fear of shyness essay

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Overcoming My Shyness, Essay Example

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Introduction

Shyness is a problem that creates further difficulties in life. Indeed, when somebody is shy, they do not speak up for themselves, they are unable to communicate effectively and get their ideas across. In teaching and learning, shyness can cause several difficulties and create communication barriers. In personal life, it makes it harder to create relationships, socialize and get to know different people’s views. Indeed, shyness can be a result of technological developments of the past few decades: one can live a life, get groceries delivered, complete courses online without ever having to meet with a person face-to-face. Shyness is a problem that can be overcome with hard work and determination. The below essay will be built upon my personal experiences with overcoming this problem, enabling myself to life a fuller, more complete life.

Thesis: Shyness can be tackled by one’s self, using the combination of hypnosis, self-determination, positive affirmations and an exposure therapy.

Review of Experiences

I had been shy all my life up to the age of 20. As a child, in kindergarten, I never approached other children. I went off to play on my own, never asked to join in. In school, I only spoke when I was asked, and even then I talked very quietly. I had known that I had a problem for a long time before I started to deal with it.

When I realized that my shyness was responsible for the lack of friends, success in school and personal life, I understood that I had to deal with it. I had enough of carrying the stigma of being a “shy kid” and not being considered for leading roles in plays, speeches or performances. I started to search the Internet for resources on how to overcome shyness. I knew that being withdrawn was a result of being afraid of other people’s opinion, therefore, I searched for solutions to control this fear.

I found resources on the internet and discovered free hypnosis video sessions that are designed to help me overcome social fear and develop the capability of expressing my views in front of other people. I also understood that if I carry on avoiding others I would develop a condition called “social phobia” which is a serious mental illness. The website “Free Hypnosis Treatment” had several videos that have helped me. Over time, I created a schedule to watch the videos three evenings a week before going to bed. I did see slow changes in my attitude towards other people and started to open up.

Self-determination

Even though I did well with my online hypnosis treatment, I had difficulties with keeping up the schedule. Sometimes I did not see the point in listening to the same voice over and over again and did not fully agree that it was important to go out there. I tried to convince myself that it was OK to be shy, there was nothing wrong with me. Indeed, my unconscious mind was trying to be lazy, and in many cases, my fear of change was overcoming me. I had to re-inforce my self-determination to ensure that I keep up the schedule of the therapy. Without adequate motivation, it is hard to achieve goals, therefore, I combined self-determination with motivation. I got a blank piece of paper and wrote down the benefits of being more outgoing, open and sociable. On the other side of the paper I wrote down the consequences of not changing my attitude towards people. This way, I was able to convince myself and keep up my self-determination.

Positive Affirmations

When I did not have the piece of paper with me detailing the benefits of opening up to others, I often fell back and became withdrawn again. I soon realized that these relapses were in the way of my self-development. I created positive affirmations to use for these instances and told myself the following: “I can open up to people”, “I can be positive”, “People can find me ineresting”, “People can judge me, it doesn’t matter”. When I used these affirmations, my attitude changed and I managed to focus on my goal to overcome shyness.

The last step in my journey of overcoming shyness was to expose myself to situations I was most afraid of. For this method, I wrote down all the instances when I was feeling anxious about being seen, heard or noticed. Some of these situations occurred in the shopping mall, others in school. I started to actively seek these specific difficulties to teach myself how to deal with them. Indeed, I improved my methods of handling these difficult situations and got better at them over time, resulting in a sense of achievement and increased motivation.

While the combination of the above self-help methods to overcome shyness have worked for me, they might form a general framework. I spoke of my experience, and the success of the approaches is not guaranteed for everyone. However, self-determination and positivity are definitely needed for overcoming shyness, and if someone lacks motivation, these aspects of personality can be strengthened using the above described techniques.

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11 Varieties of Shyness in Adolescence and Adulthood

• Published: October 1999
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This chapter offers data and a model that may shed light on the developmental course of shyness and social inhibition. It describes the various psychological literatures to explore the short and long-term effects of three constructs commonly used to describe social reticence (behavioral inhibition, social isolation, and shyness) and their relationship to social phobia. It begins with a conceptualization of shyness. There is evidence for stability of behavioral inhibition over time, even though the associations are only moderate. In addition, correlates of behavioral inhibition include theoretically related constructs and disorders such as shyness, specific fears, separation anxiety, and social isolation. It is noted that there is much overlap in behavioral inhibition and social phobia, as well as some differences. However, it is likely that at least some of the children in these various categories suffer from the same condition, and the model proposes one heuristic conceptualization of the relationships among these constructs.

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Stage Fright, Shyness, and Speaking to the Crowd

February 17, 2017 | yalepress | Health & Medicine , Psychology

I have been shy for as long as I can remember. For half of my life it just seemed an inconvenience, something to live with rather than be curious about. I became interested in shyness as a subject—one that might repay careful reflection—when I began to find my own way of working around it. A few weeks into my first year working in a university, I stood up to give my first-ever lecture. My students, I had noticed, seemed solicitous and concerned for me: never a good sign. But as soon as I started speaking, I felt the relief of the room, a mass exhalation of breath. A benefit of being shy is that people have such reassuringly low expectations of you. I had set a low bar and clambered over it.

