How difficult is it for family members to understand social anxiety disorder, if they don't know what it feels like?

I understand. I am bipolar 1 with anxiety disorder and borderline social anxiety disorder. I find the majority of social interaction terrifying.

I have no easy answer for you. I’m sorry. If you are getting therapy for your condition, I recommend you ask you therapist about including your husband in some of the sessions. If you’re not getting therapy for it, you might consider starting. It does me a world of good.

I believe they do care, but you are correct. They don’t understand never having felt the panic.

I suggest you try to focus on commonalities. I have never had a diagnosed mental disorder, and may be out of my depth, please accept that. But I have loved people with disorders.

Say to your family something along the lines of “Imagine a job interview and how stressful that is” and then say “Every conversation I have is a job interview to me.”

I think it is almost impossible to imagine a mental illness unless you experience it for yourself. I lived for 51 years without a mental illness, and I had the feeling that people who were depressed should just snap out of it.

I got sick, and experienced bipolar depression. It was like nothing I could have imagined. By far, it was the worst thing I ever felt. And yet, from the outside, it looks like nothing, really. Why are you just lying around? What don’t you do something? Just do it! Nike!

I believe people care, but are ill-equipped with the imagination and empathy necessary to understand. For that reason, I don’t tell anyone about what has happened to me. I have heard my parents make comments about other relatives with bipolar. I don’t want them thinking that about me.

I’ve lost friends due to my bipolar. I don’t expect people to understand any more. The only people who can understand are those who have been there. It’s ok.

They don’t, and won’t, get it. My ex basically thought my anxiety was a cop-out, too. Even when he later went through some extreme anxiety of his own, he still didn’t understand mine. It’s very difficult to understand what goes on inside other peoples’ heads, unfortunately. We even had couples counseling, and he understood it a little better after that, but he still couldn’t really grasp what I was going through.

I think the best you can hope for is that people will take your word for it, even though they don’t understand it.

I think sometimes people who don’t understand and have never experienced a social anxiety disorder have a gut reaction to treat you with tough love. You know what I mean? I think they believe if they are stern and treat you harsh regarding some of your anxiety issues and force you out of your comfort zone, you’ll come around and “snap out of it.” They still care and love you, they just don’t understand. To me it is like describing a beautiful sight to a person born without sight and then trying to force them to sketch the scene.

It would be interesting if they could impose some of the physical or emotional symptoms on these people who do not understand. Heart pounding, sweating, tremors, terror, whatever is your most uncomfortable. Give them something psychotropic that really messed them up, just for a little while.

I haven’t always been this way, and I think that’s one of the hardest things. I was always a little socially awkward, but not panicky. I have a few very close friends that I made in high school and some lovely friends I met online, otherwise I just have “acquaintances” that don’t usually understand my difficulties.

I can make friends online easily because I don’t have to be face to face with them, but I haven’t made any new friends IRL in over 10 years because I don’t like being out of my comfort zone. Some days, it’s all I can do to go to the grocery store or take my kids to their activities. Some days, it’s not that bad and I can converse with the person in line in front of me at the store.

It just keeps getting worse every year. I’m much more of a recluse than I used to be. I prefer to be in my own home, with my own things, and my baggy, comfortable clothes instead of dressing to fit in and trying to keep from doing something embarrassing. My husband wants me to get a full-time job and doesn’t understand why it scares me so much. He doesn’t understand why I don’t like leaving the house or why I don’t make friends with other parents at my kids’ school.

I also don’t think people who have never experienced unrelenting anxienty or repeated panic attacks can understand what it is really like. I think they care, and it is very difficult for them to see you so anxious, so paralized. I think ironically it makes them a little anxious, or uncomfortable to watch it. Just like if you were ill with, God forbid, a physical disease, they would want to make you better. They want you to be better. I know anxiety is not just mental, it manifests itself physically to, it is a whole mind body experience, an out of control feeling that has to be some of the worst I have experienced.

