Life experiences, especially during childhood — though not only from childhood — significantly shape your daily functioning moving forward into adulthood. Childhood is a critical period for developing essential coping skills you use as an adult. However, adverse experiences, 
or trauma during these formative years can disrupt your ability to build important skills and respond effectively to various life situations as adults.
There is a deep connection between childhood trauma and the social anxiety that can develop (and strengthen) into adulthood. Emotional mistreatment or abuse in childhood can have a way of distorting your overall sense of security and safety in the world, leading to issues such as substance abuse, anxiety, and depression.
Understanding Social Anxiety
Social anxiety is generally experienced as an intense feeling of stress and worry around social situations, including fears of being criticized, judged, shamed, rejected, bullied, or otherwise interpersonally mistreated. Socializing isn’t fun, it’s perceived as a threat. It can be incredibly crippling for many people, to the point of completely isolating away from social situations.
Unlike shyness, which usually fades as one becomes more comfortable in a social setting, social anxiety tends to persist and have a more widespread impact. The fear experienced in social settings is often not aligned with the actual threat. You may find yourself sweating, or your heartbeat increasing, or stomach discomfort, or other physiological symptoms. You’re essentially in fight-flight-freeze mode as if you actually are facing a true threat. You may not actually be bullied, shamed, judged, or rejected, but when you’ve had enough experiences growing up in these types of environments, your body and emotions are ready to react to the potential attack that the past has shown you, regardless of what may be really happening in the current situation.
How Childhood Mistreatment Can Lead to Social Anxiety
Adverse childhood experiences and traumas can significantly increase the prevalence of mental health struggles later in life. As a child, you’re still developing skills and coping mechanisms for life’s stressors. This makes you much more emotionally impressionable to what is taking place at the time.
Stable and supportive connections with parents and general caregivers helps create a sense of security and safety in the world. However, when trauma is inflicted by the same people who are supposed to be nurturing and protecting you, this makes it really hard for a child to develop a strong sense of emotional resilience in life. Your world becomes constantly preparing for attack. It essentially disrupts secure attachment and can lead to longer-term effects, including developing social anxiety and other mental health difficulties as an adult.
Emotional Abuse, Neglect and Social Anxiety
Emotional abuse and neglect tend to set the foundation for social anxiety. Abuse and neglect in childhood almost automatically spikes your sensitivity and awareness of potential shame and rejection, which is at the core of social anxiety. This can have a way of making you feel you have to be more careful, or less authentic, and constantly looking out for how the other is perceiving you in an interaction, and overall spending a lot of energy trying to avoid the landmine that will lead to the attack. (This is one reason while people with social anxiety often feel exhausted after social interactions).
Impact on Relationships
When the impact of childhood emotional mistreatment goes unaddressed, the wounds tend to grow over time and be reinforced by avoidance, which usually increases social and emotional difficulties as adults. Trauma and violation created by parents, in 
particular, can eat away at your overall sense of safety, support, and self-worth in the world. This can lead to a variety of issues with anxiety, and also depression.
As you grow up and into adulthood, the social insecurities coming from adverse childhood experiences may show up in a number of ways, including:
- Anxiety
- Panic attacks
- Isolating yourself from others
- Low self-esteem and self-worth
- Coping mechanisms that are often unhealthy (such as substance or alcohol misuse, or sexual acting out)
- Relational and interpersonal difficulties beyond social anxiety (such as dynamic issues and friction in close relationships)
- And others not listed here
Social anxiety often leads to avoiding social situations as a whole, and only reinforces isolation and feelings of inadequacy. It’s a defeating cycle. Avoidance tends to breed more avoidance.
If you struggle as an adult with social anxiety, or with any form of anxiety, it is possible to overcome the challenges of painful childhood experiences and have more meaningful relationships. Contact me if you’d like to start moving forward from these painful life experiences.
