For the last four months I have been doing a form of therapy known as EEG biofeedback (previously more commonly referred to as neurofeedback). On the most basic level it is a system that allows the brain to get information about itself and thereby correct certain imbalances or traumas. As I get into further posts describing the process in more detail I’ll provide plenty of links. For now I’d like to concentrate on my initial experience.

I was skeptical when first offered the chance to try the therapy. Skeptical, but curious. Anything that might work was worth a shot.

A session of EEG biofeedback consists of being hooked up, via three sensors placed on various points on your scalp, to a laptop with specialized software that reads information about your brainwaves and then, based on that information, gives you feedback in the form of sounds and visual images. The loop this creates allows your brain to make the corrections I mentioned above. Which protocols you will use are determined by an evaluation given before the first session.

Almost immediately, it was startling how good I felt. The session would end and I would head home, elated by a sense of ease and comfort. As my sessions continued that immediate jolt of feeling good subsided and I seemed to hit something of a lull (which is apparently common). And, yet, at the same time, I could step back and recognize that when I got into anxious states, particularly when I would get stuck in a building sense of dread, they didn’t seem to be lasting as long.

And then, somewhere around twenty sessions in, something extraordinary happened.

I had agreed to go to an alumni get-together. It was just the kind of situation that has always been terrible for my social anxiety and I dreaded showing up. On the evening of the event, I parked and headed for the location. My mind began a familiar refrain: “Why do I have to do this? No one will remember me. This is going to be horribly awkward and embarrassing. I’m going to stand around holding one drink and looking lost and feeling pathetic. I could just turn around right now…”

But then I noticed something. My body was calm.

My heart wasn’t racing. My stomach wasn’t churning. My breathing wasn’t shallow. I had no numbness in my fingers. I didn’t feel any chills or trembling. I wasn’t having the physical symptoms of social anxiety.

As soon as I recognized this I was floored. I worried I might be imagining it. I stood still, waiting to see what would happen. My body remained calm. And as the realization that I really was feeling okay settled in, my mind began to relax. I stopped thinking about how terrible the evening might be. I went inside.

And while it wasn’t the perfect gathering, it was nothing compared to how events like that usually are for me. I was able to find ways to talk to people, meet people I knew, and not worry so much about what everyone else might be thinking.

The feeling of physical calm I first noticed that night has continued to build. And I have slowly realized that something significant is changing. It is as if my central nervous system has long been out of whack and now is not. I am more content, less thrown by events, and able to experience greater joy.

This therapy is affordable and easily accessible. If you’d like any kind of follow up information you can email me at umguyduh@gmail.com and I’ll be happy to both discuss this and pass on details as to who you can contact to try it yourself. I’ll post further details and links in a future post, once the website being put together by the person who got me involved in this is finalized.

But eventually, around the time the posting stopped, I began to feel like, no matter how much progress I made or effort I put into getting better, the intense discomfort I felt in difficult situations made lasting improvement something of a mirage.

I don’t want to sound too pessimistic. I was enjoying my life and enjoying a more relaxed attitude towards my own metal state, but I was seeing just how constrained by this thing I had always been and how constrained I would continue to be. No matter how much progress I made I wanted, very deeply, not to have to deal with SAD.

And a lot has happened since we stopped posting here. I moved. I took up a number of other writing projects. And I tried to get back into dating after playing at being a hermit. All of these things troubled my social anxiety. Especially being single.

There is a way to find comfort in avoiding social interactions. And there are many things it is easy to give up or to never want in the first place. But there are some things, like dating, that avoiding will make you feel just as bad as SAD is going to make you feel when you give them a shot.

Trying to manage all of these different emotions, while on the look out for any new techniques that might help, had become my routine. But it didn’t feel like there was going to be anything that really shook up that sometimes rather uncomfortable stasis.

Until recently.

Something unexpected and very positive has happened and I want to share it here because it has had such a powerful effect on my social anxiety. I have had a major reduction in the physical symptoms of social anxiety and the associated thoughts are loosening their hold. This is thanks to a very specific form of therapy I have been doing for the last three months.

I’ll get into that therapy fully with a handful of posts and provide links so that anyone interested in trying what has helped me so much will know who to contact. But for right now I want to establish this site as active once again. My next post will be a catch up post and then I’ll get into the story of what has happened with this therapy.

I’d like to take this opportunity to invite anyone who is dealing with SAD to write for this site. Please contact us with stories you’d like to share or insights you’ve gained. Take a look through the archives and see if anything we have written speaks to you. We’d love to see a post about your reaction to a particular topic we once covered. Anything at all will be welcomed. I would like to keep this site going once again.

The tonglen practice is a method for connecting with suffering —ours and that which is all around us— everywhere we go. It is a method for overcoming fear of suffering and for dissolving the tightness of our heart. Primarily it is a method for awakening the compassion that is inherent in all of us, no matter how cruel or cold we might seem
to be.

We begin the practice by taking on the suffering of a person we know to be hurting and who we wish to help. For instance, if you know of a child who is being hurt, you breathe in the wish to take away all the pain and fear of that child. Then, as you breathe out, you send the child happiness, joy or whatever would relieve their pain. This is the core of the practice: breathing in other’s pain so they can be well and have more space to relax and open, and breathing out, sending them relaxation or whatever you feel would bring them relief and happiness. However, we often cannot do this practice because we come face to face with our own fear, our own resistance, anger, or whatever our personal pain, our personal stuckness happens to be at that moment.

