My therapist wants that I should talk with random strangers as kind of exposure therapy how to deal with succes and rejections. However I feel so much anxiety and became less motivated. Not that I don’t want to do it, I simply feel too much anxiety.
I really want to do it and complete the ‘therapy’. What can I do?
2 comments
What about online chatting?
I’ve been working on trying to practice getting better at striking up conversations with strangers recently too- I don’t have anxiety, really, but I’m just super duper shy and overthink myself out of these sorts of interactions on the regular lol. If someone strikes up a conversation with me I have no issues and can carry it no problem but being the initiator is hard!
What has helped me the most so far is finding a social environment that I genuinely enjoy, going to that sort of environment enough times that I start to feel comfortable in it (without worrying about socializing too much the first many many times), and now just recently I’ve started trying to start meeting and talking to people when I go there.
For me, that environment is concerts- I genuinely love live music and live in an area with a lot of local shows. It took a long time for me to work up the nerve to start going to shows alone (a lot of my friends will go to the occasional show, but not nearly as often as I like to and I got sick of not going when I couldn’t drag someone along) but once I started doing that I realized it would be a good place to potentially meet some people and practice my social skills. That said, it took lots and lots of shows before i started working up the nerve to actually strike up conversations lol. I would get a drink and stand in the middle of the crowd trying to figure out the right person to try and talk to and over think and over think and before I knew it I hadn’t talked to anyone by the end of the night. Not a problem, necessarily. The music was still awesome and I would have a great time! But yeah… Just recently I’ve started getting more comfortable being alone there and have gotten better at just walking up to random people between sets to say hi and talk about the band that just played or whatever. Have started seeing some familiar faces too, which helps. Even if you didn’t talk to someone last time you can still be like “hey, I think I saw you at -______- last week? Yeah? Nice! That was an awesome show right? Who are you here to see tonight?” and so on and so forth.
Obviously my experience is tailored specifically towards live music venues/events, but the same philosophy can work with whatever types of activities you like, I think 🙂 Just try and go, get used to whatever it is over weeks, months even. And then once you have your bearings *then* try doing the hard social stuff. Be open to opportunities before then (especially if other people approach/talk to you), but I think learning to walk before you run helps.