You look away from someone on the street, and right away a voice in your head tells you what that says about you. In this video, you’ll find out why that inner commentary in social anxiety usually comes after the fact, why your deepest beliefs can feel like harmless thoughts, and why you don’t have to dig them up first. Along the way: a choice blindness experiment, Aaron Beck’s discovery of automatic thoughts, and the Buddha’s image of the second arrow.
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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’re walking down the street, and someone is coming toward you. For whatever reason, you look away.
And right away, a voice in your head speaks up. “Why did you do that?
They noticed. You can’t even look at people.” You worry they saw something in your face, or that you seemed strange.
But what if that voice isn’t telling you what happened? What if it’s making up a story after the fact?
In this video, you’ll find out where that voice comes from, which kind of thought hides best of all, and why you don’t have to dig up your beliefs first to get free.
By beliefs, I mean deep, automatic conclusions about yourself that run in the background, like “I’m not good enough.”
We’ll also look at an experiment where people explained, with total confidence, why they had made a choice they never actually made.
Earlier, I mentioned an experiment where people explained a choice they never made.
Researchers showed people two photos of women’s faces and asked which one they found more attractive.
Then they handed over the chosen photo and asked why. But sometimes, with a magician’s trick, they had swapped it, so the person was holding the face they had not picked.
What may surprise you is that most of the time, people didn’t notice.
They explained their choice with the same confidence, detail and emotion as a real one.
Two psychologists who reviewed many experiments found that we have little direct insight into why we do what we do, so we reach for whatever reason sounds most likely.
So why does the story always sound the same with social anxiety? Because the reason that sounds most likely comes from old, emotionally charged experiences.
The course behind this channel describes the chain. Something happens, you feel something, and your mind automatically attaches a meaning to that feeling, a meaning about who you are, like “I am someone who gets laughed at.”
The Buddha taught this with an image. An ordinary person in physical pain, he said, is like someone hit by an arrow, and right after that, by a second one.
The first arrow is the pain itself. The second is what the mind makes of it: worry, complaining, resistance.
On the street, the first arrow is the uncomfortable feeling. The second is the comment about what it says about you.
Here’s how I noticed this in my own life. Back when I had social anxiety, and already knew I had it, someone came toward me on the sidewalk, and I looked away, for whatever reason.
Right away my mind said: “You’re looking away because you have social anxiety.”
Today I’m free of social anxiety, and sometimes I do exactly the same thing. But my mind stays quiet.
I’ve noticed this many times. So the comment never came from looking away. It came from the anxiety.
So where does the story come from, if not from what actually happened? It depends on what the mind has at hand.
Once I knew the words “social anxiety,” my mind used them. Before that, the same thing was running without a name.
Looking back, I think it showed up as beliefs like “You’re not good enough,” “People don’t respect you,” or “You have to be afraid of people.”
With certain people, I also had this one: “You have to be careful what you say.”
The British psychologists David Clark and Adrian Wells described this in 1995, in what is still the leading explanation of social anxiety.
People with social anxiety use their inner feelings to judge how they come across: “I feel nervous, so they must be able to see it.”
And that brings us to a psychiatrist who discovered that one of his patients had been carrying the same thought through every single session, without ever saying it out loud.
The psychiatrist I’m talking about is Aaron Beck. Early in his career, he worked as a psychoanalyst in Philadelphia.
His patients lay on a couch and had one rule: say everything that comes into your mind.
One day, a patient was telling him about her life. At the end of the session, Beck asked how she felt.
She said she felt very anxious. Beck offered an explanation, and she hesitantly agreed.
Then she said that actually, she had been afraid she was boring him.
She had thought that the whole session. In fact, she always thought it.
But she had never said it, not once in all those months. It had simply never occurred to her to mention it.
Beck realized that next to what people tell you, there’s a whole layer of thoughts that nobody reports. He asked other patients and found the same thing. He called them “automatic thoughts.”
This is exactly what I found with my own beliefs. My mind presented them as small, meaningless thoughts, as if they weren’t beliefs at all.
Early Buddhist teaching describes this too. It speaks of “anusaya,” a word that means something that lies hidden.
These are sleeping tendencies of the mind, and some of them come close to what I call beliefs.
The monk and scholar Bhikkhu Analayo explains that because these tendencies lie hidden, they’re hard to see directly.
Why do your deepest beliefs feel so harmless? A belief isn’t a conscious opinion.
It runs automatically in the background, and it feels true the moment it shows up. Something that feels that obvious doesn’t seem worth questioning, or even mentioning.
Why would your own mind do this to you? The course explains that beliefs form when your mind tries to make sense of painful experiences and protect you from more of the same.
Clark and Wells add the other half: what you do to protect yourself is meant to keep rejection away, but it also means your assumptions never get tested, so the beliefs stay alive.
For me, it felt like my mind was guarding them. If they had been discovered, the protection that social anxiety gave me would have been gone.
Whatever is happening underneath, it works like protection. So there’s no reason to blame your mind for it. Yet people with social anxiety are often hard on themselves.
Researchers compared people with and without social anxiety, and those with social anxiety were clearly less kind to themselves, less able to treat themselves the way they’d treat a friend. Being hard on yourself is part of the pattern.
The Stoic philosopher Epictetus, who was born a slave, described three stages. Someone who hasn’t learned yet blames others.
Someone who has begun to learn blames themselves. And someone who has finished learning blames neither.
So in his view, blaming yourself isn’t a failure. It’s a stage you pass through.
So do you have to dig all of these beliefs up first?
At the start, I promised to explain why you don’t have to dig up your beliefs first.
Many people assume you have to find and understand all of them before you can get free.
In the course, the work starts somewhere else, with specific events. In Step 3, you work through emotionally charged moments from your past, one at a time.
Your subconscious tends to bring them up in an order that already makes sense for your healing, and if one can’t be cleared yet, it comes back on its own once you’re ready.
Step 4 explains that some layers only show up once the most obvious events are cleared, and that’s where it works with beliefs directly.
So beliefs do matter. You just don’t have to find them first.
That’s how it went for me. More specific beliefs came to light bit by bit, at a later stage, and only when they were needed.
An ancient yoga text, the Yoga Sutra of Patanjali, describes something similar.
In his commentary on it, Swami Vivekananda explained that impressions from the past don’t always show themselves.
Some lie asleep, and some are held down for a while by stronger ones, and only come out once whatever held them down is gone.
So what can you do about the comment? Arguing with it doesn’t help much.
As the course explains, beliefs aren’t built from logic, but from emotionally charged experiences, so thinking your way out rarely works.
What changes things is working through those experiences themselves, one moment at a time.
In the course, that happens at home, without facing difficult situations first.
Think back to the street at the start of this video. You look away, and the voice explains what that says about you.
Now you know it isn’t reporting what happened. It’s a story told afterward, shaped by old moments that still carry a charge.
These days, when I look away from someone, there’s simply nothing there. No comment.
You don’t have to fight your mind, and you don’t have to see through it first.
When the old moments lose their charge, the comment gets quieter on its own.
What working through those old moments actually looks like, step by step and from your own home, is what I show in Working Through Social Anxiety at Home. The link is on the screen.