The worst trick a childhood anxiety disorder pulls is, you spend your early years being applauded for being so much more mature than your peers, because you aren’t disruptive, you don’t want any kind of attention, you don’t express yourself, you keep yourself to yourself – this makes you a pleasure to have in class, etc etc – and you start to believe it’s virtue. But you’re actually way behind your peers in normal social development, and who knows if you can ever catch up.
Never heard a truer thing in my life.
holy shit wait you mean being just morbidly terrified of doing anything wrong ISN’T necessarily the same as being “well behaved?!”
I’ve finally started reading Why Does He Do That and honestly I’d recommend it to anyone who is or has been in a relationship (romantic or otherwise) with an abusive or controlling person, even if you’re already out of that situation, because it’s been validating and enlightening to me to see my experiences corroborated
“i can’t go downstairs, there are people there” sounds like a completely logical statement until you try to explain it to someone who doesn’t have any kind of anxiety
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