I’m probably not the only one who can beat herself up over ever having said the wrong things. I’m talking about little social errors and mistakes, where no harm was intended.
The kind of error you don’t think twice about if someone else makes them at your expense, yet you cringe even years later remembering when you were the one committing them.
Example: I still feel my cheeks redden remembering that one time I asked a woman when she was due. She wasn’t pregnant. Ayayayy…
Yet since then, at least three women have asked me the same thing. Everytime, I was mainly concerned with making light of it so they wouldn’t feel bad.
I sometimes wonder if there is some unconscious advantage out of keeping such an inpossible standard for myself.
The strange thing is that I am not self conscious before I open my mouth; I am what you call a spontaneous type. It is only hours afterward that I will bolt awake, or lay awake and go: “What the heck was I thinking saying that?”.
As things are now, such over self-consciousness is the main reason social interaction is so tiring for me. I just know that whenever I go, I will pay the worry price later, and keep on paying it untill the next memory replaces it.
And while most of those memories get replaced, some of the memories have been evergreens, haunting me for years, even decades.
Confession. To close friends and then a therapist, about the horrible, horrible things I’ve done. This is the most important, and hardest thing. But absolution comes when they look at you like you’re stupid.
Medication. To turn off the feelings so this doesn’t happen in the future. There are a lot of good medications for social anxiety and GUILT.
One thing to keep in mind that most people don’t hold grudges or have long memories. People unintentionally embarrass me all the time, but I quickly forgive them because I realize they weren’t intending any harm and that my sensitivity to certain things is MY problem, not theirs.
I find that by focusing on all the social mistakes and faux pas I’m making right now, I have no time to dwell on the past. It’s all about living in the moment. The horrible, awkward moment.
Are you me? Seriously…I could have written your OP.
The only thing that helps me (that I’ve gotten better at as I’ve gotten older) is remembering what you already know…nobody else cares. Just like you’re quick to forgive other people, so they are quick to forgive you. Nobody else spends any time at all thinking about you…they’re too busy thinking about themselves and all the awful things they’ve done and said! (Seriously, how much time do you devote to thinking about embarrassing things other people have done? Almost none, right?)
You sound like me. And I haven’t gotten over them. I know that the other person may or may not remember, but I do. Sometimes something random will bring back a memory hat I wish I didn’t have.
I don’t expect to ever forget, until the time when I start forgetting my name and where I am. I just try to not dwell on it.
When I am in danger of obsessing about how people view my actions (which I have often done) I have found it to help to remind me that other people pay as much attention to my acts as I pay attention to the acts of a random other person in my vicinity - i.e. almost no attention at all, really.
For example: when my SO introduced me to nudism I got over my self-consciousness by thinking: How much attention do Ipay to any one of the others? Right.
It doesn’t always help though, especially with certain kinds of stupid things. For me, one that I just cannot forget was back in high school when I was on a missions trip to Mexico. I was attempting to talk to the pastor of a local church in Spanish and made a mistake of thinking that the Spanish “al pastor” was anything like the English word “pastor.” And of course, it’s not, so what I asked him was something like how long he’d been roasted pork.
Now, it’s an easy mistake to make. I doubt anyone in the world thinks badly of me for making it, and probably no one but me even remembers it. Maybe they even thought well of me for at least making the attempt. It wasn’t even something hurtful, so there’s no guilt there. But I can’t remember that moment without it ruining a chunk of my day… and I can’t seem to forget it. It was just… so… stupid. :smack:
Weird thing is, I don’t think others remember my mistakes. I KNOW they don’t, not like I do, anyway. But I do remember my mistakes, that is the problem.
The confession thing is a good one. I’ve done that, but not in as much detail as I might. Because
A. it is boring, mostly because there are so many such memories, and I don’t want to bore anyone, and
B, I know my shame is utterly ridiculous. I would just get embarrassed about being embarrassed.
I’ve always wondered if, for the socially overconscious, when we are about to die instead of the highlights of our life flashing in front of us, all the gaffes flash in front of us.
This Wiki-how article says all the right things, yet it is still not quite an answer to my particular problem. And that is, how can I stop judging myself so much harsher then I judge other people?
I have them all arranged in order of severity, so the most horrific of them is 'way down there. This particular gaffe from today? Not that bad, compared to the time…
That said, I still remember the minor ones; I don’t know that I ever forgive myself for them, but I at least try to keep them in perspective.
Possibly the most spectacular example of that principle is in the area of public speaking. People who rarely do it can get unbelievably worked up about it, apparently out of some primal fear that they will utterly embarrass themselves in front of a large audience. Which is supremely ironic because the real problem is that said audience consists of people who are going to be centered on the own problems, daydreaming, etc. – so that if you really have something important to say, you’d better focus on finding a way to get their attention, because otherwise… nobody cares! I think it’s probably tied in to our own inflated sense of our own significance. We obsess about our social gaffes and exaggerate them out of all proportion when others have probably long forgotten them – in part probably because they’re obsessing about their own!
It does change as you get older. Our children from about the pre-teen years into young adulthood tend to be incredibly conscious of how we, the parents, conduct ourselves in public when they’re around. In part this is justified, because the older you get, the more you tend to not give a shit what some random member(s) of the public think(s) about you!
