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5 reasons you keep blushing, getting red, and looking like a tomato

 

SUMMARY

Why do I keep blushing?

What do I have to do to overcome it completely?

In today’s episode, Sebastiaan will be answering this specific question posted in one of his videos:

“I’ve recently discovered that the blushing was my main problem after 1 year of tapping. And I made insane progress in just 1 session.
The next day, I felt almost completely free, but I felt a bit vulnerable and I believed resistance kicked in and put me back to blushing again.
Should I just keep tapping on resistance and get more familiar with being confident?”

Sebastiaan will be talking about the 5 main reasons why people keep blushing, and the solutions on what you should do instead.

Go to this podcast link and hear more about how to overcome your social anxiety problem and your subconscious resistance to change:
Episode #7: Do this and you can beat your Social Anxiety don’t do it and you’ll suffer forever

Enjoy!



FULL TRANSCRIPTION

Hey, it’s Seb!I am a former blusher extraordinaire.

I used to have a big blushing problem from the age of 12 that lasted all the way to end of my 20’s.

And nothing I did, would overcome it. But eventually, I did. And I no longer have this problem.

I’m a Social Confidence Coach, I help people overcome social anxiety disorder, and often that goes hand in hand with blushing.

And so today I’m going to answer a particular question that I got on one of my videos. And in that answer, I’m going to talk about the five main reasons why people keep blushing.

Of course, I’m going to talk about the solutions of what you should do instead.

So by the end of this video, you have a good idea of why do I keep blushing? And what do I have to do to overcome it completely?

So let’s get into the question.

Hey Seb, I’ve recently discovered that the blushing was my main problem after one year of tapping, and I made insane progress in just one session. The next day, I felt almost completely free. But I felt a bit vulnerable. And I believe resistance kicked in and put me back to blushing again. Should I just keep tapping on resistance and get more familiar with being confident?

Now first of all, the tapping that he’s referring to refers to EFT (Emotional Freedom Techniques), which is a psychological form of acupuncture, where you’re tapping with the tips of your fingers and specific acupressure points in the body. It looks silly, but it’s very powerful to release stuck negative emotions and shift limiting beliefs around.

If you don’t know what it is check out some of our videos. I talk about it all the time. Because that’s the thing that helped me overcome my social anxiety.

Anyway, the answer to his question is as follows.

When shame comes back, there’s five possible reasons for that.

Now, I’m going to just list them off.

The 1st reason why shame comes back is: More to do.

Now, it’s unlikely that if you’ve suffered from shame and blushing for decades, that you get rid of it in one single tapping session by yourself.

Now it is possible, but it’s just unlikely.

Likely, it will take a bunch of sessions over a period of time. And you might need the help of a practitioner to do so to get past subconscious blind spots, and all that kind of stuff.

But you can do a lot on your own.

You might even be able to get their old way, though. I think for shame, you probably need a practitioner, which is a good thing.

Anyway, imagine that your shame is this big. Now you might do an hour of tapping, and you take a bit off of it, then you feel great, you feel relief, you feel so much better…but if the shame then comes back, it’s not that the shame has come back; what is left of the shame has come back.

So, in other words, you’ve shrunk the problem, you feel some relief as a result of that for a day or a couple of days, and then the remaining triggers for the ‘shame’ response in your body for the old unprocessed shame still present themselves.

It doesn’t mean it came back. You can go like, ‘Oh my God, it came back. I better give up working on it. Because this is not working.’

No, just say ‘Okay, great. Now I’m going to look at what’s there now. And I’m going to continue to tap to get rid of the rest of it.’

That’s reason number one why blushing keeps coming back. There simply is more to do and what’s the solution? Simply persist, continue tapping on whatever is left.

Reason #2 why blushing comes back: Subconscious resistance to change.

Now, of course, consciously, you want to get rid of shame. It’s a problem in your life. It’s causing awkward situations, it’s probably causing you to avoid certain things. It’s a big problem. It creates tremendous suffering.

I feel for you, and I’ve been there myself. And I know how incredibly embarrassing and difficult the problem is. So, I know you want to get rid of it.

However, the deeper part of your mind, your subconscious mind likes to keep things the same.

Because when you make changes, you’re going to venture out into the unknown. There’s the unfamiliar.

Your subconscious mind wants to stick with what’s familiar, even if it’s uncomfortable.

Because going out into the unknown means facing things that you do not have control over.

Maybe people are going to react to you differently.
Maybe there’s more pressure on you.
Maybe you have higher expectations of yourself.

Whatever it is, there is change and so there is subconscious resistance to change.

That needs to be addressed.

If you do not address it, then your subconscious will bring the problem back.

That needs to be addressed really easy to do, if you want to know how to do that go to my seventh or eighth podcast that I ever created. Go to social-anxiety-solutions podcast and check it out. And I think that title is something along the lines of “Do this and you can forever overcome social anxiety don’t do this and you remain stuck forever”, something along those lines.

Reason #3 why you keep blushing: Not feeling worthy and deserving of being blushing free.

Now, this reason is actually very tied to the shame itself. Because shame is a feeling of lack of worthiness, a feeling of not being okay with part of yourself that you’re trying to hide, and it might not make sense to you in the here and now at your current age, because that’s shame might be very old.

And this attitudes towards yourself might be really old. And it doesn’t make sense to your conscious mind. But it’s somewhere in your subconscious. And so that needs to be shifted, and it needs to be changed around to the point where you do feel worthy and deserving. As a person you value yourself now.

And by working on the shame, through to shame, you will neutralize all the obstacles to feeling worthy and deserving.

This brings us to Reason #4 why shame keeps returning: Not seeing yourself as a person that doesn’t blush.

