Why are you so quiet?

During a break at my exercise class the other day a girl came up to me and said, “You’re so quiet. Are you always like this?” And I half-smiled and just said, “Yeah.” What I really wanted to say is, is it still that obvious that I’m shy? There, I said it. I’m shy.

This isn’t exactly a new development. In my earliest memories I am shy. I remember being too inhibited to talk to the other kids at a birthday party. I remember sitting at the coloring station in kindergarten afraid to talk to the girl sitting next to me. I was always sure the other kids wouldn’t like me, a feeling that has persisted for years and years. I don’t know where that came from, since my parents never told me anything like that. If anything, they spoiled me and thought everything I did was great. As far as I can tell I was born shy.

Some people grow out of shyness but unfortunately I wasn’t one of them. I just couldn’t understand why it was so easy for other people to just open their mouths and say something and why everyone else seemed to have more and better friends than I did. This wasn’t a case of being “a little shy.” This was a bizarre fear where I just couldn’t get to know people. I was a good student but a complete dunce socially. You often hear the adjective “crippling” attached to shyness. It really is crippling, sort of like having two broken legs. You’re not able to get around socially. As a result of being shy, I was a lonely and often unhappy kid. The middle school years, especially, were nearly unbearable.

When I was old enough to reflect on this I tried different things to cope. I told my parents but after awhile I realized that they couldn’t help me. They tried, but I think that they just couldn’t understand the depth of the problem. I made resolutions: I told myself that this year I’m not going to be shy, I’m going to be very outgoing and talkative. This usually lasted about a month, at which point I found it too difficult to keep up and I’d go back to being my quiet self. I tried prayer, but I found that God couldn’t help with this one. I tried positive self-talk—I thought if I just had the right attitude about myself I wouldn’t be shy anymore. That didn’t work either. Nothing seemed to work.

I struggled on and by high school things had settled down a bit. In high school I would say I was surviving socially. I had mostly accepted my shyness and thought that this was how it was going to be for the rest of my life. Things still weren’t great but I had a few misfit friends I could talk to. I still didn’t know what was “wrong” with me or how to “fix” it, but I was reasonably content.
I was 17 before I knew anything worth knowing about shyness. One day in the school library I happened to pick up a copy of Psychology Today magazine and there was an excellent article on shyness. Its conclusion: there is nothing wrong with shy people, medically or psychiatrically, and the solution to shyness is simply to develop better social skills. OK, maybe this seems extremely obvious. But I had never read anything about shyness before, ever. And it was such a relief to know that 1) nothing was wrong with me. I really had thought that something was wrong me for which I should possibly be taking medication. And 2) there was something I could do about it, a difficult but effective solution backed up by plenty of research.

Knowledge is power, and this article changed my view of shyness completely. It was like turning on a light after years of stumbling around in the dark. It was also around this time that I got on the Internet (the good old days of AOL) and found the newsgroup alt.support.shyness, fairly useless now but a godsend at the time, as I had never known anyone who was as shy as I was. Finally I didn’t feel alone in this struggle. At 17, I knew more about shyness than I ever had before.

I can’t say that things changed immediately after I read that article and that suddenly I wasn’t shy. I was still shy, but I realized that I had the power to change things and began to work in earnest on my social skills. And it actually worked. As soon as I started to work on things like “small talk” skills, things did improve for me. I did feel more confident in social situations. However, it wasn’t easy to change patterns of behavior so ingrained in me from such an early age. A lot of times it was two steps forward, one step back. And I still struggle though I think I have become progressively less shy over the years.

In Shyness: A Bold New Approach, a book based on his Psychology Today article, shyness expert Bernardo Carducci likens shyness to hay fever, and I think it’s a great comparison. Like hay fever it’s a source of discomfort that will never be totally cured, but you can find appropriate ways to deal with it. “[Allergy sufferers] don’t have to live in sanitary, plastic bubbles, but they will stay away from gardens in bloom, springtime fields, and florists’ shops. They can enjoy life once they learn to control their exposure to what makes them uncomfortable.” (46)

Part of the reason I’m writing this is that I find that most people do not have a good understanding of shyness, especially the type of chronic shyness I have struggled with. Unless you have this particular problem yourself, most people can’t understand being so shy that you have great difficulty starting conversations and making friends. Hence situations like the one in my exercise class. Even so-called professionals don’t understand shyness. I’ve been to therapy a couple of times, and both times I found the therapists unsuccessful at helping me deal with this problem. One told me to “just accept yourself.” Another gave me some self-esteem exercises to work on. If either of them had read Carducci’s research they would know that neither of these approaches is optimal. Which leads me to believe that treating shyness is not generally taught as part of therapists’ training, and it should be.

I spent so much time in my childhood and adolescence unhappy and I think it’s really awful that I wasn’t able to find some help for this until I was 17. If I had only known, or my parents had known, how to deal with shyness I think I could have avoided some of the hell of loneliness I went through. Maybe I would have actually gone to the prom in high school. Or not, since proms are kind of stupid anyway. But friends are always good, and I didn’t have enough of them growing up. Maybe I would have even been able to lead more of a normal life and not think of myself as a freak. And that’s the main reason for writing this, so that someone else might read this and not have to struggle as much as I did.

Here are the best resources I’ve found for overcoming shyness, three of which I’ve already mentioned:
Psychology Today article by Bernardo J. Carducci, Ph.D.: A great article. Read the whole thing.
Shyness: A Bold New Approach also by Carducci: The only good book about shyness, in my opinion. Must-read for anyone struggling with shyness.
alt.support.shyness FAQ: Some good information. I wouldn’t recommend the actual newsgroup at this point, though.
Some great, practical advice for overcoming shyness from someone who has been through the experience.