I turned out to be a good public speaker. I felt more at ease at the lectern than talking to a stranger, or even to a colleague. I was thankful for the clarity and structure of the format, for the props—lectern, microphone, clicker—that told me how I should behave. I had been given leave to speak.

Shy people can be drawn to performing and are often surprisingly good at it. It’s not that we don’t suffer stage fright; it’s that there is something leveling about the experience. For stage fright is the shyness everyone gets: the common cold of self-consciousness. And the shy know as well as anyone that life is a perpetual performance, that when they step out on stage all they are doing is substituting one role for another.

The psychoanalyst Donald Kaplan once suggested that stage fright’s most terrifying aspect was the actor’s sense of “a complete deprivation of his everyday poise-retaining mannerisms, which are about to be supplanted by the gestures of the performance.” The terror came, Kaplan thought, from facing others without those near-invisible gestures that, in our daily lives, make us feel like ourselves. Perhaps shy people are drawn to the stage because they do not have this everyday poise, so they are looking to strike another pose that might work better for them. For the shy, the pressure of performance can be easier, or at least no harder, than the challenges of daily life.

The lecture theater can be an even more nerve-racking space than the stage. True, the lecturer doesn’t have the actor’s feeling of being intensely scrutinized under a spotlight from a dark auditorium. (The illuminating name that Germans give to stage fright is Lampenfieber : lamp fever.) But nor does the actor have the lecturer’s sense that her knowledge and authority are on the line.

There can be something gladiatorial about it. In his recent memoir, Brief Candle in the Dark , Richard Dawkins writes about being invited to the Royal Institution in London to give the “Friday evening discourse.” In this tradition dating from the 1820s, both lecturer and audience members are required to wear evening dress. The lecturer is locked in “Faraday’s room” for 20 minutes beforehand, having been handed Faraday’s own guide on how not to give a lecture. While a clock strikes the hour, the lecturer stands outside the famous lecture theater, and on the last strike, an official throws open the double doors and the lecturer enters. She must start talking about science from the very first sentence (with no preamble about thanking people for coming or anything). The last sentence of the lecture must be spoken just as the clock begins to strike the next hour. It is hard to imagine a format more designed to induce shyness.

And yet this elaborate ritual also points to an important truth. The lecture is theater, and you can fake it, like the lecturing ape in Franz Kafka’s story “A Report to an Academy,” who learns human speech and gestures to avoid having to live in a cage. The best lectures, I have realized, are full of what the Elizabethans called “lively turning”—strange juxtapositions, rhetorical tricks, surprises, jokes. In other words, they are an act.

If you are feeling confident, you can use a lecture to play around not just with words but with silence. The sociologist Nikolas Rose would turn up to give a lecture to first-year students at Goldsmiths, the University of London, gather up his notes and then say nothing. One year he managed to stretch the silence out for 40 minutes. (This story appears in the book Academic Diary , written by one of Rose’s colleagues, Les Back.) Rose was, of course, making a point to his students about the power and authority invested in certain kinds of speaking. That takes more nerve than I can muster.

I have also found that my stage fright returns if there is a question and answer session at the end of the lecture. Here I have to come out of role and will surely be found out by that left-field question from the audience which will induce brain freeze and a calamitous attempt to answer that ties itself up in tortured syntax before dissolving into terrifying silence. This has happened rarely to me in real life, but just often enough to fuel my catastrophizing imagination. That moment when the trickle of applause dies down and the chair asks for questions from the floor marks the transition between two types of performance. One feels comfortingly fake, the other terrifyingly real.

My life as a lecturer has taught me that shyness is complex and situational. Human beings are social animals by instinct and default setting, so all that shyness does is to make us sociable in peculiar and circuitous ways. It can encourage us to reroute our dormant social impulses into new and creative areas: writing, singing, acting, public speaking. “Les grands timides,” as the French psychiatrist Ludovic Dugas called them in a 1922 book of that name, lead lives of “complicated dissimulation, full of subtleties and detours.” Shyness is less a shrinking away from the world than a redirection of our energies. It can prod us into doing what we might not have done if we had found our everyday encounters more congenial. It leads us down stimulating side streets after it has blocked off the main routes.

It can even cure us of stage fright.

Joe Moran is professor of English and cultural history at Liverpool John Moores University. His previous books include On Roads: A Hidden History, which was longlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize. He lives in Liverpool, UK.

