck and a very drunk girl. This improved my confidence a tidbit more because now I finally knew what it was and could participate in “sex-talk” if necessary. Then up until age 20 I got lil’ successes with women here and there. But still no girlfriend. I wanted one desperately (which, ironically, was exactly why I didn‘t get one). My confidence did start to improve as I gained a bit more experience, but meeting women when I was out was still a major problem. If I did started talking I was turned down because I was way too drunk. Or I rejected them by pretending not to be that interested. Of course out of a fear of getting rejected myself. Being insecure and drunk isn’t all to appealing to women… Sober I couldn’t talk to them, drunk they weren’t interested. Can you say catch 22? I was feeling a little better in social situations among friends by now, but still hoped there wasn’t talk about sex or relationships. Which there always was of course :-) Meeting strangers was still highly anxiety provoking. It seemed almost impossible to do that confidently. In the same year I decided I was confident enough to test some things out though. One thing being exposure therapy. On my site you can learn more about it, but it basically means consistently getting out of your comfort zone. I went to the city with a friend and I had to speak to 25 groups of women. Women passing by, in shops etc. I had a standard way of starting conversations to do this. And boy... this sucked! I’m almost ashamed to say it, but it was very, very scary. I was afraid of becoming ashamed and them telling the world about it (though they didn‘t even know me..). Or them remembering me, and then running into them again in the near future... Anyway, I did it and after that day I had a huge boost in confidence. It did work, but it’s wasn’t easy. Then I also have done tons of experiments where I would say hi to a certain amount of people. Or introduce myself to strangers. Or make small talk with people working behind counters. I also did other experiments where I had to walk up to a girl and have myself rejected for 20 times... I know, stupid stuff, but I read a scientific study that proved that it does help you to better take “rejection”. The first couple of times where very harsh, but indeed, when I did it for the 15th time I started to have a little fun with it. One girl actually thought she was on an MTV show... A few weeks after that I decided to go backpacking by myself because I wanted to gain more confidence meeting new people and of course because traveling and seeing the world is an awesome experience. The first 2 weeks I met up with a friend who was already in Thailand and we hung out together. We only met a few people and most of the conversations where very short. But I was improving.
In the beginning it was scary as hell, but it got easier and easier the more I did it. I did tours to the jungle where you are with 15 people for 3 days and I decided to talk to all of them as much as I could and be myself. It worked out fine and I got 8 new friends by the end of the tour. After the 3 months of traveling and meeting people I went back home. My self esteem being reasonably high. But then I fell back in my old habits. Smoking weed and avoiding social situations… I did that for another 9 months until I had the opportunity to go work in sunny South Africa. I jumped on that opportunity and it was brilliant. We went with a big group of people to South Africa and nobody knew each other. My social anxiety was pretty low at the time and having to meet so many new people and getting new friends did my confidence wonders. My issues with women where by now basically solved. and I only felt ashamed every now and then (about a lot of different things that I had no idea how to get over). I then met a cool, funny and beautiful girl that became my girlfriend. We had a fun and intense relationship, lived together and it ended after a year because I had to go back to the Netherlands and didn’t want to settle long-term yet. In South Africa I was still trying to completely rid myself of all my social anxiety. Because I still had the inferiority/superiority thing nagging inside me and I sometimes still became ashamed and embarrassed. For several different reasons, most of them non-related to relationships, being beat up or being bullied. Logically I felt I was OK with it, emotionally it turned out not to be. I then, after getting certified in NLP (Neuro Linguistic Programming), stumbled onto EFT(Emotional Freedom Technique).
Click here to go to the official EFT website (opens new window)
The first time I saw a clip on youtube I didn’t believe it. Too good to be true I thought. Then after a month or two I saw it again and started looking for more info on it. It turned out to be great for social phobia and basically all emotions. I was excited! But… It didn’t work for me! I couldn’t feel emotions when I wanted to. I had repressed so much stuff (and possible messed up a lot of my feeling-emotions-capacity due to the drug period) that I couldn’t access my emotions. I worked on that and I stuck to it. I decided that it had to work for me also. After a while I got more info, started to study it intensely and (I’m now even an advanced certified EFT practitioner) handled the not-being-able-to-feel-issue. I have worked with several other people now and I’ve rid myself of all my shame issues. And all my social anxiety problems, I'm socially confident now, like I was when I was young. Currently when I encounter something uncomfortable, I am actually happy because I can treat it. I find a little issue, I clear it, it's gone. I’m now perfectly OK with myself, I really accept myself now. I feel at ease in social situations and I can strike up conversations with people effortlessly. I have basically have zero social anxiety now. And it's an extremely free feeling. I can maintain eye contact easily (it even feels stupid to write this now actually) and I now live in a friendly world. I have the success with women I've always wanted and when I go out I have the time of my life. I’m talking to everyone and I’m basically having a blast. Life’s awesome as it is now, I‘m happy. I changed my mind with all the tools I learned and I’m now living the life I want. I’m myself again, finally. It feels great. And... Well, normal!
My Current LifeI’m at the moment living in the Philippines and Australia is next on the list. I’m constantly meeting new people and I have a very satisfying social life with the relationships I want.I’m in love with life and want to live it to the fullest. I have the friends and relationships I desire, live where I want to live, do what I want to do and wake up excited every day for yet another adventure. I'm very grateful and excited about how my life is at this moment. I’m saying this not to brag, but to tell you about what is possible. It’s my intention to have this story inspire you and give you hope. Because there’s a way out of social anxiety. I’d like to show you the way, the shortcut.
Goal Of This WebsiteIt is my intention to help you to get over your social anxiety disorder as fast as possible. I always try to motivate you to do what is necessary to become socially confident.I might come off a little direct and commanding, but this is always done with your best intentions in mind. Social-anxiety-solutions.com will give you anything and everything that I have come across that I believe will be helpful for you. I will have great information, advice, personal stories, practical tools and step-by-step techniques. All will be presented as simple and easy to understand as possible. It will all be available on this site.
Click here to get more information on it. In 2010 the goal is to give one on one personal coaching where I coach you to become socially confident and build the social life of your dreams.
You just got to have great information, an open mind, a positive attitude (I know that‘s close to impossible in the beginning, but practice makes perfect), the right tools and persistent action.
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I wish you the best of luck on the road to recovery. Your friend and coach, Sebastiaan
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I got so determined to get over this that I tattooed my hand with a cross on it. 
