Do people with social anxiety have it worse or better?

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meowmeowhimeowmeow
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13 Mar 2017, 6:29 pm

Honestly I'm curious what all of you think. I have quite the bad case of social anxiety and I wanted to know if thats any different from your autism thing. (I DONT HAVE AUTISM) I mean, social wise. :skull: :skull: :skull: :skull: :skull:
I also want you to remember that at any moment you could die from this clown.... :twisted: :skull: :skull: :skull:



kraftiekortie
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13 Mar 2017, 6:32 pm

I like cats, too.

It sucks to have social anxiety.



248RPA
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13 Mar 2017, 6:42 pm

I don't think you can compare it as worse or better. You have different severities of both.

(Correct me if I'm wrong.) Social anxiety without autism, as I understand it, is when you know how to socialise, but you get anxiety from having to interact with people.

Social wise, autism causes you to not know how to interact with people. Social situations can seem very unpredictable. Autistics often have a hard time with unpredictable things. An autistic person can develop social anxiety from not knowing what to expect in social situations. But that doesn't always happen.


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Joe90
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13 Mar 2017, 7:37 pm

I have both ASD and social anxiety. I'm not the best at making friends or socialising, but I am not socially clueless either. Even as a small child I was socially-orientated, but still socially awkward, if that makes sense. I was naturally interested in other children, and people in general, and I would always draw pictures or write stories of people (mostly about myself and my family and friends), and I made my toys socially interact when I played, using a lot of imagination.

OK I think I might have gone a bit off-topic there, but I'm just saying that having social anxiety is frustrating when you have ASD and ADHD. It's like my social performance is so important to me, and I'm aware of other people's thoughts and feelings, so that makes having ASD harder than it already is. Sometimes I wish I was more socially clueless, just getting hyperfocused into an intelligent special interest, being oblivious to how other people judge me, and just being disconnected from the social world.
But I'm not, and I can't make myself be. Social interaction with other human beings is as important to me as it is for the average NT.


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kraftiekortie
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13 Mar 2017, 7:41 pm

It is well known that people with Asperger's have the intention to socialize and be friends with people---but they go about it rather awkwardly.

Case in point: myself. I think of myself as Aspergian, but not as someone with Asperger's (because of my severe speech delay). I used to go up to people and ask (sometimes) embarrassing questions. I wanted to be in contact with people, but I just didn't know how to go about it.

I also used to brag about something like knowing all the capitals in the world. I thought people wanted to hear how smart I was. I didn't know that many people could give a rat's butt about even a little kid's intelligence. I also was unaware when people would get bored of me, and wanted me to just "shut up."

I guess I had the "opposite" of social anxiety. I had it pretty bad LOL



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13 Mar 2017, 9:46 pm

I have plain old social anxiety with​ women and children. I have super-duper-DUPER social anxiety with other men and did with boys when I was young. I survive by surrounding myself with women and children as much as possible. I have had a few successful friendships with men, but in hindsight I realize that almost all of them were pretty feminine compared to others​. Although I've always been comfortable being male myself, I understand very little about how most men work. For a long time I assumed they were all faking it--that no one could be that way naturally.



citoyenlambda
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13 Mar 2017, 10:10 pm

When I was younger, I used to go around and try to butt in people's conversations when they interested me. I thought that's how people made friends. I was never gregarious, but at least I was slightly interested.

Of course, high school completely neutralized my idea of how social contact was supposed to happen, quite violently I might add. I developed severe social anxiety from always doing it wrong and always being told to sod off.

Once I had my diagnosis at 17, so many pieces finally fell in place. I tried to learn how to do it the normal way, and to some extent I did, but people could perceive my anxiety and my complete lack of confidence. It was like speaking French as a second language in the middle of very stereotypical France, where people snob you if you don't pronounce everything perfectly. I felt like I was judged on every mistake, and in this "creep" climate, I probably was. Despite a decade of trying I had not made a single real connection. In the end I shrugged and just rubbed the need to have social interaction from my psyche, which was much more easily done than trying to contort myself to please NTs. I lead a tranquil life now, free from social expectations and anxiety. I haven't been this happy in years. I used to have a lot of "cringe flashbacks" where my episodic memory seemingly shuffled for an embarrassing moment of my life and made me relive it and all the emotions I felt thereafter. I have much less of these now. It's definitely not a "normal" lifestyle but as trying to be normal did nothing for me I figured this might be better.

To answer your question, as someone who went from AS to AS + SA, I think it's worse to have social anxiety if its crippling than to simply have AS. Both together though is insane and I wouldn't wish it on my worst enemy. Mild to moderate social anxiety is basically just apprehension and might be totally normal and expected. However, severe anxiety paralyzes you and leads you to inaction, and even if you power through it and act, this same anxiety sets you up for failure, and will make you relive those failures again and again every time you try to get yourself out of the pit. With AS you may well be gregarious and uninhibited, but simply odd. You might be frustrated for being unable to connect properly with others but you'll keep trying. Basically, it's the difference between having and losing hope.


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Scorpius14
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13 Mar 2017, 10:13 pm

I stammer alot when speaking and it varies depending on the atmosphere, i dont have an official diagnosis but my diagnosis of kanners may have dissipated through adolescence and it still remains a residual problem that i cannot comprehend social situations, its alright if im under the influence of alcohol but when completely sober my bipolar (again undiagnosed) tendencies switch on and I either go into ignore mode and just shut myself off from everyone or be really optimistic and high-spirited which usually ends up falling down rapidly likening the state to a drug addict going into withdrawal.

The fact that my close relatives still treat me as though my sociability has diminished, has shut me out of the real world leaving me isolated and when they ask me to go out and be yourself, i find myself perplexed at the thought of going out and meeting strangers. I don't think i have autism, but that my social anxiety is brought on by lack of exposure earlier in life: I wanted to go to football clubs, fun events, teambuilding exercises, once in a while but nope, they used the diagnosis to keep me indoors away from people and it has hurt my chances of a life.



Joe90
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14 Mar 2017, 4:54 am

Quote:
When I was younger, I used to go around and try to butt in people's conversations when they interested me. I thought that's how people made friends. I was never gregarious, but at least I was slightly interested.


I did that too, right up until I was 20, when I was humiliated about it by some bitchy people. I always knew I done it, but that's only because I always see others doing it all the time, and I got confused every time when people looked annoyed when I did it and not others. Even to this day I'm sure that the rule isn't ''don't speak unless you are specifically spoken to'', otherwise if it was, conversations would be pretty strained. I understand if it's a private personal conversation, but when it's just general small talk, I didn't think it was wrong to join in, as I see other people doing it all the time. Sometimes I see people at work having a genuine conversation in the cafeteria, then someone walks through the door and jumps into the conversation.


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14 Mar 2017, 8:38 am

I have both. It's like the social anxiety is an adaptation to being autistic, that keeps me from making social errors at the cost of constant terror.


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