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The Many Faces of Shyness in Childhood Across Cultural Contexts

• First Online: 06 May 2020

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• Yiyuan Xu 2 ,
• Taylor Stacy 2 &
• Alexander Krieg 3  

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There is increasing evidence to suggest that shyness is a multidimensional phenomenon in childhood across cultural contexts. This chapter reviews the recent theory development and empirical evidence related to differentiation of three forms of childhood shyness, including shyness toward strangers, anxious shyness, and regulated shyness. Drawing from Nigg (Psychological Bulletin 126:220–246, 2000)’s model of motivational and executive inhibition, we argue that regardless of cultural context, all the three forms of shyness may be related to an early emerging sensitive motivational inhibition system that predisposes children to dispositional appeasement, but they may be differentially related to a later developing executive inhibition system over time. There are both within- and between-cultural differences in these three forms of shyness. Within each culture, the three forms of shyness vary in their primary eliciting situations and accompanying behaviors and emotions and are associated with different peer relationships and psychosocial adjustment. Across cultural contexts, predominant cultural norms and beliefs may shape hyper- and hypocognition of the three forms of shyness, as well as their appeasement functions and focal events that activate each form of shyness. We also discuss an important future direction of understanding the role of implicit theories in explaining cultural similarities and variations in interpersonal perception of and relationship with shy children.

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Xu, Y., Stacy, T., Krieg, A. (2020). The Many Faces of Shyness in Childhood Across Cultural Contexts. In: Schmidt, L.A., Poole, K.L. (eds) Adaptive Shyness. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-38877-5_12

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How to Overcome Anxiety & Shyness: Real Life Success Stories

Learn to overcome anxiety and shyness with these four strategies.

Posted January 14, 2014

• What Is Shyness?
• Find a therapist near me

As a psychologist, I am frequently inspired by the resiliency people display in everyday life. Through the Internet and the power of social networking , I have met amazing women whose stories need to be told. Read their success stories and be inspired. I've written full-length posts about each them before. Here I'm sharing their success strategy with a link to their full story.

1. Accept Yourself: Celia

• “You’re doing great work, but you’ve got to come out of your shell.”
• “Have you always been this quiet?”
• "You need to ask yourself, What would Queen Latifah do?"

Celia had heard it all before (well, maybe not the Queen Latifah line). Teachers made her feel that her quiet temperament was a weakness. And she believed it. At least for awhile…

Celia learned that self-acceptance was the first step in overcoming her anxiety . “The more I convinced myself that being quiet is the same as being weird, the more quiet I became,” she said.

She also learned that shyness had its strengths.

“The real revelation for me is that being shy isn’t even necessarily a social handicap. Shy people have a great gift: their gut about whom to trust. It comes from years of observing people and a deep fear of being burned, and it pulls us away from the frigid, hateful and fake.”

"Being shy is, if not a virtue, at least a blessing: it’s a heightened social sense, an intuitive risk aversion that keeps us far from broken bones and broken hearts."

Read Celia’s story: I'm Shy and I'm OK.

2. Join a Support Group: Marla

Marla lived in daily fear. She woke to physical symptoms of anxiety , such as her heart racing, as well as worry about what the day would bring. "Is there a staff meeting where I may be called upon to speak? What should I do about lunch with my coworkers? (She had situational anxiety about eating in front of others.) Will my boss need to speak with me? Will someone have to observe me as I train them or they train me? What if they invite me to happy hour? And the list went on..."

Marla credits a lot of her own progress in overcoming her social anxiety to joining a support group. She started attending a group in 2006 as a participant, and then became a group facilitator herself.

She also did an unexpected project, especially for someone with social anxiety: She wore a tee-shirt every day while in Disney World that said, "Ask me about my social anxiety."

"I am so passionate about this cause—to raise awareness for social anxiety, to offer hope, to show people they are not alone, and to let them know they don't have to live their lives in fear," she said.

Read more about Marla’s story: Shy Girl, Brave Woman and Joining a Support Group When You're Afraid to Speak.

3. Blog about It: Brittany

Brittany described herself as having debilitating shyness. She dreamed of teaching English abroad, but fear was keeping her from doing this, as well as other things. She started a blog, The Shyness Project , which was a one-year plan she devised to confront her fears. She set a number of goals for herself and held herself accountable by writing publicly about her progress.

“My blog readers definitely helped me keep going. I doubt this project would have been possible without them. I received a lot of really kind emails and comments throughout the project, and that really encouraged me. And when I was told by some of them that I inspired them to confront some of their own anxiety and struggles, I was more determined than ever to keep pushing myself. I really developed a sort of blog family, and they became my support group. They kept me accountable because I didn't want to let them down and I didn't want to let myself down either.”

Read more about Brittany’s story: The Shyness Projec t and on her website . (She was also featured on Susan Cain's website, The Power of Introverts .)

4. Seek Expert Help: Kayla

I first became acquainted with Kayla when I was participating in a documentary on social anxiety disorder called, Afraid of People . The producer sent me an early "rough cut" of the documentary to watch; I was particularly drawn to the girl with the strawberry-blonde hair. She appeared tormented every time anyone spoke or looked at her. She would gaze downward, her hair falling forward, obscuring her face. She wouldn’t talk to anyone but her family. Kayla had selective mutism .

The key to Kayla’s progress (she’s now a successful college student) was her mother, Sherry, being persistent in getting a diagnosis and specialized treatment. It was not a quick or easy process. They went through numerous doctors before they found Dr. Shipon Blum , an expert in selective mutism. With Dr. Blum's help, Kayla recovered.