I do think agoraphobia, and other anxiety disorders, many times have to do with avoidance. The more we avoid, the worse the anxiety gets. It isn’t always the cause, as anxiety can be triggered for many different reasons. But, when it is not a specific event like a death, or a specific bad experience, then I think it usually goes to something or someone we decided to avoid because they were causing us so much stress dealing with them, and then never resolving that situation and it grows into avoiding many many things. The fear of the fear, anticipatory anxiety, is probably the worst anxiety there is. I don’t know if that helps you at all, or applies to you. For me, I began to feel better when I “forgave” or had more understanding for the people who had hurt or dissapointed me. Kind of went to a place of acceptance, and tried to empathasize with their position. I also am much better now at not dwelling on something I will have to do that I dread. I don’t think about it for weeks before, I wait until just before and get through it.

Get a copy of the section in the most current DSM that discusses this disorder. That may lend credibility to its existence.

While I have had anxiety and depression it was situational during a horrible divorce some years ago. I can relate, but obviously not as a long term condition. I’m sure this is very hard for BOTH you and your husband. I would say to keep with or get therapy and also, try to not create your entire indentity around your condition.

YOU are NOT your condition.
I fear your husband may not understand and perhaps your marriage is at risk as well. I think you need to do everything you can to work on this, it is something that is effecting your entire family and sadly, as hard as it is on you, you must have empathy for your husband. Coping with anothers mental/emotional issues is very hard for the unaffected family members too.

I wish you the best.

Has there ever been a movie or TV show that illustrates the agony of this condition? (Like Monk shows how absurd and difficult obsessive/compulsive disorder can be.)

“Is it that difficult to understand having never felt the panic, or do they just not care?” <- It must be one or the other. Either that or they choose to deny it :“I won’t have a family member of mine with mental problems….”

Have you seen a doctor? There are easy to take, cost effective, low side effects medications such as Lexapro that most likely would really help. There are other benefits to these medications such as not getting stressed out driving in traffic and not getting nervous speaking publicly and not getting all worked up in stressful situations.

Well, I always try to examine both sides of a situation, and don’t get me wrong, I have the utmost empathy for those suffering from certain conditions, however, I can’t help but feel for the husband equally so. I am sure he has plenty of fear and anxiety and frustration of his own.
I am sure he worries about what might happen if HE became sick or lost his job or could no longer be the sole supporter of the family. What then? Knowing he does not have a functional partner that could pick up the ball and really BE a partner.

This must be a great source of anxiety for him, knowing that if a job crisis happened the family would go down like the Titanic overnight.
I am sure he feels sadness at not having a happy and functional partner and feels extremely burdened feeling responsible for the welfare of his family with no support of his own.

These issues are every bit as hard for the healthier partner and their feelings, needs and fears need to be taken just as seriously as the ill partners condition.

I think that the situation between you and your husband might make things worse. He wants you to work, perhaps for financial reasons. Or maybe it’s just because he thinks it will get you out of the house and that will make you better. I don’t know. Just speculating. But whatever it is, he is getting a stronger and stronger interest in having you work, and thus he is getting more and more of a reason not to believe in your anxiety.

You, on the other hand, probably need him to validate you more than anything. The more pressure he puts on you, the less validated you feel, and the more you feel anxious, and the worse your symptoms get.

This cycle, if it is happening, is not good. It will make things worse if it continues.

How do you feel about a job, in theory? Do you want to be working? Do you want to make money? If you didn’t have anxiety, would you be working the second you could find a job?

Because if this is something you want, you should share that with your husband. Then you guys can unite on the goal, and start working together on the obstacle.

Like @Charles said, there are meds that can help. Are you in therapy? If not, that is something that can really help.

I would suggest mindfulness techniques, if you are not using them already. While our thoughts are in our heads, and our brain chemistry can make our thoughts do very painful things, there are still things we can do, by will power, to cope better.

I have found that giving in is really helpful. It sounds so contradictory, but it has helped me. I was beating myself up over depression and being unable to turn myself around. It made me want to kill myself that I couldn’t fight it.