At that point you can change the focus and begin to do tonglen for what you are feeling and for millions of others just like you who at that very moment of time are feeling exactly the same stuckness and misery. Maybe you are able to name your pain. You recognize it clearly as terror or revulsion or anger or wanting to get revenge. So you breathe in for all the people who are caught with that same emotion and you send out relief or whatever opens up the space for yourself and all those countless others. Maybe you can’t name what you’re feeling. But you can feel it —a tightness in the stomach, a heavy darkness or whatever. Just contact what you are feeling and breathe in, take it in —for all of us and send out relief to all of us.

(For more info on tonglen see these articles: Changing Pain into Compassion, The Practice of Tonglen.)

There are several ways to tonglen and one way to do it is to first remind myself to do it! It is so easy to forget and not be mindful, especially in a high stress situation like a social event. So just reminding ourselves that during this event I am going to notice my fear and anxiety is a good start. Then once I notice it, I start to become aware of my breathing and I begin to focus on all the other people around me. I breath in deeply and take in the suffering (fear and anxiety perhaps or suffering in general) of others and breath out healing and peace. If it becomes difficult to do this I just try to breath and accept the anxiety in myself. Sometimes I may to myself to someone close “may you be happy, joyful, loving and peaceful” as I breath out lovingkindness to others.

I used tonglen the other day while shopping in a crowded mall. I had made a purchase and the salesperson was wrapping the gift for me so I had to stand and wait for a while. I felt myself becoming very self-conscious, wondering if others were staring at me and I noticed my breathing became very shallow. I then decided to practice tonglen and started with the salesperson, then with everyone in that particular store and then the entire mall breathing in their suffering and exhaling lovingkindness. I did tonglen for myself as well to break the automatic negative thought cycle and to be more mindful of my breathing. It really helped physically and mentally to do this and my anxiety decreased. It was still there of course but just not so intense and not so overwhelming. I believe it also is a great way to increase our compassion and lessen our self-centeredness.

So give it a try sometime and if there are those who practice tonglen now please share you experiences as well.

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I then applied to physical therapy school and was accepted at Duke. I had made some great progress in therapy and was able to get through the interviews on campus quite well. The program required me to move away from my hometown, which was a great challenge and great exposure for my social anxiety issues. Unfortunately I did not continue therapy after I moved and after a year of school the stress, anxiety and depression set in once again. The program was pretty grueling with classes from 8 – 5 and then homework, reading, clinicals, you name it. There was a lot of patient contact and lots of “performing” in many of the classes that kept me in a state of ongoing anxiety. Classes required participation, presentations, etc. which of course added further social anxiety pressures to the mix. At the beginning of the semester I was elected Treasurer of the class, but during the year became paralyzed with fear and anxiety of the role and the responsibilities it required. In a nutshell I was a mess. I also was finding out that both professionally and financially the program was not for me so all of that combined drove my decision to leave the program. I disclosed my issues of social anxiety to my advisor and they were more than willing to help me deal with it in classes and clinicals (which I am very thankful for), but in the end I felt I made the right decision to withdraw at that time.

I was at a very low point and the suffering was very great at this time in my life. I started visiting the Social Anxiety Support (SAS) web site forum and participating in an online class where we went through a great book which I highly recommend called The Shyness and Social Anxiety Workbook by Antony and Swinson. At this time I also began a journey into spiritual practice and discovery – especially in terms of Buddhist teachings and meditation, which I continue to this day. I then found a local social anxiety support group and another therapist, both of which have helped me tremendously the past few years.

I still struggle and find myself taking steps back but the hold and identification with the anxiety and depression has ever so gradually lessened over time. The one common denominator that I will say that helps is practice…whether it be CBT, behavior/exposure exercises, relaxation techniques, meditation or whatever else the bottom line is you have to put the effort and commit to practice. With time you will experience the changes and transformations necessary to move past the suffering of social anxiety disorder. You will be able to do things you have always wanted to but just couldn’t in the past. It can happen with persistence and effort. I still have many goals and issues to deal with when it comes to my social anxiety, but I feel the steps forward I have made can be realized by any one of you out there suffering. May you be healthy and peaceful on your own path to freedom from fear.

I have called myself socially awkward, introverted, nervous.

I have long listened to an internal voice, asking, “What will people think of you?” It reminds me not to stand out and never to risk looking foolish.

Sometimes I might think I want to speak up. It could be during a class or any kind of group discussion. I rehearse what I will say over and over, feeling tightness build in my chest, feeling my breathing get shallow. Sometimes I sweat. Sometimes my nose goes numb. Usually, I never get around to asking the question. But I burn with a wish that I could.

I’m frequently unable to attend parties or other social occasions unless I know there will be someone I can stick close to. Only this makes me feel a little pathetic. I fear people will wonder why I am so strangely attached to one person. Even worse are the times when that person eludes me and I find myself standing in a crowded room, talking to no one, holding a drink. Wanting to escape, but fearing that my escape will be noticed. Wanting to escape, but also desperately wanting to be able to walk up to someone and start a simple conversation and enjoy what everyone else is there to enjoy.

I live in fear of disappointing people, convinced that one screwed up encounter will turn them against me. I dread saying the wrong thing. I am jumble of fumbled sentiments around anyone that I admire and wish I could know better.

Shopping in a busy store makes me agitated. Having to find a seat in a crowded theater touches a nerve.

I have often felt that if I did not get my act together I could never be happy or have a normal life.

And while I have seen people behaving in ways that made me think they must be feeling some of the same things I do, I have also never gotten over the ingrained idea that the only difference between me and most people is that I am doing a really bad job of dealing with my fears.

I have always thought those things listed above were personal failings. And I have a always believed they must be visible to all who interact with me. Realizing that they are symptoms of social anxiety has finally begun a process of learning to deal with them constructively.

I can breathe easier, knowing they might not be flashing signs alerting all to my ineptitude. I can stop searching for stories to tell myself about why other people often make me so uncomfortable. And I can be a touch less judgmental about my own behaviors.