This is my first post after suffering from depression and anxiety for 55 years. I grew up poor and was teased a lot at school about my appearance. So of course I was self-conscious around others. If I did something wrong at home my mother would say "are you crazy!". So I guess after a while I thought maybe I was a little off. But this fear and anxiety really impacted my life when I was 15. I went on a date with a guy and he took me to this party where everyone was smoking pot. I had never tried it before so I took one hit and felt this moving-through-time sort of feeling. I started giggling and my boyfriend said "why are you giggling...you can't be high yet?" So I thought then what is wrong with me? My heart started pounding and didn't stop for days, I was so afraid. I think they may have mixed something else with the pot. I was literally in a state of shock for months! I was afraid to do anything, but I hid it from my parents. I'm sure they noticed because I was like a zombie. Gradually after a long period of time, I started living again but I kinda felt like a different person. More of a loner I guess. Still to this day, If I start to feel really anxious I start withdrawing afraid that I will experience that debilitating dread again and withdraw again (which is very difficult to come back from). I do take medications Prozac, Ativan, and now high blood pressure meds.
The symptoms happen most often as I am awaking to face a new day or waking from a nap. It's like a heavy weight coming down on me.
I don't see a psychiatrist as I feel I have let this go for too long now.
Thank you for listening.
Written by
Afraid2BMe
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Hello and welcome, I too was bullied and teased growing up and lived in a poor area of town and I also had no emotional support from my family and consequently developed social anxiety disorder which it sounds like you are suffering from. I also had a similar experience smoking pot, all it did was increase my anxiety and didn't relax me like it supposedly does with others. You are just wired differently as am I and a whole bunch of other people and smoking pot or drugs is one of the more common things that people do that first causes their anxiety to develop.
So first of all, there is nothing wrong with you and there never was, you did what you did in order to survive crappy parenting as did I. You were never taught how to love and accept yourself and validate yourself and your self-worth but it's not too late and there is a lot of good info on youtube about how to do it. There is also a lot of good info on there about overcoming social anxiety. I was astounded a number of years ago when I realized that people actually liked me and enjoyed me when I thought just the opposite. Social anxiety distorts our perceptions of others and how they perceive us, we think everyone is constantly judging us and the reality is that they are too busy thinking about themselves or life and barely paying attention to us. You can learn new constructive ways to think and heal your social anxiety and as one of my therapists said, "it's never to late to have a happy childhood" but you have to make the effort.
You are in a very situation to myself. At the age of 17 or 18 I became extremely shy but this was serious. I started to drink alcohol in the mornings beforvI went to college & university to cover my anxiety when mixing with groups of people. After speaking to my gp, Ativan replaced alcohol. After maybe 5 years on Ativan, I then spent 30-35 years on Diazepam. For maybe 10-12 years now Codiene Phosphate has replaced Diazepam. I remember my dad joking about me & my painful shyness but I never conquered the problem & Im still popping pills at 65 years of age (as I have to mix with people at work)
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