Jeffrey Brantley - The mindful path through shyness: how mindfulness and compassion can help free you from social anxiety, fear, and avoidance

The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a Heaven of hell, a hell of Heaven.

John Milton

Life is fraught with peril. From our very first breath, all of us are sensitive and vulnerable and cannot avoid illness, injury, and death. We cant survive without one another, yet we also cant avoid being separated from one another. We will hurt and be hurt by one another in many ways. The experience of shyness involves being exquisitely sensitive to interpersonal peril and seeking to protect yourself from the pain inherent in relationships.

Given that you experience a lot of shyness, one of the ways you may have chosen to protect yourself is by avoiding significant interpersonal relationships altogether. This is logical as it prevents a great deal of pain and angst, and in the short run it worksyou do feel less anxious. The problem is that youre then stuck with all of the difficulties that come with not having significant relationships, like loneliness. This is a particularly painful problem when you feel angry and critical, and with no one else to talk with, you may end up judging and blaming yourself. Unfortunately, people with shyness can often spend a lot of time doing just that.

Theres a particular kind of suffering you experience with shyness yet you want the things that successful relationships can bring, like loving and being loved, a sense of belonging, or even advancing in your career. The very thing you want makes you feel anxious. The purpose of this book is to help with this kind of suffering.

Shyness is made up of characteristic thoughts, emotions, sensations, and behaviors that are entirely malleable and within your power to change. In this chapter, well explore how various thoughts, feelings, and behaviors come together to create shyness.

our lives are made of patterns

We create habitual patterns of behavior in our lives and then live in them. Some we create consciously, like a morning jog, but most of our patterns are formed unconsciously by repeating certain thoughts, feelings, and actions so often that we become stuck in them. Research has shown that problematic shyness has core components of self-blame, private self-consciousness, shame, and resentment (Henderson, Zimbardo, and Carducci 2001). These habits of mind operate automatically and often unconsciously, below the threshold of awareness. They are something we do, not something we are, and once created and in place, they are generally predictable and arise instantly on cue.

Imagine going into a restaurant at lunch intending to sit and eat, but a coworker sees you enter and jumps up to invite you to join him and three others for lunch. You immediately feel nervous, smile, and thank him for the invitation but make up an excuse, telling him you just came in for some takeout. You flee to the takeout counter. You didnt plan this reaction to an unexpected invitation; it came automatically. As you leave the restaurant, you feel a flood of relief, but you also feel frustrated and self-critical. You really dont want to end up eating lunch in your car, and you may wonder whats wrong with you and why you cant be more sociable.

As a person struggling with shyness, you have your own unique blend of mental and emotional habits that forms and perpetuates your individual shyness pattern. The pattern is automatic and hard to control and can create much pain and suffering in your life. As in the movie Groundhog Day, we tend to remain stuck in unexamined ways of doing things, repeating the same pattern day after day. Youre likely to remain stuck until you can find a perspective that allows you to explore and understand your mental and emotional patterns without being controlled by them.

Its important to get beyond your problematic shyness patterns so that they dont automatically define and limit your life. You need to begin looking at the patterns themselves and trying to understand how they work. Are they rigid or flexible, changing or unchanging? How well do they serve you? How are those patterns created by your thoughts and emotions, and how do they drive what you do?

We usually dont look deeply into these patterns or understand them well. In fact, were usually swept along in the same deeply ingrained habits we developed as very young children. But we do have the ability to examine these things and recognize how were repeating old and sometimes painful patterns, and this is where mindfulness is so valuable. The more we look into our life patterns, the more we can take them off automatic pilot. There are many ways to respond to any given situation. Mindfulness can help you find new responses to old triggers so that you can live more in accordance with your highest values.

One way to arrive at a more deliberate, mindful response is to pause at a trigger point, at least for a moment or two, before you do anything at all. Within that mindful pause, you may notice that you can respond rather than react to the situation. In the example above, you might pause and reflect for a moment before responding to your coworkers invitation to have lunch together. You may still decide you dont want to join the group, but now this decision came from a choice, rather than a knee-jerk reaction. Its perfectly alright to sit alone to eat if thats what you want to do, but its also perfectly alright to sit with your coworkers even if you do feel uncomfortable.