"I will never forget the first time she yelled out the car window to one of her friends after school," Sherry said. "It was as if she finally discovered the voice she never knew she had."

Read more about Kayla’s story: From Quiet to Queen .

You can also read my story: Quiet is Not a Four-Letter Word and Successfully Shy: Things I've Learned.

Oh, and one more thing: Don’t give up. The world needs you and your ideas!

Shyness is nice and shyness can stop you
 from doing all the things in life
 you’d like to.


–Ask, by The Smiths ( Read how we named our blog .)

Let’s Keep in Touch!

To subscribe to my posts via e-mail, click here .

Join me on Twitter and Facebook .

I also write at The Self-Compassion Project .

To read more of my posts on this blog, click here.

I am the co-author of Dying of Embarrassment , Painfully Shy , and Nurturing the Shy Child . Dying of Embarrassment : Help for Social Anxiety & Phobia was found to be one of the most useful and scientifically grounded self-help books in a research study published in Professional Psychology, Research and Practice. I’ve also been featured in the award-winning PBS documentary, Afraid of People . Greg and I also co-authored Illuminating the Heart: Steps Toward a More Spiritual Marriage.

Barbara Markway, Ph.D., is a clinical psychologist with over 20 years of experience. She is the author of four psychology books and has been featured in media nationwide.

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Shyness Essay

In a world where 84% of people have reported feeling shy (Zimbardo, 2016), it is easy to understand the fear of potentially being laughed at or at times the easier option is to withdraw into the background. Coon and Mitterer (2014) defines shyness as “tendency to avoid others, accompanied by feelings of anxiety , preoccupation, and social inhibition”. Most people can relate to the characteristic of shyness at one point or another, but for 15 to 20% (as cited in Theall-Honey & Schmidt, 2006) shyness is a constant daily trait. Temperament is used to help differentiate between the two which describe it as being apparent in early age, it is a stable over time, predictable mode of response (Crozier, 2000). Shyness can impact someone from meeting …show more content…

In a sense avoidance is a coping mechanism which happens to create stress, anxiety and reduces self-confidence (Boyes, 2013). Fortunately, for students with temperament shyness this avoidance coping mechanism can be overcome once recognized. However, it is important to first question why there is a difference between shy and non-shy students. One approach to this question is the labeling theory which is the idea that if given a label and accepted that it will affect how they see themselves and how other perceive them. For example, “ ‘teachers in one classic study were told to watch normal elementary school children who had been labeled (for the study) as ‘learning disabled,’ ‘mentally retarded,’ ‘emotionally disturbed,’ or ‘normal’ Sadly, teachers gave the children very different ratings, depending on the labels used,’” (as cited in Coon & Mitterer, 2014, page 46). This concept is similar to that of shyness. Once a student is label as “shy” in the classroom it effects the student’s self-esteem. If the student is willing to change attitude toward shyness and interacting with other in social situations, they can overcome avoidance approach by practicing. Dr. Henderson and Dr. Zimbardo developed a program called “Social Fitness Training” where the idea is that someone can improve their social skills through practice the same way someone would train their physical fitness ("Social Fitness Training Model"). For example, instead on not answering a question due to the fear of being made fun off or being judge by their class mates, a student would deliberately try to raise their hand to overcome shyness. This should serve as a reminder for teachers to seek out shy students and guide them to overcome shyness in hopes that it could prevent it from deepening into

Social Anxiety In College Essay

Each year, thousands upon thousands of new high school graduates enter college to begin one of the most exciting chapters of their lives. This is a time where young people get to move away from home, learn valuable life skills, meet interesting new people, and pursue the career of their dreams. While all of this may sound like nothing but positivity, there’s a dismal side to all of this that many individuals are not aware of. Out of all of the problems that college students face, social anxiety is an issue that has persisted throughout the years, and has not begun to improve. According to research out of The University of Plymouth and The University of the West of England, 10% of all university students surveyed said they experienced significant anxiety (Weaver,

Social Phobia Essay

Those who have social phobia have a strong fear of being embarrassed, or being judged by others. Most people that have social anxiety know that they shouldn’t be as afraid as they are but, they cannot control their fear. When they are in or around public they become very self-conscious, and tend to

Social Phobia or Anxiety Disorder

Social phobia is “shyness taken to an extreme” (Myers 323). The origins of social phobia can be linked to “traumatic social experiences and social isolation” (Hudson118-120). A traumatic social experience can be “being laughed at or making a mistake in situations such as being called on to talk in class, being on a first date, speaking in public or being at a party”(Hudson 118). Social isolation includes “being teased, bullied, laughed at, rejected, neglected, or isolated from other children. Research from Allison G. Harvey shows that certain events around the time social fears being are when people are changing schools or work at 50.9%, not fitting in with or being ostracized by a p...

