Royane Real
Can You Outgrow Your Shyness?
By Royane Real
Author of "Your Guide to Finding Friends, Making Friends and Keeping Friends”
Because I grew up to be a very shy person, I tried many ways of overcoming my shyness. It took me a long time, but eventually I was able to conquer my shyness.
When I was doing research for my book on how to make friends, I discovered that many people experience shyness from time to time. Apparently, only seven percent of adults say that they never feel shy.
Many children go through a stage where they are very shy around strangers.
Parents with a very shy child are often told, “Don’t worry, they’ll grow out of it!”
Is this true? Do children always outgrow their shyness? Some of us do grow out of our childhood shyness as we become more comfortable with ourselves and as we develop better social skills. We learn ways to make friends more easily.
Unfortunately, many of us who started out shy, also stay shy as adults. For some of us, our shyness is very severe and causes a host of problems that can be devastating, including a lifelong difficulty in making friends.
If we are lucky, we may be only mildly inconvenienced by our shyness. We may have mild form of shyness that does not have any harmful effects on our lives at all.
Many people feel a bit shy when they are in new situations with new people they don’t know. Most of us know that if we just stay with the situation and spend a few minutes making small talk with strangers, our sense of panic will calm down. As we get to know people better, we may not feel shy at all.
Very shy people often panic when they are surrounded by strangers, and many have developed the strategy of leaving any social encounter as soon as they possibly can. This is their way of dealing with the overwhelming sensations of shyness they experience. Unfortunately, by avoiding social situations, they are making their shyness stronger than ever.
It’s very likely that if these shy people stayed longer in the social situation that makes them nervous, they might start to calm down and actually start to know the other people better.
Shyness comes in varying degrees, and is not the same with everybody. Therefore it is difficult to give advice that will work in every situation.
If a person is inconvenienced or embarrassed by physical symptoms of shyness such as blushing, sweating, trembling or nausea, these can sometimes be relieved by such therapies as biofeedback training, or relaxation exercises.
A person who is shy and who is overwhelmed by a fear that others might judge or reject him, can benefit from learning cognitive therapy. Cognitive therapy teaches the patient a way of thinking that is very logical, whereas a person who fears rejection, quickly starts thinking many illogical thoughts.
For example, a person who has severe, persistent anxiety in social situations may experience such automatic and illogical thoughts as:
- If people don’t completely like me, it means that I am a social failure
- If I am not a complete social success it is horrible and unbearable
Here are a couple of links to sites that discuss cognitive therapy to treat shyness and social phobia. If you cannot click on them and get to the site you want, then copy and paste the web page address into your browser window.
http://www.socialanxietyassist.com.au/treatment/cognitive.shtml
http://www.socialanxiety.com.au/Treatment/Cognitive%20Therapy/treatment.htm
(The above comments were written by Royane Real. )
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