MIND MOVES Tony BatesAs each social event drew near, his panic steadily increased. The anticipation of an encounter was almost as painful as the occasion itself. Conscious of his potential to blush and let himself down in front of others, he endured meeting people by virtually holding his breath.
Frequent visits were made to the bathroom to check for signs of facial blushing in the mirror. If the slightest evidence of redness was perceived, he splashed his face with cold water and verbally attacked himself in the harshest way. "What the hell is wrong with you?" "You're so STUPID!"
A safe corner of the room or a quiet relative offered temporary refuge, but inwardly there was nowhere to hide. Afterwards, the onslaught of self-attacking continued for days as he obsessed about all the ways he let himself down. At 34 years old, this was a problem he had grown into rather than out off since his early teens.
He remembered when it had first began, the night he stood on stage in the school concert in front of his peers and forgot his lines. "Oh you should have seen your face, you were SO red" was the only feedback he heard. It was a memory that had become frozen in his mind and which he seemed destined to repeat. With each new encounter, the audience was different, but his physical sensations remained the same.
Why had it meant so much, why had he walked out of school three days later never to set foot in a classroom again, moving from one menial job to another? Growing up as an anonymous child, one of seven children born to hard-pressed parents, he had managed to carve a niche for himself and cope. But his father's constant reference to him as "brainless" had nurtured destructive seeds of self-doubt. Perhaps his failure on stage that night represented proof that his father was right.
The persistent fear that one will blush in social situations is part of a problem we call social phobia. Being the centre of social attention is the stimulus that provokes this fear. Sufferers believe that they will fall short of what is expected of them in social situations and provoke ridicule from others. Even praise can ignite a blush because the person feels they don't really deserve it.
While these concerns are common for many of us, a diagnosis of social phobia is given when these fears significantly hinder a person's daily life on a consistent basis. A true social phobic is aware of their social fears are excessive but they are unable to control their distress. Their social life is increasingly constricted by their refusals to meet and interact with others. Career opportunities and promotions may be declined due to the increased social exposure involved. Attendance at family celebrations may prove unbearable.
There is a surprisingly high incidence of this problem in the population. Over the course of a lifetime, it's been found to affect over 10 per cent of men and women. This puts it in third place in terms of serious emotional disorders, behind depression (lifetime prevalence, 17 per cent) and alcoholism (lifetime prevalence, 14 per cent). The age of onset of social phobia is usually in the mid-teens and it generally takes a person 15 to 20 years before they seek any kind of help. The fear of being ridiculed even by one's own GP can be very strong, so nothing is disclosed for years.
Ironically, it is not blushing that is the problem but the sufferer's fear that blushing will betray them to other people as being less than perfect. Many have experienced a trauma in their teens of being exposed and ridiculed and they live in terror that it will happen again. Others have been raised to believe the approval of others is critical to their survival. Personal inadequacies must be concealed at all costs.
Sufferers can go to extraordinary lengths to conceal their anxiety. Meticulous care with make-up, hiding behind one's hair, avoiding eye-contact are all efforts at self-protection, which we call safety behaviours. Unfortunately these safety strategies increase self-consciousness and raise their anxiety level leading to more strenuous efforts to hide their reactions and they become trapped in a vicious cycle of anxiety. Treatment can work medically at blocking the physiological mechanisms underlying blushing but this misses the point in many ways. The path to enduring recovery for blushers lies in being able to be themselves with people and discover that they are acceptable with all their imperfections.
Cognitive behavioural therapy works at helping them break free of the anxiety cycle by confronting feared situations without safety behaviours. People who are honestly and openly themselves convey strength to others and are seen as more trustworthy and attractive than people who present as cold, controlled and emotionally distant. And the consequences of disapproval are rarely as devastating as one might imagine. For the individual who has been haunted by a terror of blushing these truths are little comfort until they are experienced first hand on repeated occasions.
The man whose story opened this column successfully overcame his fear of blushing and returned to adult education in his late 30s. This summer, he completes a five-year training as a professional counsellor. His insights and compassion born of a lifelong struggle with anxiety have equipped him with a great strength to pass on to others with similar difficulties. He plans to write his own story some day, which he may well entitle, Red Man Walking. His courage to confront this problem allowed him to reclaim his life and prove his father wrong.