Hi Sophia

I really feel like I know your situation. I’m also 25 and also use to have really bad social anxiety. But I have had a lot of help to deal with it for the last two years and have been seeing a therapist and going to group meetings. I’m so sorry that you havent been able to get any treatment, but actually what helped me the most was things I read myself, but since i’m from norway most of it is norwegian psychology books/articles, but I will try to explain it to you as good as I can, because i think i found a few things that really helped me a lot. I think the therapists I have had focused a lot on low self-esteem and although I think this is also the main problem.. for me at least, what has helped me the most was the advise that i needed to stop to try and fix my myself and focus is to focus more on empathy for other people instead

Of cause I can’t say if you feel the same way, but for me, I always imagine and analyze what is going on in other peoples heads and reacting and judging this according to my own bad self-esteem. Because I usually think really badly about myself, this is naturally what I imagine other people think too. When I’m focusing on how I appear and at the same time trying to remember what my therapists told me about deep breathing and self-worth I can’t even have a normal conversation. I’m trying so hard to control the situation and trying so hard to relax at the same time that the situation just becomes more tense. It’s so paralyzing and painful

But at the same time I don’t feel like this around some few close friends, because they know me so well and they’ve already seen me in all kinds every mood and situation. I feel safe and I don’t overanalyse because i don’t focus on my self-image. This shows that I’m able to forget my anxiety and at the same time it also makes me feel like social anxiety isn’t really a part of my personality, but more like an phobia that isn’t there all the time

My anxiety really started going away in other situations too after i realized this and when I became genuinely more interested in people around me. New people don’t know you or your worth from the beginning like your close friends or family do, but instead of being afraid that they wouldn’t recognize my worth, I tried to focus on them. You can’t just stop negative thoughts from coming up, but you can shift your attention back to the other person. The more I focus on feeling compassion or empathy for the person I’m talking too, the less I think about how they perceive me. I still care about it, but it becomes much less important. When I started doing this people really reacted to me differently and I found out that a lot of people around me was just as insecure as I was, just in very different ways

I write all this because i really hope it can help you too! I think I know how you feel and sometimes I’m still afraid that I will end up completely alone.

But I try to remember that the negative reactions I think I see in people is more a projection of how I feel about yourself, more than its reality. I can’t control how they feel and there will always be someone who doesn’t like me, but I know that it is not important to me. I try to always see it as if I’m choosing empathy over the risk of being embarrassed

I think maybe I read this in a Mark Epstein book, but he says that it’s impossible to control what other people think and really hard even to control your own thoughts, but you can always choose how to react to it. You can just begin to notice which of your thoughts comes from out of fear, and then without judging them, choose not to react to them

I’m not saying that you’re not already really empathetic or able to feel love towards other people because you have social anxiety. If you’re like me, maybe anxiety is just stopping you from expressing it. I used to hate myself for having anxiety because i thought i was self-centered and weak, but its really not self-centrered to want to connect with other people and its really not weak to face anxiety every day

I really hope this can help you a little!