The Emotional Connection between Childhood Sexual Abuse and Social Anxiety Disorder
Why do people who survive childhood sexual abuse* sometimes develop social anxiety disorder**?
*Childhood sexual abuse is when an older child or an adult perform oral, anal, or vaginal intercourse or sexual touching with a child. This includes forcing the child to watch porn or touch the older child or adult sexually.
**Social anxiety disorder is when a person feels heightened stress in public settings, work settings, or any social setting.
Some people who experience childhood sex abuse tend to become adults who internalize or externalize what happened to them by withdrawing or becoming aggressive.
This is likely because when they were children, the sexual abuse caused them to feel shame (internalizing that the act was somehow their fault).
Oppositely, they may have externalized the sex act and feel rage (someone must pay for their pain).
When children are violated, they sometimes blame themselves for what the adult or older teen did to them. They think something must be wrong with them because the person selected them to abuse.
Self-blame starts the cycle of anxiety for some people. When interacting with others, they over explain themselves, they over apologize for mistakes, or they clam up to avoid upsetting others.
These children become adults who silence themselves.
Due to the self-blame, these children are likely to develop a socially conditioned fear of criticism from other people.
Whenever they are criticized, the criticism confirms the self-blame they took on during and after the abuse.
Most of the time, engaging with family, friends, coworkers, or strangers involves irrational fears of criticism or insults from others. This is a conditioned response from trauma.
Walking into a room and assuming everyone is thinking something negative about you is a trauma response. Most of the people do not know your story, they only know the parts of you that you have decided to show them.
They are engaging with you and interacting with you based on what you have told them and what you have shown them through your behavior.
Are you now thinking about how to present yourself to others? This is an exhausting exercise!
You have no control over how people respond to you, treat you, or engage with you.
Your job, therefore, is to show up and present yourself authentically to them so that interactions are based on who you are versus who you want them to think you are.
Being authentic means saying what you mean and meaning what you say.
Because they expect people to not like them, to criticize them, they generalize the self-blame and fear of criticism to an extreme fear of social situations. This is understandable but limiting.
Social isolation exacerbates depression and anxiety.
Please consider challenging yourself to choose one day a week to be social with others.
You set the timer for an hour, but becoming comfortable with the uncomfortable feelings about worrying about what others are thinking is part of the healing process.
Generalizing self-blame whenever you exit your living space holds you back from living the life you desire.
Once this generalization happens, over time, the person develops a consistent fear that other people will view them in a negative light.
They imagine most social situations will leave them feeling embarrassed or humiliated. The likelihood that every social interaction will be a negative experience is low.
However, I do not want to downplay the extreme discomfort of being embarrassed or humiliated in public.
These instances are moments to laugh at ourselves for whatever happened. These instances are not proof that we are undeserving of love, laughter, and joy.
By the way, those people who view you in a negative light because you did something to feel humiliated – those people do not like or love you, thus, they do not matter.
People who matter, the people who like and love you will come to your side if you do something in public that causes embarrassment and try to provide emotional safety. These are your people, not the others.
Women tend to develop symptoms of PTSD (posttraumatic stress disorder) after an incident of childhood sex abuse.
If someone violates you sexually as a child, you do not have to remember all of the details for the abuse to be valid. Your intellectual memory may have blocked out what happened, but your body remembers all.
When you enter a facility and feel ill to your stomach, it may be a warning that the abuser is nearby or one of your five senses recalls being activated by something in the environment.
Breathe. Exhale.
If your abuser is not present, you are safe to stay and enjoy the event. If the abuse continues over time, the woman may develop cPTSD (complex PTSD).
This is where we discuss intersectionality. The more marginalized and oppressed social groups the person belongs to higher the likelihood the person will develop long-term negative effects.
Social identities such as being a woman, being low income, being a woman of color, etc. Unfortunately, these are the groups most targeted by abusers because their caregivers are distracted by survival tasks.
Pedophiles tend to target parents versus children. They can tell which parents are not paying attention and this makes it easier to prey on those children. Once an abuser decides on a victim, they begin a slow grooming process.
What is confusing about the impact of childhood sex abuse is the on and off or fluid nature of the negative impact:
- low self-esteem in some areas of life and high self-confidence in other areas,
- feeling unworthy in some instances and deserving in other instances,
- distrusting others while also developing emotional connections with others, and
- they also vacillate between fearing transition, change or new people/places/things and
- being excited to meet new people and experience new places and things.
How does it feel reading that adult social anxiety disorder may stem from childhood sexual abuse?
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