On and off had substantial experinces with severe social anxiety.
My way of dealing with it is to recognize your part to play in it.
A mental health disorder like an anxiety disorder does not exist without the participation of the individual experiencing it. Unlike some mental health disorders, anxiety disorders are heavily dependent on the behaviour of the individual. People say you are what you eat. Well with social anxiety and other disorders, you are how you behave. It's hard to accept at first because it's very easy to assume the role of victim and simply sink into the identity of someone suffering with something that exists seperate to themselves. In the process ownership of the core issues are denied. It's you not me. It's them not me. It's because of my past. It's because of work. It's because of this, that, whatever. While all these reasons may have genuine parts to play, we are forgetting the person in the driving seat. If we assume this position, we are helpless, we are self defeating, we are easily distracted from dealing with things using our own resources, our fates are already set out for us and we have no part to play in defining ourselves in this lifetime.
In a sense it's all about personal responsibility and especially about understanding your own behaviour. Self acceptance is also a critical part to play because social anxiety, for me anyway, contained A LOT of content relating to my past and that linked in with how I saw myself which as you can guess linked in with my mental health, emotional health, relationships, outlook on life etc. I found there's always something I can be doing to understand my relationship to my social anxiety. In that process I discovered it's not the actual relationship with my social anxiety that matters. No, it's the relationship to myself. My relationship to myself defines how I interact with the external world, and of course, myself. This then creates the substrate for all other experiences, such as social anxiety.
It's not something outside of my control because I'am the one in charge of myself. Social anxiety starts and ends with me. It's a product of how I see things, how I process things, what I believe, how I choose to react/respond, what my values are, my relationship to others and the world ie my perceptions etc. It also involves my past experiences which has a lot to do with imagery that stored in memory. Studies prove our memories are linked to emotions, which is why they tend to have such significant meaning to us. If my past experiences involve heavy emotional attachment to particular memories and then these memories are stirred up and perhaps they are negative? Hello anxiety my old friend! Past experiences also come with elaborate belief systems too; how we navigate the world, and how did do back then. With social anxiety our memories and beliefs are usually attached to negative experiences whereby we perceive some sort of invalidation, isolation, rejection, abandonment. When we experience things today and our anxiety begins to peak, we resort back to how we experienced things in the past. Result? Hello anxiety my old friend, again!
I experience something that triggers the potential for me to get anxious. I may naturally run to assume a particular pathway to deal with it, this links in well with what neuroscience says about neural pathways in our brain and how we from a young age establish circuits in the brain that become our default way of processing things. If I have severe anxiety disorder I can probably say with a high degree of confidence this pathway is no doubt dysfunctional. The definition by which we look at mental health disorders is based mainly on dysfunctional behaviour. You could say dysfunctional behaviour is a less than optimal way of behaving in regards to how we as humans ensure our health and wellbeing. Therefore my way of dealing with whatever triggers my leaning towards experiencing anxiety is going to be detrimental because the foundations of my are... you guessed it! They don't work.
So what does work? Seeing things differently I found. And then BEING different. Taking part in the experience also works, instead of running away from it. With social anxiety (and I've seen some great memes in this topic!) I find myself trying to run away a lot. If I look down, avoid eye contact, prevent people from connecting with me etc the problem goes away. But does it? No. Otherwise my social anxiety would be cured by now! So another approach is needed. An approach that puts me in the driving seat. Now I can be present and experience what I'm experiencing.
This is where it gets tricky because in order to do this I must trust myself. If I'm feeling like my a*s is about to fall out while I'm talking to someone I'm interested in engaging with, it's going to be difficult to process this AND the person I want to talk to. I have to trust myself that I'm okay, I'm safe, I'm experiencing anxiety and lots of what I'm experiencing involves past experiences, and that I don't need to run away and escape my discomfort, the fundamental existence of my being is sound and I will not evaropate into nothingness. This is where self love, self care, self esteem, self respect and pretty much my entire life and the choices I make and the values/principles I stand by come in. Because if I have something I believe in and I know fundamentally what I believe is right and I know that I'm doing everything in my power to bring myself closer to who I really want to be and become, and that I have proof in that I have overcome things in the past, I have a good relationship with myself, I love myself, I care more than enough about myself to not hurt myself and self destruct - why shouldn't being present with this other person when I'm about to have a severe social anxiety episode be enough? It's like with children that are loved, they grow up to feel good in themselves and to navigate the world with confidence and a sense of freedom and innocence because their belief in themselves, the belief their parents had, family, friends etc has been more than enough. So why not now? It's no different with yourself. You must give yourself what you need deep down and what will help you to find peace, acceptance and grounding. You must seek to become all that you perceive is missing in those situations when you get really anxious.
This is where the critical element of personal responsibility and radical acceptance comes in. Accepting the issues are present is the first part. Tieing them together with past experiences is another. Understanding the basis for the core issues another, this is where learning (a huge part of the process) comes in. And the personal responsibility present to put all this together and then understand is it only you who can take all this and walk through the door you've been potentially been struggling to walk through all your life. Accepting your part to play in it all. Refusing to see your social anxiety as a disease that exists seperate to yourself and will only be cured when it happens to disappear one day never to come back again. Taking ownership of your life and understanding how all aspects of your life right now is determining the overall health and wellbeing of you right now.
I still struggle. I'm a self taught high school drop-out student therapist of many years seeking to get qualified. It's tough sometimes. Social anxiety may never go away completely and depending on exposure to trauma/re-traumatization and other life events, it will be present in varying degrees. From my understanding and studies, social anxiety is a product of early development whereby our environments were invalidating in some way or another and we learned to adapt to these environments, potentially without the correct support, and now we continue to practice these coping mechanisms even though they are based, like mentioned above, on dysfunctional foundations. If this is true, trauma may indeed be involved as could many other significant experiences and depending on how these are present will determine whether our symptoms are pronounced or perhaps not so much. Even if social anxiety is present, the work done on the underlying core issues themselves will aid in the reducion of social anxiety symptoms, in my opinion.