moving on – Real Social Skills

A reader asked:

I’m going through a breakup and am dealing with pretty crippling anxiety and depression despite the fact that my ex and I didn’t end on bad terms. I am a very socially awkward normally and my ADHD sometimes causes me to act impulsively.

I have three questions:

How/when/who is it appropriate for me to discuss my problems with (Like when people ask how I’m doing I normally lie but I think that may not be good for me.)

How long should I wait before spending time with my ex, seeing him is like tearing off a band-aid and

What is a good way for me to cope with my loneliness when my social anxiety prevents me from being able to be around most people?

Realsocialskills answered:

A few thoughts:

First and foremost, there is no one solution to this problem. You’re going to have to slowly find ways of making your life better. You’ll probably feel better if you think of it that way.

I get the sense that you might be thinking of the problem as “How do I get over my ex, stop being so impulsive, not be depressed, not be anxious, and not be so isolated, so that everything will be ok?” That’s a really overwhelming problem, but it’s not actually the problem you have to solve. The problem you have to solve is “What things can I do to start making my life better?”

And there are a lot of things that might be worth trying, and other things worth avoiding. I’ll start with the things I think you should avoid:

Don’t rely on your ex for emotional support:

It’s not good for either of you
Part of what being broken up means is that you need to separate emotionally and regain your own space
Relying on your ex for emotional support makes it damn near impossible to do this
Especially if you don’t have much else in the way of support
It is not your ex’s responsibility to make your life ok post-breakup
It’s probably not a good idea to spend time with your ex until you’re past the point of the breakup feeling like an excruciating loss when you see them

Respect other people’s boundaries:

Someone asking you how you are isn’t necessarily an invitation to share
“How are you” is usually a fairly meaningless socially greeting.
Sometimes people ask because they are concerned and really want to know. These are usually people you are already close to, or people you’re related to.
If you’re not sure whether they really want to know or if it’s just social noise, you can say “It’s kind of hard right now” or something similar, and see if they ask follow up questions
If they ask follow up questions, it’s usually ok to tell them what’s going on
But keep in mind that it’s ok for people to decide they don’t want to be your support system
And it’s important to respect that

Meetup.com

Meetup.com can bee a good way to meet new people in an unthreatening way
It’s easier to talk to new people when you know that you share an interest and are gathering to talk about it or do something
It’s also often ok to go and listen to other people talk
And it’s ok to leave if you need to

Interacting with people on the internet

A lot of people who can’t interact easily in person get a lot of social interactions from Tumblr
This counts as social interaction. Don’t devalue it
It also might help to seek out some other type of forum, like a message board about your interest/fandom/whatever
Email lists can be good too, especially if they’re the kind that don’t have archives that can be googled
Even with people you know, it might be easier to interact on chat or Facebook or some other internet based way

Religion

If you have a faith tradition, it might help you to go to church/temple/synagogue/mosque/place of worship.
If you have a bad experience with the place of worship you grew up with, you might be able to find one that works better for you
Most communities have a number of places of worship. Some of them probably have nice people
Unitarian Universalist churches work for some people who don’t feel comfortable in the organized forms of the religion they grew up with, but don’t want to reject it either
Going to a place of worship can be a way to meet people
It can also be a way to be around people without having to interact too much directly
For some people, being near people without having much conversation can be a way to feel less lonely without anxiety-inducing pressure
There also might be things you can volunteer to help with that aren’t too socially intense
There also might be study groups that work for you, because you can talk about the topic or just listen
Prayer can also help some people. Talking to God can help, even if you can’t talk to people.
Organized religion is not right for everyone, but it can be really good for some people

Reading fiction or watching TV

For some people, stories are a good way to cope with loneliness
Reading or watching stories is sort of like vicarious social interaction
It can also help you to learn a bit more about people and relationships
There’s a reason why lonely isolated kids coping with growing up by reading novels is such a pervasive trope
This isn’t helpful for everyone. Fiction can be really misleading and not everyone can understand it. But for some people, it can be good.

Therapy is helpful for some people

Some people find it helpful to talk to a therapist
Sometimes therapists can help people manage social anxiety and depression better
Or figure out executive functioning strategies
Or learn appropriate boundaries that make friendship easier
Therapy is not a good idea for everyone.
For some people, it isn’t helpful.
For some people, it’s a matter of finding the right therapist
For others, it’s actively anti-helpful and damaging.
For some people, it’s sort of helpful but not worth the costs
Therapy is something that can help some people to get support that helps them to figure out how to improve their life incrementally
Only you know whether therapy is a good idea for you (and it’s ok to decide to stop going to therapy if you decide that would be better)
In any case, therapy isn’t magic and it’s not a cure. There isn’t actually such a thing as “getting help” and that fixing your life. There’s just trying things and seeing what works.

Medication can be helpful for some people

Anxiety, depression, and ADHD are all conditions that some people find easier to manage with medication
For some people, medication is useful in the short term even if it’s not good in the long term
Some people don’t benefit from being on medications regularly, but do benefit from having medication available for occasional use to control anxiety or panic attacks
Medication is not right for everyone.
For some people it doesn’t work
For some people, it works, but has intolerable side effects
For some people, it works, but it takes a lot of experimentation to find the right medications and doses
Only you can decide if medication is right for you
Medication is not a cure or a way to become a different kind of person. It’s a strategy for managing things that works well for some people
If medication doesn’t work for you, that doesn’t imply that you don’t really have depression/ADHD/anxiety.
It also doesn’t imply that your condition is mild
Or that you’re not serious about making your life better
All it means is that medication is not a good strategy for you

Note: This post is for people who this post about being seen as real through ideological affiliation applies to. If you don’t have that history, this post might not make very much sense.

When you need to break with an ideological group, it can be really difficult. It can undermine your sense of self.

Partly because of the way ideological group members treat you when you stop fitting their worldview. When other people stop treating you like you’re real, it can be hard to remember that you’re real.

But not just that. It’s also, when you see the problems with the ideology, when you see the huge gulf between what its words say it is and what it actually is, sometimes it’s easy to feel like there must be something wrong with you to have ever wanted to be part of that group.

You can feel like you were really stupid and that everything was rotten, and that you just need to root out parts of yourself that you developed in association with that group.

But… keep in mind… that you were attracted to the ideology for reasons. And some of them were good reasons. And you learned a lot in your time with the group. The growth that you experienced was real. Your learning counts.

And you don’t have to reject everything you learned in order to move on. You don’t have to reject former versions of yourself, either. You don’t have to throw everything away, to get away from the ideology.

What you have to do is move on. Not reinvent yourself. Not throw away an old version. Not find a new group. Move on. Keep trying to find out what’s true, keep looking for good things to do, and keep looking for good people to do them with.

And moving on by building things takes time, and it’s not exhilarating like throwing yourself into a new ideological group would be. But in the long run, it’s much, much better.