The moment you try to force connection, something inside you tightens up.

You've been working so hard at this. Watching what you say, measuring how you come across, trying to make sure people don't see you as "not good enough." Every conversation with someone new feels like a test you might fail. You rehearse what you'll say, second-guess yourself mid-sentence, and walk away wondering if they judged you.

It's exhausting. And the strange thing is, the harder you try to prove yourself, the worse the anxiety gets.

What if I told you that the very method you're using to protect yourself from judgment is actually the thing keeping you trapped?

What You've Been Doing to Protect Yourself (That's Making It Worse)

Let me walk through the approach you've probably been taking, because it makes complete sense given what you learned growing up.

When you meet someone new or enter a social situation, you operate under a specific rule: "Others will judge me unless I prove otherwise." This means you enter every interaction assuming the other person is already evaluating you, already finding you lacking, already seeing you as "lower class" or "no good."

So you do what any logical person would do:

• You watch everything you say, just like you learned to do around your mother
• You rely on your spouse to help you navigate conversations because you don't trust your own judgment
• You stick to people you've known for years because with them, the proving is already done
• You avoid situations where you might be "found out" or criticized
• You constantly monitor yourself, asking "Did that sound stupid? Are they thinking badly of me?"

This is the standard approach to managing fear of judgment: Work harder to prevent criticism. Be perfect enough that they can't find fault. Prove your worth before they decide you don't have any.

It's what most people with social anxiety do. It's what makes sense when you believe you're starting from a deficit.

The Backwards Assumption That's Keeping You Trapped

Here's what research on social anxiety has discovered, and what you actually experienced in your own life without realizing it:

The assumption you're operating under is backwards.

You're entering social situations with the rule "Others will judge me unless I prove otherwise." But the people you feel comfortable with-the ones you knew before marriage, the people at church you've been attending with for years-you're not applying that rule to them anymore.

With them, you've flipped the assumption. You assume they're kind until they give you a specific reason to think otherwise. And in those interactions, you just... talk. You don't think about it so much. You focus on the other person instead of your internal worry.

The counterintuitive truth is this: You need to reverse the order of proof.

Instead of assuming people will judge you until you prove you're worthy, assume people are kind until they prove they're not.

This sounds simple, maybe even naive. But research published in 2024 shows that the core belief "others will judge me" is what makes social situations appear more dangerous than they objectively are. Your brain is operating on a childhood rule that's no longer accurate for most of your adult interactions.

When you approach new people with the assumption that judgment is coming, you're not protecting yourself. You're activating a surveillance system that makes you monitor everything you say, which paradoxically makes you MORE anxious and LESS natural. The very thing you're doing to prevent judgment is making you feel and act more awkward.

The reversed approach-assume kindness first-actually produces better results. You're calmer, more present, more able to focus on the other person instead of your internal criticism. Ironically, you come across better when you stop trying so hard to prove yourself.

Why You Actually Know What to Say (You Just Don't Trust Yourself)

This isn't just a technique. This is a complete reframe of what's actually happening in your social anxiety.

Here's what you discovered in therapy: You actually DO know what you want to say. You just don't trust yourself.

Read that again. The problem isn't lack of social skills. It's not that you're genuinely "not good enough." You have clear evidence of your competence-your heat sealing work was really appreciated by your employers. You're confident caring for young children. In one-on-one conversations where you're not overthinking, you connect naturally.

The anxiety isn't telling you the truth about your capabilities. It's echoing your mother's old criticism.

Recent research published in BMC Psychiatry (2025) found that childhood criticism doesn't just create temporary hurt-it creates something called "fear of evaluation" that persists into adulthood. When a parent constantly criticizes a child's work as "not fast enough" or "not done correctly," that child internalizes a belief: "I am not good enough, and people will discover this unless I hide it."

But here's the paradigm shift: That belief is not a fact about you. It's a scar from your mother's criticism.

Studies show that children with adverse childhood experiences internalize negative information and devalue their self-worth, believing they're unworthy of love or compassion. They carry that devaluation into adulthood, projecting it onto people who have given them no evidence of harsh judgment.

You're not seeing people as they are. You're seeing them through the lens of how your mother saw you. And she was wrong.

Her criticism wasn't an objective measure of your worth-it was her reaction, her standard, her stress. The fact that your employers valued your work and you're confident with children proves that her assessment wasn't reality.

This changes everything because it means the work isn't convincing other people you're good enough. The work is separating your mother's voice from the reality in front of you.

The Childhood Survival Strategy You're Still Running

When most people experience social anxiety, they assume it's because they lack social skills, or because there's something genuinely wrong with them that others will see.

But in the majority of cases where social anxiety traces back to childhood experiences, the real culprit is something different: internalized criticism that taught your nervous system that social situations are dangerous.

Here's what was actually happening in your childhood:

Your mother criticized your cleaning work-not fast enough, not done correctly. In those moments, you felt small, like you couldn't do anything right no matter how hard you tried. Your brain, designed to help you survive in your family environment, learned a critical lesson: "I need to watch everything I do and say, because criticism is always coming."

Then you mentioned something else-your mother and sisters would speak about you secretly, behind your back. This taught your brain a second lesson: "Even when people seem okay with me, they might be judging me in private."

