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Social skills destroyed

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Dr.kush

Bluelighter
Joined
May 9, 2010
Messages
248
Location
Ventura
I have always been shy, however, now since I have been clean for a good period of time and actually look at myself I think drugs have destroyed my social skills.

This should be for young people for I am a perfect example of how drugs can damage brain function, or increase preexisting mental disorders. I started weed, and alcohol in 8th grade, around 13 years old. Within two years I was a full blown heroin addict. I used until I was 17, went to rehab 4 times, and relapsed continuously on weed until about 5 months ago, where I had enough.

But now it seems that my brain stopped progressing at this first years of teenage life, I have no idea how people got use to being around people (I was the 'lonely stoner') I have zero social skills. Was it the drugs? Well I will tell you that on Heroin I was quite talkative, I LOVED opiates because I was able to talk- so was it the drugs that worsened social skills?

Marijuana might actually have started that cycle of isolation, heroin just deepened. I am the type of person that 'just needs a few beers' then I talk.

There seems a direct link to drugs and social skills.
 
I don't think that the drugs destroyed your social skills, but I do think that you may have been self-medicating both your inhibitions and your loneliness. I know a lot of people that went through their teenage years doing drugs, and it prevented them from learning how to integrate themselves comfortably in social situations, so when they sober up, they're kinda lost and very shy. I went through periods where during my teenage years I smoked a lot of pot alone, although still had friends. But eventually I had to learn to socialize because I was tired of being the quiet kid. And I did eventually work on my social skills and became pretty extroverted and likable. Then I dipped back into substance abuse, drank for a few years (mostly alone), medicated my loneliness and kinda destroyed my motivation to put myself out there. So now I'm right back to where I'm rather shy and timid around people. It's easy to forget how to socialize when you use drugs and alcohol to cope with loneliness. We just have to put ourselves out there, even if it's uncomfortable at first. Personally I'll always be a loner deep down, but that doesn't mean I can't enjoy being myself with people. It's just a matter of learning how to bring myself out in the open again, without relying on drugs and alcohol to do it for me. And you can learn to do the same. At first it's all about practice and taking small risks. Putting your inhibitions to the side feels dangerous at first, especially when you're sober, but it's better than bottling yourself up.
 
I am in the same boat and the only way to get over this sort of thing is practice. Accept the reality that everybody is so worried about how THEY are being perceived by YOU that only rarely are people truly thinking of you in a judgmental way.

I'd say join a club or something like that in your area, I'm joining a hiking club in a couple of weeks.

When your autonomic nervous system perceives something like social situations as a threat, and you go along with that system and avoid the perceived threat, you strengthen those mental circuits. Only by consistently going against your instinct to be lonely will you start to develop real social skills.

Serious drug abuse stunts mental growth. I still have a part of me that thinks I "need a beer" to talk to people. You just have to ignore that urge, ignore your fear to a certain extent (though you don't want to push yourself too hard either), and keep practicing. That could mean inviting friends over to your house more often, or something as simple as walking to a library to return books (which is where I'm at right now with my anxiety unfortunately, just that journey and all the crowds is enough to "exercise" my social skills), etc.

Just figure out where you're at, how much social stress you can reasonably handle, and face that stress.

Edit: haha me and blahman gave you the same advice, that's pretty cool
 
It's a baby! said:
Accept the reality that everybody is so worried about how THEY are being perceived by YOU that only rarely are people truly thinking of you in a judgmental way.
Click to expand...

Quoted for truth. I try my best to remind myself of that.

Also, just to add, what really sucked for me about having to drink in order to engage in socializing, is that even though it allowed me to open up, I ended up getting drunk and acting like a complete jackass without realizing it. So you either got sober/somber/quiet blahman, or you got drunk/loud/jackass blahman.
 
I think it can work both ways.
Growing up, I was always very shy and introverted, never able to develop relationships or even care to be in one. Didn't know what made social situations tick, couldn't pick up on body language and cues, and was pretty awkward. When I entered highschool, that all changed as I started using weed, coke, and ecstasy heavily with basically everything else. I don't do "drugs" now anymore, and I can honestly say I'm changed. I'm very sociable and likable now. I can engage with people in conversation with such confidence. The way I talk about things, and the way I use more than proper language with politeness has everyone thinking I'm a very innocent boy, and they can't even imagine how I used to be. It really helped me a lot.
 
I was in a similar situation to you when I got off hard drugs. I had been introverted to the point of awkwardness as long as I can remember, in school I was always awkward in social situations. In highschool I started using MDMA, strong opiates and benzodiazapines. Under the influence of thse drugs, I was much more confident in social situations and interacting with others seemed more "natural".

