mouse around my loved ones

[emperkins1]

hi  everyone! I was wondering if anyone has advice on this anxiety issue i've been having for about 10 years now.. I am totally comfortable being myself around coworkers, strangers, etc... but when i am around my friends and family who are supposed to be closest to me, I cant seem to break through this "fog" that comes around my thoughts. I get super anxious and its like my mind goes blank when i try to contribute. Even if i feel passionately about something, or know the answer to a question, I can't seem to push past my anxiety and talk. I'm like a little timid mouse around the people closest to me and this confident person around everyone else. I feel like I've gone backwards sometimes. I've tried several different counsellors. Not sure if anyone else has experienced this and can offer advice? thank you!

[Paxiled]

What did your therapists say about it?  Anything happen in your family that might have triggered this?  I'm wondering, though, the only way to have "friends" is to interact with them.  All interaction is "contributing."  Same with family.  Unless you're completely silent around them, in which case they wouldn't actually be able to be friends with you, right?  So if you have friends, you must be talking.  If you hang with family, you must be communicating, right?  With anxiety, we can feel things are a certain way when they actually aren't that way.  Because you're saying you can't talk around family and friends and, again, you can't be with family and friends without talking.  Without interaction, there is no relationship.  So I think what you're saying is, you can talk to them about some things but not others.  So what are the things you can talk about and what are the things that make you nervous?  So it's a little confusing to me exactly what's going on.  But the gist seems to be, around colleagues and strangers, you don't feel pressure, but around your friends and family you do.  Is that what you're saying?  Which again leads me to wonder, did anything happen that might have caused this?  Anxiety affects different people differently, but it sounds like those you most want to impress trigger strong anxiety.  The only advice I can give you is, others don't care as much about what you say as you think they do, they care more about how you treat them and whether or not you're there for them and whether or not you make them feel good or whether or not you make them laugh.  They aren't really judging you all the time, they have other things to worry about.  If they are choosing to be around you and not avoiding you, they must find something about you appealing.  But that's objective reality, and anxiety isn't about that, it's about our thoughts bedeviling us instead of amusing us.  If you can stop being bothered by your thoughts, and if you can accept yourself and not care what others think of you (assuming you're not a horrible person, which I'm sure you're not), the pressure will be off.  It's not easy to fix this kind of thing.  Anxiety is very hard to fix.  Therapy is the best way, but you have to find a therapist you click with and who will pressure you to make changes.  When anxiety can't be fixed by therapy and it's making your life really hard to live, medication might be necessary.  But I think the most important thing going on here is, something triggered you to think you have to perform rather than just be yourself and again, that's either objectively true in which case your family and friends aren't nice people or it's not objectively true and you need to harmonize your thinking with objective reality.  Now, I can say that, but I can't really tell you how to get there except to learn to let go, relax, and stop judging yourself in these situations.  Which is what a good therapist should be working with you on doing.