Avoidant Personality Disorder

Avoidant Personality Disorder (AVPD) can be defined simply as a disorder in which an individual purposefully withdraws and avoids social contact for fear of rejection (Alloy, Riskind, & Manos, 2004). The individual that exhibits this disorder has an extreme sensitivity to criticism and the idea that they may be rejected, humiliated, shamed, or disapproved by others (Alloy et al., 2004). Morrison (1995) states that the sensitivity to criticism and potential disapproval has an effect making individuals with AVPD more likely to demonstrate modesty and eagerness to please others, however, this sensitivity can also lead to social isolation. The individual with AVPD may have difficulty distinguishing otherwise more innocent comments and view them as being critical. This can also lead to avoiding certain social situations and even career choices that involve a high level of interpersonal demands.

Reflective Essay On Communication Skills

For the aforementioned reasons, there is no doubt that fears and shy had been controlled myself throughout the years. According to The People’s Almanac presents The Book of Lists by David Wallechinsky, Irving and Amy Wallace, one of the topic was titled “The 14 Worst Human Fears”, and the fear of speaking in public is the first fear of all fears (Richard I. Garber, 2009). This make me realized that it is perfectly normal to feel anxiety and fears to speak. Everyone, even an experienced speakers has some anxiety when speaking in front of a group of people. As for my experience and situation, I should have just fight the fears in me to throw my voice out asking questions in class otherwise I would might left behind a bit and need to struggle up for the subjects more than everyone does. Asking questions does not make you any stupid, it’s the source of

College Essay About Being Shy

Everyone experienced feeling shy and nervous at some point in their lives. Being shy doesn’t mean that a person lacks talent, because it just might be that they don’t feel comfortable in certain situations.

Examples Of The Continuum Hypothesis

In today’s extroverted world, the shy temperament has become synonymous with insecurity, social anxiety, functional deficits, inhibited social skills, avoidant social behavior and impaired behavioral, somatic and cognitive symptoms in social settings. However, shyness has been suggested to lie on a spectrum ranging from normative shyness to a pathological state of extreme social phobia and avoidant personality disorder. The distinction among the varying levels of shyness on the continuum has been a topic of interest to current researchers, specifically qualifying normative shyness from highly shy, and highly shy individuals with and without social phobia. The difference between an individual with shyness and one with social phobia can be explained by comparing how the two approach social situations, and how they respond cognitively, behaviorally and physiologically. A shy person might go to a social event but feel uncomfortable and not enjoy themselves very much. However, an individual with social phobia may not even be able to make themselves go to the event at all.

Origins Of Social Bullying By Hudson Jl, And Rapee Rm

According, to the origins of social phobia by Hudson Jl, and Rapee Rm. ”There is, however, research derived from related areas such as shyness, social anxiety, self-consciousness, peer neglect, and social withdrawal that contributes to a richer understanding of the etiology of social fears” (Hudson). Their research is accurate because I have low self-esteem and I suffer with social anxiety due to being neglected throughout my life. Having social phobia has prevented me from getting a job, and talking to people on the daily basis. I do not enjoy talking to people I am not familiar with, especially when I am in school. I have a hard time giving presentations because of my anxiety. As a result, I would fail a class that I would have to present in because of my

Internal Locus Of Control

This disadvantage may hinder my overall growth, especially if I don’t utilize tutoring or office hours wisely. Also, I am a little concerned about coming off as arrogant because I want to stay humble and down to earth as much as possible. A recommendation to help treat my shyness is to make eye contact with the person I talk to and to ask open-ended questions. Simply asking yes or no questions won’t help me overcome my shyness. Another recommendation for being reserved is to make a list of situations where I feel shy.

Communication Apprehension

Payne, S.K. & Richmond, V.P. (1984). A bibliography of related research and theory. In J.C. McCroskey & J.A. Daly (Eds.). Avoiding communication: shyness, reticence, and communication apprehension. (pp. 247-294). London: Sage Publications Inc.

Growing Up Research Paper

I say this because shyness affected my ability to collaborate. As a result I was not able to do group projects with my peers. I did not know how to interact with my peers; so, instead, I would just do the project by myself and hand it to my teacher. What I did not know was that the teacher was grading everybody as group, and we had to present our project in front of the whole class. That made me nervous because I had never presented in front of a group of students.

Shyness: An Persuasive Essay: Overcoming Challenges

Overcoming challenges is a difficult thing to do. I 've always been a shy person even when I was a little girl; and it seems that as I 'm getting older, it 's getting worse. For me, my shyness is a challenge I have to overcome; it takes a lot of preparation to even think about overcoming a task physically, let alone emotionally. Determination is a big role in helping me overcome my challenges, this lets others know how much I want to succeed; and what I 'm willing to do to set my goals. Faith also helps to tell me that I can do whatever I set my mind to. All of these things helped me in my time of need – when things weren 't going as planned.