Looking back, I realize that socializing while high wasn't any more normal then isolation. I didn't really want to form relationships for the sake of forming relationships, I wanted to form relationships because that's what everyone else around me seemed to do so easily. I wanted to seem just as normal as anyone else; I didn't want to stand out as a loner.

In retrospect it was a disaster. I hit rock bottom trying to use hard drugs to make myself someone I am not. I had great social skills while on drugs, but it was because I was high. Drugs didn't give me any sort of tangible social skills. As soon as they wore off; I was back to square one.

Once I found a balance in my life, I had much less trouble around people. When I was honest with myself about how much I wanted to interact with people, everything was much easier. I'm not a hermit or anything like that, but I do value a decent amount of time to myself every day. I really like to be in control of the amount of time I spend alone and the amount of time I spend in public/around friends and family. I think that there are a lot of people who are the same way.
 
eh, i did the same thing in high school, or at least *edit* after sophomore year. i was always awkward since i can remember, and using drugs definitely helped me to open up. now that i'm clean, i'm in the same boat. i think that drugs only help us drop inhibitions, because a few beers isn't going to create some incredible social machine of a person, they're just going to help to pull back some layers of passive bystanding and throw you into the game a little bit more. plus, the action of drinking alone is a relatively social thing. i've noticed that when i go to parties (although now sober,) it helps tremendously to have something to do with my hands, ie: smoke cigarettes, drink out of a glass, play a hand of cards. just try to consider your social skills as another thing that you'll have to relearn since clean, along with coping with boredom and lonliness, etc.

also, like pr0d1gy said, it helps a lot to balance your alone time with party/ social time.
 
like they say in AA, you have to change your playgrounds and playmates. it's hard though, especially in a small town where the only 'friends' that you have are using friends, which a drug counselor told me aren't really friends at all. hanging out with my old using buddies is always reaaal awkward too, because i know how loosened up i would be, even if we weren't fucked up because we were at least on a mission to find drugs. now it's like, ehhhh, i have nothing to talk about with these people, i don't know why we ever even try to chill to begin with, other than for nostalgia's sake, because i'm pretty much the only completely sober one, they all at least still smoke pot and drink. and nothing's worse than when your friend who "gets" your sobriety asks you to smoke a joint or passes you a bottle of tequila. at some point you've gotta ask yourself, are these really your friends? or people that you would want to include in your sober social circle?
 
I've always had social anxiety, but yeah I do think that drugs have stepped it up a notch. I'm not sure if it's worse now or I'm just more aware of it or what's up. I think it might be some of each. My psychologist has been trying to get me into group therapy for social anxiety (yeah, I know it sounds like it'd be a just a bunch of people avoiding eye contact and not speaking), but my schedule hasn't worked out to allow it yet. I do think it would be beneficial and am willing to try it. In the past I was terrified of group therapy, but I've found it refreshing when I actually went through with it and found people that could relate to me and I could relate to as well.
 
I can relate a lot to this topic. Since I stopped drinking and cut way back on drugs (technically stopped them too since it's been a couple months now), I've basically lost most of my social life. I've cut a lot of people out of my life so as to prevent me from falling back into that lifestyle, but at the same time have not had much success making new friends (in person). I've been medicated in some way for going on ten years, up until this year, and I just have absolutely no clue how to go about meeting people without that help. I'm a classical case of awkwardness I suppose; making a new friend is orders of magnitude more difficult for me than doing calculus or programming a computer.

What seems to have happened is that my inner voice feels like it's on speed nonstop. Seriously, though, I overanalyse everything, and then do it some more. I second-guess myself, I second-guess the intentions of others, I am convinced that everything in my life is a hundred times more complicated than it probably is and I just cannot seem to turn it off and relax. I make an assumption, perhaps flawed, that because I think so much about everything, everyone else must be thinking just as much about their own things (we're all the same people, right?). And if I'm stressing and obsessing all the time, then everyone else must be taking things just as seriously. So for someone to tell me to relax and to understand that the mountains I'm making out of social situations are not really mountains, I think that it's just the person trying to make me comfortably blind to the reality. That people analyse me and what I do just as much as I do it to them (I don't mean this in a bad/manipulative way, just as a part-of-life).

I'm extremely shy in person, to the point where unless I have a requirement to for work as a pretense, it's impossible for me to initiate conversations with strangers. Panic, racing heart, fear, insecurity...without any type of chemical assistance, it's just too difficult to do. Or when I actually go through and do it, I stumble over my own words and then get embarrassed and reply the situation 10000000 times in my memory, preventing me from being able to enjoy myself for a long time, or even be able to sleep. And then with the friends I have, I talk their ears off, and by now it's safe to assume that most of them probably think that I'm mentally insane and they just let me ramble on.
 
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I think it also the reliance of a chemical to help you. That is the 'insanity' of drug abuse: you think you need chemicals to do everyday things, however, you do NOT!
 
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