Understanding Shyness:
Shyness is nothing but a part of your personality. Your personality is made up of many blocks, which are your habits and your thinking patterns. You have acquired or, should I say, constructed them over time, especially when you were a child.
You had no other choice but to construct shyness as a defence mechanism, and if you take a good look, it has certainly served you well. It has got you out of more unpleasant situations than you can imagine. Situations you were not ready to face as a child.
{picture of a queue of children where one is standing a little awkward and seems shy while being picked up for stage performance}
So, it was once a very important part of your personality, and for some, it is still working after they have grown up. Let me explain a little more to get the complete picture.
Reason for shyness: the childhood conditioning:
Our society is filled with broken homes, the ‘system’ as the Joker calls it.
Most of humanity believes in shaming and punishment rather than understanding the behaviour. Most of us were brought up in homes where our primary caregivers were inclined towards the shaming mindset. If you, as a child, failed to do some tasks, you were shamed. You were told that you are incompetent and a failure, and you should be ashamed of yourself. In some cases, you were even body shamed as too fat, or too thin etc.
Somewhere along the way, you internalized this and started to believe it. You started to consider yourself as somebody less than or not good enough. With this thinking pattern, there were certain contracting body emotions which can be seen in a shy child or person as trying to hide away somehow or not making eye contact as if it will expose their fragile personality and incompetence.
In another situation, it is quite possible that you were not directly shamed but rather lived in a home where the general atmosphere was heavily based on shaming. People around you would constantly judge and shame each other, and you, as a child, still internalized it.
Remember, we can’t be judgmental of others unless we are judgmental of ourselves. So, the self-judgments created enough internal shaming to give you a personality block called shyness.
We now know for a fact that each human is born with baseline happiness, talking strictly biologically. We acquire certain personality traits and habits through our genes. This is evolution at work, and there isn’t anything wrong with it.
How shyness affects us as adults:
1. Living on scraps:
You must have realized by now that this is exactly how it feels sometimes, like you are living in scraps.
You feel like you are trapped in walls that you can’t really understand and whenever a challenging situation arises, you repeat the same behavior you’ve been repeating since you can remember.
How many times did you decide to take certain opportunities when they presented themselves?
You even visualize what you will do and say, like asking for a raise or even asking somebody to just help you with your studies etc. But when it’s time, you cannot bring yourself to do it.
Your shyness just takes over, and it has become such a strong element of your personality that it overshadows every other part. Your quality of life remains the same. You feel more disappointed in yourself every time it happens, which in turn creates even more shame, and so the cycle continues.
2. Not taking a stand:
Shyness takes away your ability to stand up for yourself. Keeping peace becomes such a huge objective for you that you just pretend to be okay with whatever happens. But inside, you are disappointed and hurt every time.
In the outer world, however, you do have an incentive if you watch very carefully. You become known as someone who is a very content and peaceful, harmless person.
This is the very core for which you constructed this personality block in the first place when you were a child. This image took away your pain or reduced it to a great extent because of shaming.
So this actually brought a huge relief for a child who was too little to understand complex emotions but had universal intelligence to cope. It’s beautiful, really, if you see it from this perspective.
3. Not living your full potential:
Like all creation or existence, you are unique and amazing. You have universal intelligence, which is magnificent and wonderful. You have huge potential, and it can do wonders once you let it.
But the problem you face is your shyness, or at least that’s what you keep thinking.
If only I had not been shy …. you could have taken the opportunity you were presented with, or you could have gotten that degree which you thought was important, the list goes on and on.
How you can overcome shyness:
Consciously suffering the pain:
Have you noticed the amount of pain shyness has caused you?
You are always trying to suppress that pain and trying to will this part of your personality out of existence.
You have read above how it has served you by providing incentives, and now it has strengthened to the point of taking you over.
Do you want to know how it will go away?
Stop suppressing. Let the shyness be as it is and feel the pain directly rather than turning away from it.
It’s a pattern of fearful thoughts and emotions, and like everything else, it will arise, and it will pass away. In fact, the more you suppress, the longer it will take to pass.
Give up the need to remove it from your personality. For this to work, you will need insights into its working.
2. Finding insights:
Turn your focus towards shyness. One step you have to take is to not shy away from it. This is all that’s needed.
When it arises, notice it, facilitate it to exist and facilitate the pain to exist as long as it wants.
Say an internal yes when you feel it. Noticing is the first step.
Then, just see how it impacts your behavior. What kind of thoughts it creates in your mind, and what emotions come up as a result of those thoughts? How do these emotions then drive your behaviour?
Just watch it like an interesting drama. This process will provide you with insights. Experiential insights directly impact your subconscious processing and change your behaviour slowly and over time. Just don’t interfere with the process.
3. Train your cognition:
A simple definition of cognition is the default pattern we have for everything we come across in this world. You see a person, and you have certain thoughts about them, good or bad, happy, sad, trustworthy etc.
You are in a challenging situation, similar neural patterns fire in your brain. This is your cognition, and you have to be very self-honest to see how much of this is created by you and how much by your environment, parents, teachers, friends and different situations you have been in, whether good or bad.
The thing about existence is that it’s polar. There is always a negative to every positive. If letting the shyness becomes too intense for you at times, you do have the freedom and choice to shift your focus on helpful thoughts. Find the opposite of what you take as a negative thought and focus on it. It will not only be helpful in such a situation but also gradually replace the previous cognition, sometimes even in an instant, as modern neurology proves now.
How letting it be approach changes your brain:
Have you realized that you want your own neural pattern in your brain to not work a certain way? Read it again, it’s very interesting. This simple statement which is true for all of us, does mean that your own brain and body are working against you, like an independent system. Pretty interesting!
When you created shyness as part of your personality and kept building/repeating it over and over, you
were using the brain’s amazing ability to rewire itself by rearranging neural groups.
We can go a lot deeper into the science of it, but it would be out of the scope of this topic. So can you figure out what happens to your brain with the “Let it be” approach is initiated?
Let me explain. You immediately start creating a new network which stops the interference of the natural play of Shyness as a function and becomes attuned to observing the process. This allows the shyness to come and go away quickly without interference, solving the problem for you, and the observation part starts to observe other patterns, giving you strong insights about your personality.
It’s like you are afraid of something, but rather than pushing it away, you befriend it sit with it and allow it to exist. Will it be scary anymore? This not only slowly dissolves the shyness but also evokes kindness in personality for people who have been walking the same path. This kindness becomes a permanent part of you as a person.
Conclusion
The conclusion is to actually do nothing about it, considering that you are already doing a lot to get rid of it. Being shy and hating creates huge interference in your natural flow, and a lot of energy is wasted without any meaningful outcome except a very bad temper.
Hating and pushing it also means that you are setting yourself up for failure. Thoughts and emotions WILL come up, including shyness, as they are part of nature’s flow, and if you fight them, you will lose. And when you lose, your inner judge will shame you, and the cycle will continue in a poetic way.
You can never win a battle against the nature of your existence.
All you have to do to become free is just stop fighting. You were born free, and you are free; this fight doesn’t let you see that. Once you stop fighting, you are in harmony, and you are giving nature a chance to remove this part of your personality that once served you well.