What I’ve found is that this notion of fighting it is not helpful. I found that when I gave up, and just admitted there was nothing I could do about my depression, that that relieved the burden. At least I no longer had to fight it, and because I was no longer fighting it, I didn’t have to blame myself for failing to fight it. It was that failure that made me feel the worst about myself. I felt incompetent. Worthless. Useless.

When I stopped fighting, I stopped failing. It is amazing to stop being a failure. Not only that, but somehow, my fighting had given my depression energy, and when I stopped fighting, it didn’t have that energy so much. Does this sound like voodoo thinking? Sometimes I wonder.

But I think of it as mental jujitsu. In jujitsu, you use the energy of your opponent against him. My depression was using my energy against me. I suspect this is true of anxiety, too. Everything gets all twisted around in mental illness, and up is down and no healthy person can possible see how it works because it is so Alice in Wonderland.

I’m sure you want to stop feeling anxious. But here’s one other thing I discovered that kind of helped. I realized, at some point, that I liked my depression. It gave me meaning. It made me feel intense—like my life was on the line. Which it was. I need intensity. I prefer happy intensity, but if happy intensity isn’t available, then depression is better than nothing.

Being normal scares the shit out of me. It feels dead. Pointless. Even though it is safe, I can never stand it for long. It’s not as if this is on purpose, but I always find myself making trouble of some kind after a while. Stability, for better or for worse, makes me feel empty.

Depression makes me feel even worse. The emptiness is far worse, but it is intense. And of course, if I am doing something that makes me happy, the strength of that is unbelievable. The energy pours out of me. I can do anything when I am mentally charged up like that. People—when I tell stories… when I talk to them… they are rapt. They give the a quality of attention then don’t give other people. I feel like I am inside them all, part of them all, and they are part of me, and that is what I live for. To not be alone. To feel other people as myself. And when I do that, I know I am giving them something they really want, and that we have a real exchange that some people would probably call a soul exchange. I wouldn’t call it that, but the metaphor serves to get me close to the feeling.

What I learned in “giving up” is that there are mental coping techniques that allow me to sidestep my self-destructive urges. If I give up, then I am no longer responsible for fighting the bad guys inside me, and if I don’t fight them, they don’t seem to be able to see me any more. It’s as if my movements make me visible to them, but if I stay still. If I sit and meditate inside myself—the image I have is of me as a sitting buddha inside the middle of my head—then all the bad guys in my brain go rushing off in search of an enemy and they disappear from my attention.

Which allows me to think about other, more useful things. In your case, if you could do this, then all your anxieties, however you picture them, would go rushing off somewhere, looking for someone to bother, leaving you alone and free to think about, oh, say, getting a job, if that’s what you want.

You could think of it on your own terms, without reference to the anxieties, because when they have run off, they are irrelevant.

Now don’t worry. They’ll be back. That’s ok. It’s a process. What worked once will work again. When I was teaching myself this technique, they came back over and over, in part because I asked them to. I was almost daring myself. I would be strongly attracted to questions like this one and every time I would write about it, I would feel the depression coming closer and I would feel like crying and descending. It was like the black pit was yawning wider right in front of me.

But I never fell in. I learned I could get close to the edge, but always turn back. I didn’t have to let myself go. It wanted me. I felt that strongly. It wanted me badly and it wanted my death, and there was a part of me that yearned to have it all be over and not to have to fight.

Hah! Except I’m not fighting, right? I’m fighting, but I’m not fighting. Fighting without fighting. Fighting by refusing to fight.

I don’t want to die. I’m curious. I want to know what’s going to happen next. I want to bring my children up. I may even want, God help me, to write my book. But that will happen, if it happens, in the same way. I will write my book by not-writing it. It’s not something I can take on straight ahead. I’ll beat myself up for failing, if I try to write it. Not-trying. Through the looking glass.

Slowly, I got better. I could face these issues in greater depth and not feel the gravity of the depression scaring me. Those guys had run far enough away that it was easier to not see them or notice them or to put any credence to those kinds of thoughts when I thought them.

I did, recently, have a major anxiety episode. The worst of my life. But I let myself be. Fortunately, my wife is supportive, and I told her there were certain things I couldn’t do. I was trying to arrange travel, and I just could not get on the phone to call some hotels. I was feeling really bad because this was for my son’s vacation and I was going to really fuck it up and then we wouldn’t go anywhere.

