10-22-2019, 02:24 PM
ME: WARNING MORE AUTOPSYCHOANALISIS AHEAD: Ok, Shannon asked why I fear embarrassment. Short answer. At this point it’s closely related to imposter syndrome.
Long answer. When I was a young kid, I was late to develop any kind of physical skills, I was VERY late to develop social skills, and I was funny looking, pretty seriously overweight and I had an odd self hypnosis behavior and a habit of spacing out (I mean really going somewhere else mentally) that lead to like mumbling to myself. In short, I was weird. I went to a very small town school in a very rural area. This was bad. I was picked on by just about everybody just about every day for the entire time I went to that school. It was brutal, and I was THE one, the bottom of the totem pole, the biggest target in my class. Unfortunately, in a small school like that, the social hierarchy is set in kindergarten. You can change all you want, but you’ll still be viewed and treated the same way you were no matter what you do. I became very sensitive to ANY attention because there was no such thing as good attention. If anyone so much as looked my direction, I felt embarrassed (fear) and not only the other kids, but the teachers found embarrassing me extremely amusing. This in and of itself would cause a severe fear of embarrassment. This went on from age five to age sixteen when mercifully, we moved. I had changed for the better without noticing.
I spent my last two and a half years of school somewhere else. It was a lot better. No one picked on me, I got some positive attention from girls. I did pretty well in school, and things started looking up. Unfortunately I took the self image and thought patterns with me. All of those “inner mes” were still there and feared embarrassment. In order to make the most of my fresh start, I successfully faked it till I made it, but I really feared that people would find out who I “really was”.
What was happening was that my inner six through sixteen year olds (oversimplification) passed on their messed up thought patterns to my inner seventeen year old and so on. (Got a pretty stark visual on this too, won’t share) The influence is still there though I’ve done a lot to mitigate it since then.
Long answer. When I was a young kid, I was late to develop any kind of physical skills, I was VERY late to develop social skills, and I was funny looking, pretty seriously overweight and I had an odd self hypnosis behavior and a habit of spacing out (I mean really going somewhere else mentally) that lead to like mumbling to myself. In short, I was weird. I went to a very small town school in a very rural area. This was bad. I was picked on by just about everybody just about every day for the entire time I went to that school. It was brutal, and I was THE one, the bottom of the totem pole, the biggest target in my class. Unfortunately, in a small school like that, the social hierarchy is set in kindergarten. You can change all you want, but you’ll still be viewed and treated the same way you were no matter what you do. I became very sensitive to ANY attention because there was no such thing as good attention. If anyone so much as looked my direction, I felt embarrassed (fear) and not only the other kids, but the teachers found embarrassing me extremely amusing. This in and of itself would cause a severe fear of embarrassment. This went on from age five to age sixteen when mercifully, we moved. I had changed for the better without noticing.
I spent my last two and a half years of school somewhere else. It was a lot better. No one picked on me, I got some positive attention from girls. I did pretty well in school, and things started looking up. Unfortunately I took the self image and thought patterns with me. All of those “inner mes” were still there and feared embarrassment. In order to make the most of my fresh start, I successfully faked it till I made it, but I really feared that people would find out who I “really was”.
What was happening was that my inner six through sixteen year olds (oversimplification) passed on their messed up thought patterns to my inner seventeen year old and so on. (Got a pretty stark visual on this too, won’t share) The influence is still there though I’ve done a lot to mitigate it since then.