Outgoing Person Essay

I used to be very shy, and not talk to a lot of people. It was a big part of my personality, and I would only talk to someone when spoken to. Wong explains how I acted very well, “My friends and family probably wouldn 't describe me as shy. But for me, being shy has always been about struggling to connect with people I don 't know. I fear the unfamiliarity of a stranger—how they might judge or reject me. Maybe there 's nothing inherently wrong with being timid, but when I started noticing how it affected my everyday life, I wanted to get it under control.” (para. 3). I started getting more and more talkative as I grew older, but one day I decided to change. I began to come out of my comfort zone. For example, I made myself talk more to people even though I was afraid of what I would say, but I made myself do it anyways. This helped me communicate a lot with people, because they began to respect me more, because I would also watch what I would say to them. I still watch what I say most of the time to people because one of my biggest fears is to offend someone on accident because of something that I said. Making myself talk to people more made me a much more outgoing person, which is a big part of who I

Personal Reflection In Psychology

479). Throughout my life, I have always been described by teachers, friends, and family as an introvert. I’m shy around other people and often have a difficult time talking to them. In school, I’m the student that the teacher doesn’t know if I’m in class or not, unless I participate in discussions. It was interesting to learn more about introversion by reading about it in the book and the discussions in class. I was intrigued by the research information in the book, “shyness has a strong biological influence” (Grison, Heatherton,Gazzaniga, 2017, p. 484). My grandfather displayed the same quiet nature. Whenever, I went to my grandparent’s home, I noticed how he sat and listened intently to others, but didn’t speak much. He has always had a quiet nature. In addition, I learned more about the trait from the Eysenck’s Biological Trait Theory of Personality, which described how “personality traits had two major dimensions:

Examples Of Overcoming Shyness

Many of us faced challenges in our years and struggled with them. Some of those struggles might have changed who we are or how we later approached life. A lot of people think that shy people are just quiet, and do not like to make friends. It's not the truth for me. As some of my friends know, I love to talk and share to others. I am a really outgoing fun girl, once I'm out of

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How I Learned to Love My Granddaughter Without Fear

T he phone call from my daughter in North Carolina came at six o’clock in the morning, unusually early for her. “I’m pregnant,” Maggie announced, her voice bubbling with delight.

From 1,600 miles away I put down my mug of smoky dark-roast coffee and gave a shout. Her news was the last thing I would have expected as I sat in my rented house in Albuquerque, watching roadrunners skitter over the xeriscaping in the front yard, stabbing at the dried mealworms I’d just put out for them. 

Maggie and her husband, Jimmy, together for 11 years and married for eight, had been on the fence about having children. Four years into their marriage, they decided to try for a baby. But after years passed, they both assumed and then accepted it wasn’t going to happen.

Read More: What My Family Taught Me About Loneliness

I’d looked on with a mixture of curiosity and a small bit of envy as friends welcomed one grandchild after another. My oldest son, Liam, in his early 40s, was at the time unattached. I’d resigned myself to the possibility of never knowing that particular brand of joy, although I also couldn’t imagine what it would be like to actually be someone’s grandmother.

And yet, here I was, trying to wrap my head around the idea. I walked through the house, my brindle Boxer dogging my footsteps as I did a quick inventory of room after room. In the next couple of days, I began packing up my belongings and arranging for housing with dear friends back home. 

During one of our phone calls, my daughter had asked, “What do you want your grandmother name to be?”

“I have absolutely no idea,” I confessed. 

Meanwhile, I worked to tamp down a rising anxiety. My second child, Cooper, had been born 40 years ago with a heart defect. When he was 4 days old, he had closed-heart surgery to repair a coarctation of the aorta. What we didn’t know — what no one could have known then, with limited ability to see inside an infant’s heart — was there were other, more deadly defects hidden within, two holes in the wall separating the atria. When he was 6 weeks old, he died quietly at home in my arms as I held and rocked him, unaware he was slipping away from me.

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When Cooper died, Liam was 2 1/2. To say I became an overly anxious mother would be an understatement. I monitored every bump and bruise, each sniffle and fever. Nightmares of childhood cancer and other life-threatening illnesses pushed their way into everyday activities. After all, I now knew that the worst was possible. 

Then I became pregnant again. After Maggie was born, I slept with her on my stomach most nights, and when she finally transitioned to a crib, I’d go into her room in the morning, half-expecting to find she’d died.

The grip on my heart gradually released, though, as my healthy children grew into their wonderful selves with nothing more than the usual list of childhood maladies and injuries. And now here was my baby having a baby. My emotions roiled with wonder and excitement, but all of it was overshadowed by a deep, resonating dread.

My daughter sent me the first ultrasound photos of “Little Bean,” a nickname they’d given in the earliest days when a pregnancy app indicated the developing clump of cells was the size of a vanilla bean.

I peered at the mottled, blurry image of my grandchild at 8 weeks gestation. “What am I seeing?” I asked.

“Here,” she texted and sent a second photo, this one with a red arrow pointing to a small darkish blob with a hazy dot in it like a dandelion tuft. “The brighter spot is the heart,” she wrote.

I peered at the picture, trying to imagine the fuzzy image as a beating heart. Something in me broke open, then just as quickly slammed shut. 

Some years before, during my tenure at the domestic-violence and rape crisis agency, a co-worker had asked if I’d mind holding her newborn while she attended a short meeting. I happily took her baby boy in my arms, cooing and grinning at him, and brought him into my office. Sinking into the chair, the first thing I did was check to make sure he was breathing, as easily as one might check to make sure his socks were still on. Hot tears of sorrow and anger spilled down my cheeks at my automatic reaction to holding an infant. 

