A related example is my “On insecurity as a friend”: I’d on some level bought into messages saying that confidence is always good and insecurity is always bad, so when I had feelings of insecurity, I treated them as a sign of irrationality to override.
What I didn’t realize was that I had those feelings because of having screwed up socially in the past, and that they were now correctly warning me about things which might again have bad consequences. Just trying to walk over them meant that I was ignoring important warnings, sometimes causing things to blow up in my face. What made the feelings easier to deal with was when I started actually taking them seriously as hypotheses to consider. After that, the relevant part could tone down the intensity of the social anxieties, as shouting so loudly as to force me to withdraw socially wasn’t the only way that it could make itself heard.
A related example is my “On insecurity as a friend”: I’d on some level bought into messages saying that confidence is always good and insecurity is always bad, so when I had feelings of insecurity, I treated them as a sign of irrationality to override.
What I didn’t realize was that I had those feelings because of having screwed up socially in the past, and that they were now correctly warning me about things which might again have bad consequences. Just trying to walk over them meant that I was ignoring important warnings, sometimes causing things to blow up in my face. What made the feelings easier to deal with was when I started actually taking them seriously as hypotheses to consider. After that, the relevant part could tone down the intensity of the social anxieties, as shouting so loudly as to force me to withdraw socially wasn’t the only way that it could make itself heard.