From: bbyun@oz.net (Bryan Byun) Newsgroups: alt.support.shyness Subject: Shyness is Not the Problem (Long) Date: Fri, 17 Feb 1995 14:57:05 -0800 Message-ID: <bbyun-1702951457050001@bbyun.oz.net>Hi all, I thought I would throw this little observation to the group and see if it sticks to anyone (sorry, gross metaphor). It's not a particularly original insight, but I thought it would be a worthy topic of discussion. Anyways...
People often talk as if shyness is a disease or mental condition that can be cured. I prefer to think of it as an emotional disability. It's something we are born with and something we carry with us our entire lives. That doesn't sound very hopeful, but I think too many people get obsessed with finding some way of eradicating shyness from their personalities, and in my opinion it's a waste of time. I don't mean that we should be resigned to our situations; quite the contrary. I think we need to separate the basic fact of our shyness from our ability to function in a social environment.
Look at one of the most famous shy people of them all, Johnny Carson. This man is painfully shy, yet for decades he made a living talking and interacting with different people every night, in front of a national audience. Carson has never gotten rid of his shyness, but he has successfully found a way to *deal* with it to the extent that he could be, not just a talk show host, but a legend among talk show hosts. Look also at Sally Fields, who has recently admitted her problem with shyness. This is a woman who has appeared on countless films, tv shows, interviews, and hobnobs with the cream of Hollywood's elite, yet in her early years she was so shy that she turned down a lunch invitation from Jane Fonda because she was terrified of meeting her.
I think the basic challenge here is not overcoming shyness so much as it is simply learning to function as a social animal. As shy people, most of us probably never went through some of the socialization processes that other people go through as kids and young adults. While everyone else was mixing, congregating, and generally socializing, we were on the fringes, on the outside looking in. Why? I suppose because our shyness prevented us from reaching out to others the way more outgoing people do. I guess there is some innate insecurity in each of us that prevents us from putting ourselves on the line or risking looking foolish.
Therefore, as we grow up and become adults, we haven't allowed our social skills to grow and flourish. We're still stuck in kindergarten or elementary school or wherever it was that our shyness first took root in our psyches.
So, this is all well and good, but what can we do about it?
I think one possible solution, and I know this sounds silly, is to reach back and re-experience our earliest youth. That is, to find the point where we, as kids, went one way, and everyone else went the other way. If we can find out where it was that we started growing up in a different way than other, more outgoing people did, then perhaps we can take up that "path not taken" and *re-learn* those things that we never learned to begin with.
When I was a kid, friendship was easy. If a kid had a Tonka truck that I thought was cool, and I had some Matchbox cars that he thought was cool, that was enough to make us best friends. For me, then, the challenge is to find out how things have changed since those days. Why did it become so much harder to make friends with others, when there are people out there who make friends just as easily now as they did back then?
For one thing, I got self-conscious. I started worrying about what other people thought of me. That made me introspective, and self-critical. Which then made me less articulate (after all, when you worry about every word that comes out of your mouth, you can't exactly be a sparkling wit), which of course further increased my alienation and introspection.
I got so obsessed with what people thought, it seemed like everyone was watching me and judging me. And when you spend your time thinking like this, how can you get around to expressing interest in other people? Because isn't that what essentially lies at the heart of a good friendship? That you are interested in the other person, and that person is interested in you? It seems to me that what failed, in my case at least, is that I stopped assuming that anyone else would be interested in me. Therefore, I became focused on getting people to be interested, instead of focusing on expressing interest in others. My whole philosophy became, if I can put on a good front, others will be drawn to me. Well, that led to a lot of bizarre behavior, especially at drunken college parties, but it didn't lead to any close connections. Because I continually overlooked the most important aspect of social success, which is to let *others* know that you find them cool and interesting. I was so intent on getting that from others, I didn't realize that I had to give it, as well.
I don't think anyone who is themselves healthy minds attention from other people, and there's nothing more appealing about a new friend than the fact that they like you. Not everyone reacts the same way to this kind of attention, and there are certainly people out there who are paranoid or even more insecure than yourself, who will react negatively, assuming the worst. But you must realize that this reaction has less to do with *you* than it does with *them* and their own personal problems. And then of course, not everyone you approach is going to be compatible with you, and that's OK too. At the very worst, you've found a friendly face, and widened the boundaries of your social circle a little bit. In my own experience, even a failed attempt is useful, because you learn to take these things in stride, and eventually you see that this whole social thing is a paper monster that we create out of our own insecurities and anxieties. We're all pretty much just looking for a smile and a good word from each other.
In the end, I think we need to get back to that child that is within us. Yes, the dreaded "inner child." We need to get back to that relatively innocent world view we had as kids, when we didn't take ourselves or other people so seriously, and didn't have such high expectations. We need to recapture the sense of wonder and excitement that we had back then. I don't know if that's enough to solve the problem, but it certainly would be a help.
Well, if you're still with me, thanks for sticking around to read this big slab of verbiage. I'd be interested to hear any feedback anyone might have, including disagreements!
-- Bryan Byun (bbyun@oz.net) ======================================== * LIVE FAUST DIE JUNG LEAVE IT TO BEAVER * ========================================