Stories

This is where you can find the stories of those suffering and recovering from social phobia. We suggest starting with Earla's open letter, and then exploring the rest of this section. We hope they'll help you as much as they helped us realize that we're not alone, and that there is hope.

Earla's Road Map

My life, my journey, feels like a road map. Sometimes I take the straight route, stopping at stop signs, cross walks, but continuing in a straight line. At other times I take a dead end and stay there for awhile and when I am ready, and only when I am ready, turn around and take another route. Other times I am in a street that is a circle and I keep going around and around until I get dizzy and I want to leave, or I go up and down a street never going anywhere else, just up and down. It can be one of those curvy roads going one way then another.

24 year old who suffered social anxiety his entire life. I finally conquered it.

The following is reddit user Tajimoto's account of his experience and success with Cognitive Behaviour Therapy. It is reproduced with his permission. The original reddit thread contains many comments and is well worth a read.

After I met my first gf (happened to be online) and she wrecked me, I fell in such a deep depressive lull that I had to drop out of college for a semester under the medical leave classification of a major depressive episode. I chose to seek therapy, and in my 6 months of seclusion, I decided I absolutely needed to get over social anxiety because I simply could not keep living the way I have been anymore. I decided to search online, and at last discovered a Social Anxiety Cognitive Behavioral Therapy group running at Mass General (I live in Boston).

I remember my first day. Walking in, nervous as hell, and sitting down among a group of 5 others just as socially awkward as I am. We introduced ourselves, and then filled out assessment forms covering two things - 1) if something makes us anxious, and 2) if that anxiety keeps us from doing it.

Earla Dunbar – I Have My Life Back (2012) - frist published in Recovery Network Toronto

My psychiatrist tells me that I am like two different people; one, from when I started therapy with him in 1998, two, to the person I am today.  Most people do not believe that I suffered so much and how far I have come.

I used to feel less than everybody else.  I felt I was stupid, boring, nothing to talk about. In my mind everyone else knew stuff and I did not.  Why would anyone want to be with a person like me, why would they waste their time?  I thought everyone was watching me and judging me negatively.  How did I get here? How did I leave my house after virtually being housebound for six years?  It was at the age of forty-four that I finally got help.

My Gossamer Dress

You wonder why I need to be by myself. I'd give anything to be able to make you understand why I'm as I am. So I shall try to explain the awful, unreasonable fear that drives me to solitude - fear that is far too alien to the normal range of human emotion - but is the earmark of social anxiety disorder. Also known as social phobia, this disorder presents a seemingly irreconcilable paradox between social avoidance and the desperate need for the nurture of human contact.