Who knows? Maybe I spend too much money, but whatever. I got my wife’s help, and it worked out. I didn’t have to talk to these people. My wife understands. But maybe it’s not so bad for her because this doesn’t happen so often to me now. She saw the year or two when I could do nothing. So she doesn’t mind now that I can do a lot more.

Maybe if your husband believes this might not be for forever, and you can get better, he might be able to be more helpful. The unknown is troublesome. None of us can promise anything, really. But it is likely that you will get better. Especially with help. This is not forever. The situation will change. Hopefully for the better, but there are no guarantees. I believe that people who reach out for help on places like fluther are ready to get better. I believe the help you get here is part of a support system that, together with help from your family and help from therapy, will make a substantial improvement in your life. I know it can work that way. It worked for me. I’m sure it can work for you, too.

I always try to explain it to people in terms in which they can relate. I’ll ask them to imagine being thirsty. OK, so get a drink. You’re still thirsty. So drink more. But you’re still thirsty. It doesn’t matter what you do, you are still thirsty. And not just a little thirsty, but “I’ve been in the Sahara for three days without water thirsty”.

Now imaging that instead of thirst, you feel fear and anxiety. Like “I’m in a room rapidly filling with water, and there are no doors or windows” kind of anxiety. It’s not logical, just like being thirsty after drinking gallons isn’t logical.

The main difference is that most people would be empathetic to the person with thirst. They would say “something’s wrong, you shouldn’t need this much liquid, and you should go to the doctor.” They wouldn’t say “snap out of it” or “man up”.

@GladysMensch For me, until I felt anxiety that racked me to the core, I never could have imagined it. I was in a bad accident several weeks ago, I could not breath well after the impact, and was very concerned asking for emergency help, I needed to go to the hospital. I did not know if it would quickly get worse and I would not be able to breath at all, I had cuts, bruises and scrapes and pain all over my body having slammed into a chain fence, and I still was not feeling the crippling anxiety I felt during my breakup with a long term boyfriend many years ago, or the years of anxiety I had dealing with a physical illness and feeling abused and dismissed by doctors, and what it did within my marriage. I just don’t think people can imagine it, they can think of being scared, but not the physical uncontrolled reaction people with freefloating anxiety, PTSD, and other anxiety disorders people can suffer from.

Here’s what I’d do @mothermayi:

Keep a journal. Write down what your day feels like when you get up and know you have to go out for the day. Jot down as many details as you can.

Ex: My thoughts are uncontrollable. I can’t stop thinking about getting there on time, how long it will take, how many people will be there, if someone will talk to me-etc.

Then at the end of the day write a little story of your day, your thoughts and how your anxiety affected your mood, your eating/bathroom habits, your ability to process those around you-etc. Give this to your husband and anyone else you actually feel are going to read it and be empathetic.

Both my husband and my son have extreme anxiety as a part of their syndrome. At times our son has PTSD symptoms. We have spoken to and subsequently written to family to try to create awareness & understanding. Even with our vast efforts, almost none of our family gets it.

I strongly recommend you join a forum on Facebook or with a local support group. You need to learn how to be your own self-advocate. If you have a therapist, ask if there is a meet up or support group or therapy group in your area.

If your husband doesn’t get it, he really needs to read some books. I don’t have anxiety, but I truly get how it affects the men in my life.

If those that supposedly love you, can’t make simple accomodations for you, that says more about them than it does about your diagnosis.

Most people do have a difficult time emphasizing with the suffering of others if they’ve never been through the situation themselves. Unfortunately it is just human nature. I’ve went through this myself with my own family, friends and peers when I went through a horrible time suffering from severe panic disorder along with depression.

I’m not sure if the issue is that they don’t care, but it is difficult to understand something that one has never been through themselves. It is like trying to describe a color, taste, sound, etc that you’ve never experienced before, and trying to get others to understand what you’ve experienced. At least there is awareness of these types of mental health issues today, unlike in the past.