This is how trauma lives in the body, tentacled through our sense memory. So much of the terrible night my son died remains a blur. What I have recalled all too well is the cold stillness, the weight of his tiny form, and the shock of him being so utterly gone.

Little Bean turned out to be a girl and with the given name June. All ultrasounds and other tests revealed her to be developing as she should. But I couldn’t shake the sense of dread.

“So much could go wrong,” I worried aloud to a friend.

“And so much could go right,” was her loving response.

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Maggie was induced early one morning, and labor progressed slowly over the course of the day. At 9:37 that night I witnessed the moment my daughter pushed her baby girl into the world, a 7 ½-lb. miracle with downy dark hair and an adorable button nose. My son-in-law said I should do the honors — the obstetrician handed me the scissors, and I cut the cord, severing June from the warm, liquid world of her mother’s womb, and officially welcoming her Earthside.

But after her first breath, the newborn cry, that plaintive, sharp wail all parents wait for, didn’t come. The nurses took June from my daughter’s arms and continued to rub and stimulate her as she blinked in the glare of the bright room, but her blood oxygen levels remained concerningly low.

“We’re going to take her to the nursery,” one of the nurses said. My son-in-law followed. My daughter, unable to leave the bed because of the epidural, looked at me from across the room.

A chest X-ray confirmed a suspected pneumothorax, a condition in which air leaks into the space between the lung and the chest. Because we live in a small town with a small hospital, June would need to be transported to an NICU an hour and a half away. Watching my daughter and son-in-law say a tearful goodbye to their newborn was one of the most wrenching scenes I’ve ever witnessed. The next morning my daughter was discharged, and I drove her to see her baby girl at the hospital where my son-in-law already was.

The neonatal specialist assured them that the small hole in her lung would likely heal on its own, and three days later they brought June home. “Just forget this happened,” the doctor said. All signs pointed to complete health.

But I was in a tailspin that I couldn’t seem to pull out of. 

Those first weeks I’d come to their house on Friday, taking charge of June at midnight after my daughter nursed her, and giving her the 2 a.m. and 5 a.m. bottles, watching her mouth as she suckled, stroking her soft skin. Did I feel like her grandmother? I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to feel. Friends had described a dizzying happiness at being “in the best club ever.”

What I felt too much of was terror, deathly afraid of the small bundle I held, continually monitoring her rosebud lips for signs of a bluish tint, watching to make sure her chest was rising and falling, panicking when it seemed too long between breaths. The urge to tumble helplessly in love with my granddaughter was in full battle with the freshly resurfaced memories of the night my son died. I kept my fears to myself, not wanting to foist my unease on my already traumatized daughter and son-in-law, who were struggling to return to the normalcy of welcoming this new baby into their lives after her scary start. 

One afternoon, talking on the phone with a friend while driving in town, I heard myself say, “The doctors assured them the hole in her heart would heal.” There was a stunned silence as I realized what I’d said. “I mean her lung,” I said and hung up, pulling into a grocery-store parking lot where I sat with my face in my hands, weeping. In that moment, I knew I had a choice — release the dark grief or risk missing one of the most light-filled times of my life. 

“That was that baby,” I told myself. “This baby doesn’t have any holes in her heart. This baby is fine.” I offered myself a mantra to try. “That was then, this is now.” Whenever the old trepidation would rise, I’d repeat the words, reminding myself of the distance in years and reality between the death of my son and the life of this sweet, healthy baby girl. Gradually, my heart unwound.

One afternoon, while my daughter napped in the next room, I snuggled little June close and rocked her. I leaned down to listen to the sound of her quiet breathing, this time not from fear but wonder. She looked up at me with deep blue eyes rimmed with dark lashes and stared as if memorizing my face. Unable to look away, I let her hold me in the power of her wide-open gaze.

“The brighter spot is the heart,” my daughter had written to me all those months ago, and now baby June and I sat basking in the light of a love big enough to hold it all — yesterday’s grief, today’s joy, and all the beautiful and uncertain tomorrows. 

Outside, a soft breeze blew, and a shard of sunlight shot through the trees. I kissed my granddaughter’s forehead and began to sing.

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Guest Essay

How Iran and Israel Are Unnatural Adversaries

By Karim Sadjadpour

Mr. Sadjadpour is a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

“History is littered,” the British writer and politician Enoch Powell said, “with the wars which everybody knew would never happen.”

A full-blown conflict between the Islamic Republic of Iran and Israel once seemed implausible. But last month, the long-running shadow war between the two nations burst into the open in a series of unprecedented drone and missile strikes, raising the specter of a fight that would contain enough advanced technology, paramilitary forces and mutual acrimony to incinerate large parts of the Middle East, collapse the global economy and entangle the United States and other major powers.

Now the two sides appear to have hit pause, but for how long? As long as Iran is ruled by an Islamist government that puts its revolutionary ideology before the national interest, the two countries will never know peace, and the Middle East will never know meaningful stability.