These two experiences created what researchers call a "childhood survival strategy." In that environment, being hypervigilant about criticism actually helped you navigate your mother's expectations. Watching what you said, trying to be perfect, constantly monitoring for disapproval-these were adaptive responses to a genuinely critical environment.

Your brain didn't malfunction. It learned exactly what it needed to learn to survive in that household.

The problem is that your brain generalized this strategy to ALL social situations, even ones where criticism isn't coming. Research on core beliefs and social anxiety shows that when these beliefs get activated ("I'm not good enough," "They'll judge me"), they make you interpret neutral social situations as threatening.

A person taking a moment to think becomes "they're judging me."
A slight change in someone's expression becomes "they think I'm stupid."
Someone being quiet becomes "they're talking about me in their head."

You're not responding to what's actually happening in the present. You're responding to the past pattern.

And here's the hidden layer that often goes unaddressed: Your belief that some people are "a different level-higher class with better lifestyle who would look down on me" isn't just low self-esteem. Research on class-based shame shows this is a real, documented form of social anxiety. For people from working-class backgrounds, the fear of being judged as "deficient" or "lower class" is a genuine source of anxiety rooted in actual experiences of social positioning.

Your mother's criticism wasn't just about cleaning work. She was teaching you (unintentionally) that you weren't measuring up to some standard, that you were less than. And you've carried that into your perception of social hierarchy, assuming others with "better lifestyles" have the right to judge you as inferior.

But they don't. The cause behind the cause isn't that you're actually deficient. It's that you were taught to see yourself that way, and that teaching is still running in the background of every social interaction.

The Truth You've Been Living As If Your Mother Was Right

If the real problem is internalized criticism from childhood, and not actual deficiency in who you are, then here's what that means:

You've been living as if your mother was right about you.

Every time you enter a social situation assuming people will judge you, you're agreeing with her assessment. Every time you think "I'm not good enough," you're accepting her criticism as truth. Every time you believe "everybody's got a right to be better than me," you're continuing the devaluation she started.

The uncomfortable truth is that your social anxiety isn't protecting you from judgment-it's perpetuating the judgment you already experienced. You've become your own critic, running the same script your mother ran, just now it's in your own voice.

And the people around you-the ones at church, the people you knew before marriage-most of them probably aren't judging you at all. Which means you've been defending yourself against a threat that exists primarily in your past, not your present.

This is hard to sit with because it means the enemy isn't "out there" in other people's potential criticism. The enemy is the internalized belief system that tells you you're not worthy of kindness unless you prove otherwise.

What to Notice Before You Try to Fix Anything

You don't need to fix this right now. You don't need to immediately flip your assumptions or force yourself into uncomfortable situations.

What you need first is to just notice.

Over the next few days, when you're in a social situation or thinking about one, pause and ask yourself: "Is this my mother's voice, or is this the reality in front of me?"

When the thought comes "they'll think I'm not good enough," notice it. Don't fight it, don't judge yourself for having it. Just recognize: that's the old recording. That's the survival strategy from childhood.

Then look at the actual evidence in front of you. Has this person actually criticized you? Have they given you a concrete reason to believe they're judging you as "lower class" or "no good"? Or are you assuming based on the pattern from your past?

You might notice that in your one-on-one interactions-the ones that already feel easier-you're not running that script as loudly. You're more present with the person in front of you. That's not because those people are fundamentally different. It's because you've learned through repeated experience that they're safe, so your alarm system quiets down.

The work ahead is learning to extend that same assumption of safety to new people, even before they've "proven" they won't hurt you.

This feels vulnerable because you're essentially choosing to trust before you have certainty. But research shows this is actually how social confidence builds-through gradual exposure to social situations where you practice NOT running the old script, and discovering that the feared judgment doesn't materialize most of the time.

Your therapy sessions are already serving as this kind of practice. Every time you speak in session, you're practicing trusting your own clarity instead of relying on your spouse to validate what you're saying. That's exposure therapy happening in real time.

The Path When You Stop Trying to Prove Your Worth

This discovery-that your social anxiety is rooted in childhood criticism rather than actual social deficiency-opens a path that conventional advice about "just be confident" completely misses.

You're not lacking confidence because you haven't tried hard enough. You're lacking confidence because you learned, as a child, that your worth was conditional on performance and that criticism was always waiting.

The journey ahead isn't about becoming perfect enough that people won't judge you. It's about building self-worth that exists independent of other people's judgment-or your fear of it.

Research on treatment for this kind of social anxiety shows that 60-90% of people see significant improvement when they work with the actual root cause: changing the core beliefs that make social situations feel dangerous.

This means learning to:

• Recognize when you're operating from your mother's old criticism versus responding to present reality
• Practice assuming kindness first, rather than judgment first
• Trust your own clarity about what you want to say, rather than constantly seeking external validation
• Separate your worth as a person from your mother's assessment of your childhood performance
• Understand that class differences don't give anyone the right to devalue you

And perhaps most importantly, it means starting to treat yourself with the compassion you would offer someone else. Studies published in 2024 show that self-compassion-treating yourself with the same kindness you'd offer a friend-has a robust inverse relationship with social anxiety. The more you can be gentle with yourself when the old fears arise, the less power those fears have.

You already know how to connect with people. You do it in your one-on-one interactions. You do it when you're caring for children. You do it at church when you're not overthinking.

The capability is already there. What's ahead is learning to trust it, even when your mother's old voice tries to convince you otherwise.

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What's Next

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