You don’t need to feel trapped by your inner critic’s nagging voice. Nor do you need to suppress it, or escape it. Sometimes all you need to do is notice it.
While on a flight home 10 years ago, I found myself sitting next to a woman who seemed like she wanted to bring something up with me. Finally, she got up the courage to ask me her question: “Did you ever attend Fairfield High School?”
“Yes I did,” I said. “I attended Fairfield for the first semester of 10th grade.” Before I could say another word she had an even more astonishing question: “Is your name Flowers? Are you Steve Flowers?”
I was blown away! “Yes, I am, but that was 46 years ago! How could you possibly see that skinny boy in me now?”
“You were in my class,” she said, “and I had a terrible crush on you. I wanted so much to say hello and introduce myself, but I never could muster the courage to approach you, and then you were gone. But I never forgot you and still think of you to this day.”
My heart and my eyes welled up with such an ache I couldn’t contain my tears, “You wanted to be my friend? I didn’t think anybody could see me. I felt there was something wrong with me and that I was different from everybody and that no one could ever like me.” I might have been able to have a friend, at least one friend, throughout that hellish eternity of high school.
Both of us had thoroughly identified with a flawed and unworthy sense of self that was separate and disconnected from everyone else. My life path through those days has led me to become a student of mindfulness and look for a way out of this painful delusion I’ve shared with millions.
A Mindful Path through Shyness
If you too are shy you can probably relate to this pain. Fearing the judgments and rejection of others, you avoid them and find yourself principally in a relationship with your own thoughts and feelings. Unfortunately, often this isn’t such a great relationship. In fact, you’ve probably noticed that you can say critical things to yourself that you would never say to anyone else or tolerate from anyone else for that matter.
It’s a predicament. You can’t outrun your own thoughts and feelings, so your meanest critic can follow you anywhere. And does. Relentlessly. As you read this, you may recognize an important and fundamental truth: The pain of shyness is not only created by these self-critical thoughts and feelings, it’s exacerbated into personal suffering by our efforts to avoid or escape those thoughts and feelings.
It’s only natural that you would try to use the same escape and avoidance strategy with thoughts and feelings as you’ve used with external threats. It’s what most people do. Unfortunately the very effort to escape thoughts or even suppress or control them usually intensifies them. As a result, this way of trying to deal with mental and emotional difficulties can lead to entrenched patterns that create a confusing mess, and more suffering in our lives. Avoidance is like Miracle-Gro for anxiety.
Fortunately, you don’t have to try to avoid or control painful thoughts and feelings in order to reduce their power and influence in your life. You can simply let them be and instead put your energy into what you value in life. There’s no need to seek out personality flaws and fix them in order to have fulfilling interpersonal relationships. In fact, being flawed has nothing to do with deep and satisfying relationships with other people anyway. (You’ve got to know it doesn’t, otherwise satisfying relationships would be impossible for everyone.) The practice of mindfulness can help you come into a healthier relationship with painful thoughts and feelings. It can help you come home to being who you are and where you are—without judging or trying to change anything that we experience.
Problematic shyness is inherently self-critical and rejecting, whereas the nature of mindful awareness is compassionate and accepting. Learning, through daily meditation practice, to look at yourself with awareness rather than criticism is an enormous benefit. It will allow you to begin to see the habits of mind and behavior that create the pain of shyness. This new awareness can loosen the grip of these old habits and reduce their power to influence you.
Mindfulness is:
- Non-judging – You can be accepting of yourself rather than self-critical.
- Moment-to-moment, here-and-now awareness – You can actually be here rather than in some imagined futures you feel anxious about.
- Turning toward and being with – You can stop avoiding the thoughts and feelings that scare you and stop generating the self-criticism and shame that can be fueled by avoidance.
- Compassionate and open-hearted awareness – You can extend compassion to yourself rather than condemnation.
- Opening to the fullness of being – You can stop identifying with a false and limiting sense of self.
- Generous of spirit – You can free yourself from the prison of self- consciousness and extend the same generosity of spirit to others that you extend to yourself.
The Healing Power of Kindness and Compassion
The notion that love starts within ourselves is widespread in many cultures. The Roman philosopher and statesman Seneca said, “If you wish to be loved, love.” The golden rule asks us to think of others feelings as we would think of our own feelings. Drawing on Tibetan wisdom, Pema Chödrön says, “What you do for yourself —any gesture of kindness, any gesture of gentleness, any gesture of honesty and clear seeing toward yourself—will affect how you experience your world. In fact, it will transform how you experience the world. What you do for yourself, you’re doing for others, and what you do for others, you’re doing for yourself.”
Kindness and compassion are qualities of the heart that often don’t come easy to us. In fact, most of us are habituated with thoughts and feelings that are exactly the opposite, especially with ourselves. You are more apt to be just as judgmental and critical with others as you are with yourself, and these attitudes of mind can come up quickly and be very compelling. Kindness and compassion are skills that may also grow in you as you deliberately cultivate these thoughts and intentions in your life. It’s like repeating scales on the piano until they come naturally.
Self-Compassion
A painful habit of people who are shy and socially anxious is reviewing personal collections of negative self-beliefs and judgments. Not only is this no fun (!), you can become so consumed with your thoughts, feelings, appearance, and behavior that you have a difficult time understanding, empathizing, or even noticing anyone else (like I never knew anyone liked me in high school). Usually the phrase “full of himself” refers to someone who is an exhibitionist or extraordinarily vain, but in truth, we’re just as full of ourselves, just as self-involved, when we’re under the spell of negative self-talk. This is how we create the state of mind that makes us feel separate from the fundamental essence of life.
Shyness involves maintaining thoughts and behaviors that alienate and isolate us from others. When in this state of mind, you experience yourself as separate and create a pe