If you have ever asked yourself “What is wrong with me?” after an evening with other people, this video is for you. You will find out what research on babies, twins and cautious children shows about where social anxiety comes from, what your genes really decide, and how experiences shape the way your body uses them. You will also see where change can start with EFT: with the specific events your body learned from, not with you as a person.
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
Disclaimer:
This video is for education. It is not medical advice and not a substitute for professional treatment. If you have a diagnosed condition or a history of serious trauma, please work with a qualified professional.
Transcript
You are having dinner with people you know, and everyone is talking easily.
You hardly say anything all evening, because you are afraid of saying something wrong or of being criticized.
On the way home, you ask yourself the same question again: what is wrong with me?
I want you to know that nothing is wrong with you.
Many people with social anxiety conclude that they were born this way, or that the anxiety is in their genes.
However, research shows something different about where this anxiety comes from, and I will show you why I can say that nothing is wrong with you.
Researchers have watched how babies develop, compared twins, followed cautious children for many years and studied painful memories.
They did this to find out how much of this anxiety a person is born with and how much a person learns later.
In the next minutes, you will find out what your genes really decide, which experiences shape social anxiety, and where change can start.
Many people ask themselves what is wrong with them because of the way social anxiety develops.
The first reason is that, for most people, social anxiety starts in childhood or in the teenage years.
Because it starts so early, many people cannot remember a time when they did not have it.
The second reason is that social anxiety often grows slowly, so that you do not notice how it changes over the years.
This is how it was for me. It grew so slowly that I never recognized it as social anxiety. I just thought that was the way I was.
The third reason is that the anxiety comes automatically. In a social situation, you notice your heart beating faster or your face getting warm before you have even thought about the situation.
Because this reaction comes before any thought, you experience it as something that simply happens inside you.
Because the anxiety started so early, grew so slowly and comes so automatically, it always feels like a part of who you are.
Many people with social anxiety believe that they were simply born this way. However, no one is born with social anxiety.
This is because a newborn baby cannot be afraid of what other people think of it.
To feel embarrassed, a child first has to understand that it is a person of its own, someone that others can look at and judge.
Researchers have tested this understanding with a simple experiment. They put a small mark on a child’s nose and place the child in front of a mirror.
Only from around the second year of life do children touch their own nose, because only then do they understand that they are seeing themselves in the mirror.
Embarrassment appears at about the same time, and the fear of being judged by others develops even later.
At the same time, babies are already different from each other in their first months of life.
This raises the question whether genes play a role in social anxiety. Genes do play a role, and researchers have shown this with the help of twins.
They compared identical twins, who share all their genes, with twins who share only about half of their genes.
If something comes more from the genes, identical twins are more alike in it than the other twins.
Genes explained a part of why some people develop social anxiety and others do not.
The rest came from influences outside the genes, and above all from experiences that each person has on their own.
The part that genes explained describes differences between many people, and it says nothing about how much of your own anxiety comes from your genes.
What the twin studies show is that genes do not cause social anxiety on their own, and that they can make it more likely.
There is one more thing about genes that most people do not know, and I will come back to it in a moment.
The twin studies leave one question open, which is what exactly genes pass on to a person.
Genes tend to pass on a sensitivity, for example a cautious temperament. A temperament is the way a person tends to react to the world from early on.
Some babies react more strongly to anything new, from their first months on.
They move more and cry more when they see, hear or smell something unfamiliar.
Many of these babies later become cautious, quiet children. Researchers followed such cautious children for many years to find out what happens to them.
These children did develop social anxiety more often than other children. However, more than half of them did not develop social anxiety at all.
In addition, some children who were not cautious developed social anxiety anyway. For this reason, whether a sensitivity turns into fear depends a lot on what a person experiences after birth.
If you have always known yourself as a careful and quiet person, your temperament is real.
However, your temperament still does not decide on its own what becomes of it.
Earlier I said that there is one more thing about genes that most people do not know.
The thing that most people do not know is that experiences can influence how the body uses its genes.
Researchers first found this in experiments with rats. Some rat mothers cared for their young much more than others, and the young of these caring mothers later calmed down faster after stress.
The reason was the way these young rats used a gene that helps the body calm down.
When young rats grew up with a different mother, the way they used this gene matched the mother who raised them. This shows that the difference came from the care after birth.
The difference lasted into adulthood, and in later experiments researchers could undo it again in the lab.
Because these results come from rats, researchers then looked for the same pattern in people. To do this, they summarized many studies of people who had hard experiences early in life.
In most of these studies, the gene that helps the body calm down was used differently in these people than in people without such experiences.
In this way, the research in people points in the same direction as the experiments with rats.
This is the answer to what most people do not know about genes.
Your genes are not a fixed program that decides your life from the start.
What you experience influences how your body uses your genes, and the way your body uses them can change again.
If experiences influence this much, the next question is which experiences play a part in social anxiety.
Researchers asked people with social anxiety about the picture of themselves that appears in their mind in difficult social moments.
Almost all of them could connect this picture to a concrete memory of an unpleasant social situation, for example a moment when they were laughed at or criticized.
Many of these memories came from the time when the anxiety began or became worse.
Other researchers found a similar connection when they followed children and teenagers over time.
Those who were bullied or picked on by others had more social anxiety later on. This does not mean that everyone who was bullied develops social anxiety.
You may not remember one specific moment when your anxiety started, and this is also common.
When people with social anxiety are asked how it started, about half can name a specific embarrassing or humiliating moment.
For the others, the anxiety grew over time without one single moment they can point to.
In my own experience and in the course, these experiences do not have to be dramatic.
Often they are quiet moments that happen again and again, for example being ignored, being compared with others or being told not to be so sensitive.
At the beginning, I said that nothing is wrong with you, and now you can see why.
Your body learned from painful experiences that certain situations are dangerous, and since then it has been protecting you from these situations.
A system that learns from painful experiences in this way is working, and it is not broken.
Your body did what a body does when something hurts, which is to remember the situation and to warn you before it can happen again.
A very old Buddhist teaching describes a similar idea. The teaching says that the mind in itself is clear, and that what troubles the mind, like fear and worry, comes in from outside.
This idea fits what you have heard about social anxiety, because the fear developed through experiences.
This leads to the question of what has to change so that the anxiety can disappear.
Many people with social anxiety believe that they have to change themselves, become more confident or become a different person.
In my experience, this belief has the opposite of the effect you hope for, because it tells you again and again that something is wrong with you.
For this reason, the method I use always starts with accepting yourself as you are.
From there, change can start with the painful memories from which your body learned the anxiety.
My course uses a method called EFT, in which you tap lightly with your fingertips on certain points of your body while you focus on specific events from your past.
Specific events are short moments that still upset you when you think about them.
In EFT, every round starts with a sentence in which you name what is bothering you, and in the same sentence you say that you accept yourself.
In this way, the work is aimed at the specific event, and you are accepted as you are.
In Step Three of the course, you make a list of these specific events, and you work through them one at a time, at home and at your own pace.
You do not have to be fixed. Your specific events do.
Do you remember the dinner from the beginning, and the question you asked yourself on the way home?
There is now a different answer to the question of what is wrong with you.
Nothing is wrong with you as a person. Your body learned from painful moments to protect you, and what your body learned, it can unlearn again when you work through these moments.
If you want to understand how working through these memories with EFT works, watch this video here.
In this video, I explain why this method is different from what you may have tried before, and how the course is built.