Now, when you have a problem for a long time, you start to identify yourself with that problem.

I’m a socially anxious person.

No, that’s not true. You’re a person who has experienced social anxiety for such a long time, from such an early age that you’ve gotten used to it and you started seeing yourself in that way. It’s your self-image, but it’s not true.

Same thing with blushing.

You can see yourself as a blusher or a loser or a weak person or whatever it is. And it’s not true, you just have a problem.

It’s not that you are the problem.

And when you are in the process of overcoming this blushing issue, you need to get your subconscious to help you realize that you are a person that is not a blusher. Because your subconscious will keep you congruent with how you see yourself. And so, if you see yourself as a blusher, your subconscious is like, “Okay, we’ll keep things that way, then.”

And so, you need to shift that inner identity, that inner self-image and shift that to ‘Okay, this is a problem I had problem I’ve overcome. And I’m a person who feels relaxed in social situation, and feels happy with themselves and is accepting of himself or herself.’

That’s what you want to do.

How to do that…that’s a long video, that’s beside the point.

Let’s get to the 5th reason why blushing keeps returning: Not accepting the blushing

This is a very important reason why blushing keeps coming back.

I discovered the tapping after maybe 5-6 years of inner work, affirmations, visualizations, training my thoughts, facing my fears, you name it. I was doing all of that already was trying to get rid of my anxiety was trying to deal with the blushing but nothing really helped.

Then I found the tapping. And that began shifting my anxiety.

It began to reduce my low self-esteem.

It began to make things better for me, including the blushing. It became less frequent. And it would decrease a little bit in certain situations. And I made huge progress.

But I found a tapping maybe when I was 22. And in my late 20s, after many, many years of tapping, I was still dealing with the blushing and I was still scared of it happening. Because I was trying to get rid of all blushing, I was trying to get rid of all shame, I was trying to get rid of all social anxiety.

And that perfectionistic attitude wouldn’t allow any space for blushing to appear, shame to appear and anxiety to appear. And that kept me stuck.

And it wasn’t until I had some sessions, some tapping sessions with my mentor, Dr. David Lake, who was also a Psychotherapist and a therapist to therapist and a tapping expert.

And these sessions were actually focused on accepting, allowing and normalizing the blushing experience.

Now of course, within those sessions, it was acknowledged that it was uncomfortable and embarrassing.

And all of my feelings and all of my thoughts about it were acknowledged why we were simultaneously tapping as well.

And David shared stories of where he had been in a blessing situation.

And basically, it was all shifted and changed around in my head. And I started to make the blushing less of an enemy.

It was no longer this big, scary, horrible, terrifying thing in my mind.

I began to become okay with it.

And the more I became okay, with the blushing, the less of a problem, it became, and it started to become less frequent.

And when it would come up, it wouldn’t bother me so much.

Because before what happened, I would blush, then I would notice, or I wouldn’t even have the thought of, ‘Oh, I hope I’m not going to blush now.’ And that would then trigger like a blushing response in the most awkward, wrong moments, you know what I mean? I’m sure you’ve experienced this yourself.

And now it’s happening. You’re like, oh, no, no, no, I can’t blush.

And then, just when you’re upset about the blushing, makes the blushing get even stronger, and then you’re trying to control it and push it down. And like, if you can’t escape, it gets even worse, and now you’re upset about it. Now I’m beating myself up, I’m telling myself much of a loser I am and how I shouldn’t have this problem, and all of that crap.

All of that crap just locks the shame in place.

And that non-acceptance of the shame, that non acceptance of the blushing, and me not allowing myself to have that experience and complete the experience, ride the wave of him, and just be okay with myself, while I have the blushing problem sounds easier than it is and sounds harder to overcome than it is.

This is not something that has to take many years, a bunch of sessions and you can, you can be at that place.

So once that was done, shame released, and blushing hasn’t been a problem in my life. And it hasn’t been in 10 years?

Now, the last time I blushed was with my girlfriend. And this was maybe four months ago or five months ago. And I won’t go into the whole context of the story. But we were sitting in a restaurant. And it was about how much we liked each other. And it was in the beginning of our relationship, there was no official relationship, we’re just dating. And apparently, I blushed. It didn’t even feel that I blushed. And she said, Ah, you’re blushing.

And that then gave me a brief ping of like, Oh, I’m blushing. And then right after that, it was like, oh, but it’s okay. And it left in 10 seconds or something.

It was not an uncomfortable situation, it was just a negative emotion, an uncomfortable emotion that I experienced.

And I didn’t even have to think or come up with, Oh, I’m going to think about that. In this way. It was just automatic.

I just had a normal, natural response. And that’s what you can get to, as well when you start to accept and make peace with where you’re at.

Don’t judge yourself for the fact that you’re dealing with this blushing issue, it’s a result of trauma, whether that’s shock trauma, or trauma from the relationship, or your caregivers or whatever it is, it’s, it’s not your fault.

It’s very difficult that you’re dealing with this problem.

And it’s very hard to accept yourself, you might need some assistance in doing so.

And I’m not saying that to get clients because I’m not taking on clients.

But I’m just saying you might need someone to help you get beyond that if you can’t get there yourself, but try for yourself, especially with these tips that I’ve just given you.

These are the five main reasons that blushing returns address this, you can get to a place where blushing is no longer an issue in your life.

For a more in-depth explanation on how to overcome shame, if you’re dealing with social anxiety disorder, I created a video about seven years ago to talk about exactly that. And you can check that out here. And when you watch that video, you will also be guided through a tapping experience to start to release some of that shame.

Go check that out right now and I’ll talk to you very soon.

Bye for now


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Sebastiaan
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