July 8, 2022

In group therapy today, I had a whole different feeling, instead of feeling sad for the people in it, I felt negative not in a bad way, but in a judgmental way. I don’t know if this was triggered when I expressed my anxiety toward reading the email response to my gratitude statement and the group member failed to respond to my issues and instead just changed the subject or just my true feelings. My issues came when a group member discussed how messy his house was and blamed his girlfriend that is basically his wife, seeing as he is a stay-at-home husband, I don’t see how she is responsible for cleaning when she works. I hate to feel judgmental because I hate when people do it to me. Maybe my empathy allows me to see if from both perspectives.

Outside of group, I am still feeling lots of anxiety from sharing my gratitude statement and especially not in a face-to-face manner. I am afraid to read the email she sent me and the voice in my head keeps telling me she sees me as a weirdo and a creep now. I feel like my anxiety steams from my last employment when every time I said hi to a female or talked to one, I was instantly accused of flirting by my coworkers. Heck if I even looked at a female I was accused of flirting. I feel like the treatment I endured has given me social anxiety for fear of if my niceness will be misconstrued as flirting. I guess most people can’t handle a nice person because they themselves are not capable of it. Now that I have realized a huge cause of my social anxiety, I hope that I am able to overcome it. I wish that I would have had the strength to prevent people from changing me into someone that is afraid to talk to people for fear of someone misconstruing my interactions. I feel like every social interaction that the other person is judging me as being a flirt. Overall, it is the people that treated me bad and gave me social anxiety that were almost the reason I was no longer around and it is the kind hearted Lauren that saved my life through her sweet and caring nature.