How to show, not tell, when writing about characters with social anxiety disorder

With guest appearance: core beliefs

Hi all,

Happy Saturday! My family is recovering from an extended plague that ping-ponged around our house, so I’m getting this out a bit later than planned. But, here it is at last, in all its hopefully not-too-incoherent glory!

Today, we’re diving back into anxiety disorders. Today’s subtype: social anxiety disorder.

I’ve also included some information about how to use core beliefs to shape your character’s decisions. Happy to discuss more in comments!

Social Anxiety Disorder

Psychology trivia time! In previous editions of the trusty DSM, social anxiety disorder was called social phobia. My theory on the name change is because “social phobia” is slightly misleading— the core of the disorder isn’t fear of social interactions themselves, but rather anxiety around how one will be received/evaluated/judged. So it’s the interpretation of the interaction, rather than the interaction itself.

These interpretations are something you can use in your writing to craft some very illuminating internality.

As always, all opinions are my own. Included symptoms can be further studied in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders: DSM-5-TR, available at psychiatry.org.

Social Anxiety and Judgement

The symptoms of anxiety are the symptoms of anxiety, so I’m not going to spend a ton of time on those pieces in this newsletter. If you want further info, go check out my newsletter on generalized anxiety disorder, and my newsletter on panic disorder. Head over to generalized anxiety disorder to check out physical sensations and behavior that may come with social anxiety disorder, and head over to panic disorder for information on panic attacks that can also come along with social anxiety disorder (panic attacks and social anxiety don’t always go together, but it isn’t uncommon).

This newsletter will primarily focus on thoughts, to help craft character internality.

Thoughts:

Characters experiencing social anxiety will primarily jump to conclusions and catastrophize. These jumps will typically relate to worry that others might be thinking about them negatively, or are judging them. These jumps occur instantaneously.

Social anxiety disorder may present as fear of:

• Being observed doing regular, everyday things (e.g., eating or drinking). You may find that a character experiences intense anxiety around whether people will judge them for the way they eat or the way they drink.

• Having a conversation. Characters may fixate on the sounds of their voices, how they look when they talk, what they’re saying (i.e., whether they sound smart/stupid). This could be an interesting opportunity to craft some unique character traits.

• Meeting new people. Characters may be fine with people they already know, or with family, but feel immensely anxious and out of sorts around strangers.

• Regardless, these characters will have a deep fear of being judged as weak, “crazy,” stupid, intimidating, dirty, or unlikeable. They may even fear being perceived as anxious. If the latter, this fear might present as intense worry of displaying anxiety symptoms themselves, due to fearing they’ll be judged or rejected.

Whatever you decide the trigger is, be consistent! As I’ve mentioned before, know where it comes from, aka why that specific trigger. Please see below for a little primer on core beliefs, which can help inform this. :)

Always, though, with social anxiety, it should come down to fear of negative evaluation/rejection.

Behavior:

Characters experiencing social anxiety may :

Avoid!

They may fully avoid social situations as much as possible, or will endure them with immense amounts of anxiety. While in a social situation, they may stick to the edges, or spend a lot of time in the bathroom/outside. They may physically curl into themselves, or have very closed-off body language. Poor eye contact is also common here. This should be consistent. This is not something that’ll appear and disappear— it’ll be a pervasive pattern, and cause significant distress (and perhaps significant impairment, as well).

Situations a socially anxious character may avoid (that are usually connected to a specific fear/specific thing they fear being judged about):

• Public bathrooms (this kind of falls in its own subcategory)

If someone’s fear is about being judged for displaying anxiety symptoms themselves, this is what you may see:

Avoidance of:

• Eating in public (if, for example, they have a fear of being judged for their hands shaking, or the way they eat, or the noise they make when they chew)

• Writing in public (goes with shaking hands)

• Bright lights, discussion about certain topics (goes with blushing)

• Shaking hands, certain spicy foods (fear of sweating)

In other words, social anxiety will tie your character into a knot, where they fear how their own fear will be perceived. It’s a feedback loop.

About Performance Anxiety

Of note, characters can have social anxiety disorder that is isolated to public speaking/performance. This will be characterized by all of the above internality, but specific to public speaking.

So what this might look like: a character is very outgoing/social and has a wide circle of friends, but also has an absolute terror and avoidance of any type of public speaking. Unfortunately, they’re also a graduate student and have to make a lot of presentations! Hello, internal conflict.

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Any and all of the above are connected to core beliefs, so I’m going to spend a bit of time talking about them in this newsletter.

Core beliefs

Remember how I promised to come back to this? If you’re new to this newsletter (welcome!), the original mention occurred back in my depression newsletter. Essentially, I mentioned that I was saving core beliefs for a more thorough exploration because they are are one of the primary ways I think about character.

There are many ways that you can get to know your characters. Every writer develops their own over time. Core beliefs help your characters come alive on the page and make their own decisions. Because if you’re being true to your character’s core beliefs, you’ll know what choices they’ll make every time.

Here’s why—

Core beliefs are something that we all have, that dictate our responses and choices. They are not our thoughts, but they produce our thoughts, if that makes sense. To use a metaphor: think of a tree. Thoughts we have all the time are the branches and leaves. But they all branch off of a trunk, which is the core belief. So they’re all connected— to a core belief that’s strong and fundamental to character.

For example:

Character A (let’s call them Ann) believes that they are unlikeable, and struggle with social anxiety disorder. This may result in the following interaction with character B (let’s call them Ben):

Here’s the scenario: Ann is browsing in a remote corner of a bookstore. Ben happens to be browsing nearby and sees Ann looking at a book. He decides to strike up a conversation.

Ben: “I see you’re looking at Best Book Ever! The author is great. Have you read anything else by them?”

Ann: immediately feels anxious and has the following thoughts:

• Why is he talking to me? What did I do? Does he think I’m being pretentious for picking this book? I shouldn’t be reading this anyway, he’ll know as soon as I say anything that I don’t know anything about this and he’ll think I’m stupid.

Then she starts to feel anxious and embarrassed. Let’s say she starts to feel nauseous. She may then angle away from Ben, trying to use her body to shield herself. Not because she doesn’t want to talk to him, but because she believes on a deep level that she is unlikeable, and therefore thinks he must be judging her.

Ann: “No. Excuse me.”

Ann leaves.

So in this scenario, Ann’s belief that she is unlikeable shapes her response to Ben, and makes it deeply unlikely that she would remain and strike up a conversation with him, and then go out to coffee with him after.

This is how core beliefs can direct behavior.

From a character arc perspective, one way to include character growth is to have your main character’s core beliefs shift (e.g., from believing they’re unlikeable to believing they’re likeable) throughout the story. So the character by the end would be making different decisions than the character at the beginning. Because core beliefs can change, and story arcs are ideally designed to promote that growth. Side note, this is often what therapy works to do (particularly cognitive behavioral therapy, which I mentioned a while back happens to be my foundational training model).

That’s it for today!

Thanks for reading!

Questions?

Comments?

Lastly, here are some gossipy and judgmental cats. Aka, the most perfectly cat-like cats.