What's interesting is that despite me feeling the most peaceful and confident I ever have at that venue before, and despite feeling like I was legitimately having a good time, and despite my recent progress with CBT, my friend said I still had a uncomfortable look on my face! I've heard of Resting Bitch Face, but Resting Socially Uncomfortable Face??
Interesting that you mention this. I know for a fact it exists, because I had the same thing back when I had a fair bit of social anxiety (and I sometimes still have to look out for it and manage it). I would feel 'relaxed' but I would be walking along and getting closed off or uncomfortable reactions from people walking by.
I realized this was a thing when I started to make a point of looking at my reflection in a window or bathroom mirror when I got negative reactions like this, because I was thinking "there's no way I'm that bad a vibe!". I was very surprised to find I had very strong emotions on my face, either anxiety or (depending on my state of mind) hostility on my face. And the funny thing was that I felt calm.
This is a very unpleasant thing to experience, because you immediately feel disconnected from yourself and in the moment it's not easy to understand what's going on. But it's also a massive opportunity to understand yourself better and become more integrated.
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The thing is, when we feel socially anxious, it means there is something in society that we see (usually unconsciously) as a threat, often simply arising from a lack of understanding of what surrounds us or our own place in it. And (also often unconsciously) we try to change our behaviour to somehow appease or dissolve this threat, usually by trying to appear at ease and relaxed, or, failing that, to at least appear eager and enthusiastic to be pleasant and to meet the apparent needs of society.
The problem is that this requires pushing down and repressing the instinctive emotions of aggressiveness and hostility that we naturally experience when faced with a potential threat. When we are generally happy and content with life, it's not hard to push these down and cover them up because our baseline emotion is fairly positive and rationally we understand that these emotions won't do us any good, and the outcome will probably be better if we don't show them.
The thing is, emotions don't disappear, they simply submerge into the unconscious until the thing that causes them is dealt with or gone (which often never happens). And there, especially over a long period of time, they build up until eventually they come above the surface, usually unexpectedly and in a way that is sudden and difficult to manage. Sometimes though, if we manage to stay calm but otherwise do not properly deal with them, they emerge surreptitiously in behaviours or facial expressions in a way that is quite disconnected from our conscious mental state, so that we hardly even know what we are doing and may be surprised at the reactions of others who perceive them.
One way that I could diagnose when this was happening was when my state of calmness had a certain 'dead' feeling to it, as if, rather than simply operating at an exuberant but relaxed pace, as if the machinery of my mind was cut off from its energy source. This I realized eventually was because this energy had gone to something else (my anxiety) which my conscious, apparently calm mind had been made blind to.
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The question is, if my mind is expressing things outwardly that I'm not conscious of, how am I supposed to control my mind? The answer, in my opinion, is unexpected but very simple.
The truth is that the mind cannot stop expressing its emotions. If you try to block them, they go around the obstacle you put there. If you try to put them in a box and shut it, pressure builds up until emotions leak out of the corners like escaping gas. Emotions cannot be contained.
So the answer (somewhat unintuitively) is to become even more expressive. But this is often very difficult, because we have spent so long habituating ourselves to hold them back under cover. To progress, we need to tease them out, to disassemble and clear away the scaffolding of obstacles that we have spent years building up in an attempt to hold back unwanted emotion.
But why do this? Why not just force ourselves to be what we 'want' to be at any given time?
Think of it like this: you were attached to a horse, and the horse wandered around everywhere dragging you along, and would get spooked and go tearing off in some random direction without your control. But you cannot untie yourself from the horse, and you are not strong enough to force its limbs to do this or that. So instead, you must turn your attention to it, and understand it, and love it, and give it what it needs to be satisfied, and to learn its reality, and to tame it and saddle it so that it becomes the loyal, untiring engine that takes you from one place to another where you want and need to go in life.
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There was a woman around here where I live that I approached one night. She turned out to be older than I thought, not all that hot and a bit whacky. But we connected a bit, she was some combination of a neuroscientist and psychotherapist and I also have a very keen interest in the mind. So we would often happen to meet eachother and get into conversations.
One time I was telling her about some of my experiences with social anxiety and certain mental obstacles, and we were debating what the solution was for these things. And at one point she asked me right out "what do you think is the answer to these problems, if not <insert some medically acceptable treatment>?". I really wanted to say the truth, as much for myself as for her, and almost immediately I said "self expression". She didn't say anything but thought a lot about it.
Afterward I thought a lot about that too, and I realized it really is the truth. I believe every mental problem, no matter what it is, is a problem of self expression. There are times in our lives when we are faced with terrible dangers and risks, or the sense of time rushing by, but we are at one with ourselves, readily expressing our truth into the world without inhibitions, with every word and action so deeply satisfying the spirit that the outcome hardly even matters. And then there are other times when we feel disconnected and lost, hardly knowing who we are, and the slightest pressure from outside or warning of danger from within our emotions emerges to us as an overwhelming, all-consuming threat. I believe this is the foundation of social anxiety, of depression, and all habitual negative emotion.
And the means to the ideal existence, in my opinion, is by coming to know our unconscious, spending time where we allow all the emotions that are not socially acceptable to come out, whether it is anger, sadness, feelings of loneliness or desperation, to enable them to appear, and then to accept they are there, and then to rise above them not by ignoring them, but by transforming them, by bringing them into a clear, conscious picture of where we are at, and what we really need to do for ourselves to fix the problems that they represent.
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I don't know your exact situation, of course. For me, the problem was a combination of all the most destructive natural enemies of the masculine mind: lack of undertaking responsibility, lack of realistic and clear identity, lack of self-acceptance and acceptance of the reality of my life, and finally a very deep-seated inhibition based on how I viewed myself in regards to my family when I was growing up, that resulted in a sort of sabotaging of my own ambitions. Not the worst situation anyone's found themselves in, but certainly nothing to be sneezed at or fixed from one day to the next.
There is still a ways to go, but I am deeply satisfied to the extent that I have understood and accepted my problems and oriented my actions, behaviours and habits to counter them, so that my progress is relentless and consistent. And that, to me, is the essence of self-expression.
I hope some of this is helpful to you!
