Hi Raushan,
You are describing social anxiety. It is is a difficult one - I struggled with it a lot during my life.
It kind of risks becoming a 'self-fulfilling prophecy' at a certain point: you feel somehow 'deficient' in social interactions and situations, this can then make those situations feel more awkward or acute, and this feeds back and reinforces the sense that there is something 'not right' about you .. and so the circle turns.
Earlier I used to thought that maybe it's due to meditation but now I think I have been facing this situation since childhood due to my personality. And this gap becoming bigger as I am growing older.
In my experience it is not inherent in who we are - much more to do with social conditioning (and then self-conditioning building on this). Personality is built on a foundation from our early interactions with those around us. This is where the saying 'show me a child age seven and I will show you the man' comes from. It isn't fixed though. Why would any of us be meditating and walking the path if we believed that, or if that was our experience of things?
As Tulku Ringu Rinpoche said to me "
the most important teaching of the Buddha is that you can change yourself".
There are many dynamics that can lead to such issues. It can be something as trivial as a valued family member who gets a laugh from belittling you in front of others when you are a growing child; or something more serious such as having a mother who has narcissistic tendencies and/or is over-bearing: who pushes you to 'be something' you are not; and a thousand other possibilities. The cause is not so relevant as the cure (which is not to say that sometimes we may face painful truths about the cause while exploring the cure).
I also felt that sometimes we socialize just to escape from our minds. But still, I find overall at a loss.
Yes, socialisation can be a way of escape - often lubricated by alcohol or other substances that lower the normal barriers of social conditioning and the mind. Then you wake up with some kind of hangover - not just the one you get from drinking alcohol, but an emotional or 'psychic' hangover - from knowing that you filled the void for a few hours, but at the expense of your own being, your own truth: and, that filling the void with trivial stuff is impermanent and inherently leads to longer term suffering.
Have anyone here felt something similar? If anyone knows can you please give some suggestions how to balance it?
As I mentioned above I struggled with these issues for a lot of my life. I didn't realise consciously until I was about your age that I suffered acute social embarrassment and anxiety. This was some years before I became a practitioner. When I decided to tell a few close friends they really didn't believe me at first as I had hidden it so well behind a mask.
That was the beginning of me facing up to this in my own life. I learned a lot by being honest with myself and others. One of the things I learned is that I do not want to have fake social interactions with people who cannot accept me for who I am. I don't wish to socialise with people who don't want to be honest and mindful about themselves or hear those things from others. Usually such people's level of care towards others is as shallow as the activities they engage in.
Meditation is definitely a help and not a hindrance in my experience. Mindfulness is synonymous with 'remembering': it works on a lot of levels. On a basic level is being mindful of who you spend time with, choosing friends who have wholesome motivations, who care to be mindful of their own being and have no objection to engaging with you being a mindful person.
Remembering or being mindful of your own needs, and finding the kernel of what those needs are behind the social conditioning is greatly helped by meditation. Being mindful of equanimity is helpful too. Equanimity towards your own being and towards others: recognising that we are all living in a world of masks and not allowing the fakery of this to over-come you, or lead you into unwholesome action.
Other things I have found that help have included looking within to find and establish my comfort levels, what defines them, where they came from, and then re-aligning them with my felt sense of what works for me - or sometimes gently challenging/pushing myself to extend my boundaries in a manageable way.
I discovered I have no interest in the way people normally define themselves in this world: by work, or money, or status, or power, or how hot their wife/husband is ... etc, etc. These things have
zero relevance in how I value people and interactions with them. I value people and my interactions with them on how honest and straightforward they are; on how compassionate and true to their own morality they are; on the quality of equanimity they bring to any situation. Basically, on how wholesome and in line with fundamental moral/human values spending time with others is (these values being very much aligned with Buddhist ethics since I learned about this, though even before as it is what "felt right").
On a very practical level, I discovered I am more comfortable in small groups and one to one conversations and interactions. Any big group has a danger of tacitly agreeing a 'group mentality', and this involves pushing aside your own needs/values in an unhealthy way. I choose to spend social time mostly with one or two other people, so I can really have time for them, and they can really have time for me. I am comfortable in some social situations with a maximum of about five to six people, depending on circumstances: beyond that things tend either to split between the group into sub-factions, which becomes a problem for me, or the 'group-think' takes over and I walk away rather than getting lost in it.
So for me I worked on a) being honest with myself, b) choosing friends with discernment, c) choosing social situations with discernment, d) listening to others mindfully - key to this is not thinking of responses before you have fully listened to,
and heard the other - and therefore, responding to them mindfully, e) knowing what I wanted to say and saying it mindfully, f) choosing to not get involved with or walk away from people who either lack a mindful approach or situations which engender a lack of mindful approach.
In about 1995, before I became a practitioner, I had over 150 social contacts in my address book. These were people I would go to parties with, or have dinner with or meet for drinks etc. One day, looking through this list, I realised that I really did not know most of these people. I realised that most of the activities I engaged in were quite empty of real depth and meaning. I decided to do something quite radical, because I also realised I
was not capable of having true meaningful relationships with all these people. There literally was not enough time in the day for it.
So the first thing I did was go through this list and rigorously cut out the people who, when I reflected on things, I felt I would never make a meaningful, deep , and reciprocal relationship with. I cut the list down to about 25 people who I felt there was some possibility for a real meaningful and wholesome friendship.
During the next month or so, I made a point of meeting and spending some time with each of these people alone (or in couples where there was a partnership). During those interactions I asked them things about themselves on a deeper level than normal. Not invasive, but deliberately pushing boundaries a little: to see how they responded, including whether they engaged and whether they reciprocated and did the same with me.
By the end of that experiment I cut my list of friends down to seven people. Of course, a lot of time has passed since then, I have met a lot of other people .. some have come and gone, some have stayed around. Yet of that group of seven, I am still in regular contact with five of them twenty six years later, and have spoken with three of them in the last ten days. They will probably all be friends until the day one of us dies. One of the other two died already, and the other one we discovered an irreconcilable difference and parted ways agreeing with equanimity and friendliness that at that point in our lives, our lives had parted ways.
The truth is if you can fill the fingers of one hand with true friends you are doing well in this world: friends who will listen and hear; who will respond compassionately and with equanimity; who will be friends without needing you to be anything other than what you are - these friendships are actually quite rare in this world. We are born alone and die alone. That is true for all people - it is enhanced for those of us who are choosing the meditative path - to 'swim upstream', the wholesome life, or 'the road less traveled'.
The truth about friendships is that good ones are rare, they are open to (and can accommodate) change as we/other change, and they may be lasting or transient. The most defining factor in true friendship is
quality over quantity.
In choosing a few good friends wisely, and investing time in those friendships, you will gain a better quality of life than by "fitting in with the crowd" - every time.
With love,
Matthew
Topic: I think I am bad in dealing with people Any suggestions (Read 1312 times)
October 07, 2007, 06:41:18 AM