Iran and Israel are not natural adversaries. In contrast to other modern conflicts — between Israel and Palestine, Russia and Ukraine, China and Taiwan — Iran and Israel have no bilateral land or resource disputes. Their national strengths — Iran is an energy titan and Israel is a tech innovator — are more complementary than competitive. The nations also have a historical affinity dating back over 2,500 years, when the Persian King Cyrus the Great freed the Jews from the Babylonian Captivity. Iran was the second Muslim nation, after Turkey, to recognize Israel after its founding in 1948.

Their modern animosity is best understood through the lens of ideology, not geopolitics. It began with the rise of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the dogmatic Shiite cleric who led the 1979 revolution that transformed Iran from a U.S.-allied monarchy into an anti-American theocracy. Khomeini’s 1970 treatise “ Islamic Government ,” which became the basis of the constitution that governs the Islamic Republic, is laced with tirades and threats against “wretched” and “satanic” Jews. Then, as now, antisemitism often lurked below the surface of anti-imperialism.

“We must protest and make the people aware that the Jews and their foreign backers are opposed to the very foundations of Islam and wish to establish Jewish domination throughout the world,” Khomeini wrote. “Since they are a cunning and resourceful group of people, I fear that — God forbid — they may one day achieve their goal and that the apathy shown by some of us may allow a Jew to rule over us one day.”

In the same manifesto, Khomeini casually advocates what in modern parlance is best understood as ethnic cleansing. “Islam,” he wrote, “has rooted out numerous groups that were a source of corruption and harm to human society.” He went on to cite the case of a “troublesome” Jewish tribe in Medina that he said was “eliminated” by the Prophet Muhammad.

Very few of the Iranian revolutionaries and Western progressives who backed Khomeini in 1979 — some of whom compared him with Mohandas K. Gandhi — had bothered to scrutinize his vision for Iran. Once in power, he built his newfound theocracy on three ideological pillars: death to America, death to Israel and the subjugation of women.

Over four decades later, the worldview of Iran’s current rulers has evolved little. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Khomeini’s 85-year-old successor and now one of the world’s longest-serving dictators, denounces Zionism in virtually every speech and was one of the few world leaders to publicly praise Hamas’s “epic” Oct. 7 attack on Israel. “We will support and assist any nation or any group anywhere,” Ayatollah Khamenei said in 2020, “who opposes and fights the Zionist regime.”

As Ayatollah Khamenei’s words make plain, the Islamic Republic of Iran is one of the few governments in the world more dedicated to abolishing another nation than advancing its own. “Death to Israel” is the regime’s rallying cry — not “Long live Iran.”

Ayatollah Khamenei’s regime has backed this language with action. Iran has spent tens of billions of dollars arming, training and financing proxy militias in five failing nations: Lebanon, Syria, Gaza, Iraq and Yemen. Together these groups constitute its so-called Axis of Resistance against America and Israel. These groups are elbow-deep in corruption and repression in their own societies, including illicit drug dealing and piracy , while pledging that they seek justice for Palestinians.

Hostility toward Israel is a useful tool for predominantly Shiite, Persian Iran to vie for leadership in the predominantly Sunni, Arab Middle East. But it should not be confused with concern for the well-being of Palestinians. In contrast to American, European and Arab governments that fund Palestinian human welfare initiatives, Iran has poured hundreds of millions of dollars into arming and financing Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad. Iran’s goal is not to build a Palestine but to demolish Israel.

And yet as much as the Islamic Republic is committed to its ideology, it is even more committed to staying in power. As the German American philosopher Hannah Arendt once put it, “The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative on the day after the revolution.” As its careful response to Israel’s recent military strikes on Iran showed, when faced with the possibility of full-blown war or existential economic pressure, Tehran tactically retreats.

After decades of living under an economically failing, socially repressive police state, Iran’s people long ago recognized that the greatest obstacle between themselves and a normal life is their own leadership, not America or Israel. In a 2021 public opinion poll conducted from Europe, only around one-fifth of Iranians approved of their government’s support of Hamas and “Death to Israel” slogan. Few nations have Iran’s combination of natural resource wealth, human capital, geographic size and ancient history. This enormous gap between Iran’s potential and its citizens’ reality is one reason the country has experienced numerous mass uprisings over the past two decades.

Iran’s Axis of Resistance has empowered right-wing Israeli politicians far more than Palestinians over the past two decades. The threat of a Holocaust-denying Iranian regime with regional and nuclear ambitions has stoked Israeli anxieties, diverted attention from Palestinian suffering and facilitated normalization agreements between Israel and Arab governments equally fearful of Iran. Indeed, Iran and its proxies were such a useful adversary that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu helped prop up Hamas’s rule in Gaza until the deadly attacks of Oct. 7.

“The dream of Israeli leaders,” a retired Israeli general, Amos Yadlin, told me recently, “is to one day restore normal relations with an Iranian government.”

The dream of Iran’s Islamist leaders, on the other hand, is to end Israel’s existence. Israel’s conflict with Iran has been a war of necessity, but Iran’s conflict with Israel has been a war of choice. It won’t be over until Iran has leaders who put Iranians’ interests over Israel’s destruction.

Karim Sadjadpour is a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

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