Social Phobia And Social Anxiety

There are many people in the world who find it quite difficult to socialise. This may seem absurd to even suggest but I know from personal experience just how hard it can be to mix with people when you have certain issues which affect your overall confidence. I have now managed to gain enough confidence to enjoy the social scene after learning how to beat my own demons and life has never been so good.

The reason why I had a low self-esteem which led me to having a form of social phobia was mainly down to the fact that I suffered with a speech impediment commonly known as stuttering or stammering. Some might say that I should have been stronger and that I should not have let the stutter control and dictate my life in the way that it certainly did. I just found socialising and meeting new people as one big choir and I hated being unable to converse with them in a fluent manner. In a way I even felt sorry for these people having to talk to someone like myself when they no doubt would much prefer to talk to someone who is fluent.

In the end I decided that it would be much easier if I started to decline social invitations and to just basically stay at home. This is what I did and I have to say that I was quite happy on my own and rarely became bored. I did not miss the social circuit as I had never really enjoyed it in the first place. The problem however was that the longer I spent at home, the harder it became to go out. I even started finding going out to work as some what daunting. I was becoming a social misfit but a happy one at that.

My mind began playing tricks on me and I had voices in my head, I was going mad! The voices were telling me that all of my friends and family thought that I was a freak and that I was a loser.

I have always wanted and had a kind of need to be liked and these voices made me become quite down and depressed. I needed to come out of this rut and to get back into the real world, I had been hiding away for far too long.

There are many forms of treatment for people who have a social phobia and I slowly but surely began to investigate them. After a lot of soul searching and determination I was able to find the solutions and no longer have a phobia of socialising or any of those horrible voices in my head.

Stephen Hill helps to promote a number of websites including:

Social phobia treatment

stuttering

Anxiety disorders and phobias