How to overcome social anxiety from childhood trauma

One of the many outcomes of complex PTSD or childhood trauma is social anxiety. That’s a sense of fear in situations where you feel judged and negatively evaluated by others.

Some believe that social anxiety was invented by pharmaceuticial companies and is no different than shyness. However, the fear and self-loathing that accompanies social anxiety stemming from childhood trauma makes it unique in my opinion.

In this post, I’ll go through some of the reasons for social anxiety that has its roots in childhood trauma. Then I’ll cover how these manifest as symptoms of the condition, and, finally, what to do about it.

social anxiety & childhood trauma

Lack of acceptance

If you grew up in a home with abuse or neglect, you would be a prime candidate for social anxiety later on. If your parents or caregivers made you feel unaccepted, it will be difficult to believe others will accept you.

Consider the wisdom of your inner child whose goal it is to protect you from harm. If the people who are supposed to love you reject you, it’s safer to expect that rejection from others than to be blindsided and disappointed when you experience it.

Poor boundaries

As a child in a dysfunctional home, you had to abandon yourself to get your needs met. Your parents or caregivers forced you to pay more attention to their needs than yours, and that conditioned you to have poor boundaries to survive.

Again, your inner child intelligently figured out how to keep you safe. S/he avoided rejection by the people you depended on to stay alive by focusing on what others wanted from you.

Weak sense of self

You got the message that you were not good enough and not acceptable as you were. Instead of helping you understand yourself and explore your place in the world, your parents crushed your spirit.

Healthy parents help their children learn their own strengths and weaknesses. They praise them when they do a good job and encourage them to follow their interests so they can contribute to the world in a positive way.

Unhealthy parents show little interest in their children or notice them only to criticize. Instead of self-exploration, the child survives by trying to become what they think their parents want - and never succeeding.

This leads to a fractured sense of self where you are unclear on your values or what you stand for. You have spent so much time figuring out other people’s wants and needs, you have no idea of your own.

how these manifest in social situations

Fear of rejection

While many people go into a social situation with a sense of play and curiosity, you enter it like a battle. That’s because as a child you were too busy defending against threats to think about what made you happy.

While other children explored their environments with confidence, your world became small due to hypervigilance. That’s the constant feeling of being on guard for something bad that’s going to happen.

You go into social situations in this defensive state which makes it difficult to relax. Instead of asking what you want, you are hyper-aware and attuned to what others want from you.

You may read neutral expressions as negative and then try to win them over through people pleasing. Healthy people read this behavior as dishonest (because it is) and decide not to engage with you further.

This confirms your erroneous belief that you’re not lovable. You are, but when you present a false self, people are not dealing with the real you.

Self-abandonment

Social anxiety is experienced as an attack on the nervous system. Your fight or flight response becomes activated because interacting with others feels like an opportunity to get hurt rather than connect.

That’s because in childhood your parents never sought connection with you. This leads to attachment wounds that impair our ability to relate to others as adults.

Instead of asking yourself what you want in a friend or romantic interest, you disconnect from yourself to please them. You ask yourself what you can do to make them happy and this feels like a way to survive as it did in childhood.

Social anxiety hijacks our nervous system and makes us feel as though someone else’s approval means life or death to us. Ironically, this approval-seeking leads to rejection from healthy people who sense the dishonesty inherent in your self-abandonment.

more symptoms of social anxiety

Feeling triggered

Your social anxiety may be compounded by the fact that you have trouble regulating your emotions. You might feel triggered by other peoples’ words or behavior which makes you experience a loss of control.

Your fight or flight response becomes activated because the trigger brings up childhood memories of feeling dismissed. You were not allowed to speak your mind then and feel the same restriction now even though you’re an adult.

These somatic responses are not governed by time. They arise in response to a threat, whether that’s real or imagined. So, even though you’re dealing with a social equal, your body feels like that child overpowered by a parent with no escape, help, or voice.

You never received any support around your emotions growing up. In fact, you learned to suppress those so your parents didn’t have to deal with them.

This leads to buried resentment toward others who express themselves freely. It also manifests as inappropriate outbursts of anger when you can no longer push down how you feel (because you’re human).

Addiction or dependence

To combat your intense fear around social situations you may use alcohol or other substances to calm you down. This is another way you present a false self because “liquid courage” is not real.

You risk drinking too much to assuage your fears and behaving in ways you regret. With your inhibitions lowered, you are more likely to react to triggers in a volatile way, less able to suppress your feelings as you do when you’re sober.

We do not want to suppress our feelings, but to learn to express them in healthy ways. Alcohol and drugs will not help you do that. In fact, they exacerbate the problem by adding shame when you behave in ways that don’t make you proud.

Ironically, you use these substances to create more ease in social situations. Instead, they make the situation worse by preventing you from facing the real problem which is healing your childhood trauma.

Photo by Lesly Juarez on Unsplash

how to overcome social anxiety

Heal the inner child.

Your inner child is the one who should have been playing and exploring while your parents took care of you. Instead, it became tasked with keeping you safe because you could not trust your caregivers to have your back.

Even though you’re no longer dependent on them to survive, your inner child keeps rushing in to protect you. Unfortunately this protection manifests as self-sabotage.

The inner child is the one who won’t let you relax in social situations. S/he fears that letting down your guard will ensure you get hurt or disappointed.

Reassure the child that you no longer need her/him to protect you. You’re an adult with access to resources and won’t die if you experience rejection or abandonment from others.

My course Confusion to Clarity has a full module and workbook on healing the inner child. Click here to learn more and access the training.

Develop your sense of self.

Take time to go within and get to know yourself. You are so used to looking outward for validation that you have disconnected from your true self.

It may feel dangerous to your inner child to self-connect because you had to adopt an outward gaze to survive. Knowing and anticipating others’ needs kept you safe and helped you avoid punishment.

However, knowing who you are helps combat social anxiety because you’re less dependent on validation from others. You’ll tune into your own wants and needs rather than obsessing over others’.

Discover your likes and dislikes and get to know your values so you know what you stand for. Much of who you are is characterized by your tastes and what you enjoy so spend more time getting to know what those are.

the role of self-compassion

Acknowledge your feelings.

Instead of escaping your feelings through substance abuse, or feeling ashamed of them, accept them. Allow yourself to experience your social anxiety without the extra layer of shame.

Self-compassion does not consist of positive psychology where you try to talk yourself out of your feelings. The way you feel has nothing to do with reality, so logic is not going to help.

When your body is hijacked by a nervous system takeover, pep talks will not do the trick. In fact, they are another form of self-abandonment.

Comfort yourself through your feelings. Remind yourself that it makes sense to feel the way you do because of your childhood conditioning.

Mindfulness can help as it encourages you to accept how you feel in the moment without judgment or criticism. My clients have had success with Tara Brach’s R.A.I.N. meditation which you can do here.

Remember you are not alone.

Many people struggle with social anxiety and other outcomes of childhood trauma. There is nothing wrong with you and you are part of a larger community of people overcoming the same issues.

Everyone experiences some form of social anxiety, whether while giving a speech or performing for others. It is human nature to feel some trepidation when encountering new people and you are not alone.