What do you do when you long to just be yourself but you don’t trust that anyone will like you?

Dear Readers:

I first got involved with Focusing to help myself.

I struggled with emotions like anxiety and self-doubt. I especially had trouble in social situations where I felt a lot of doubt about whether people even liked me. Sometimes I felt so anxious and nervous I just wanted to run out of the room — and sometimes I even did.

I used a lot of substances like alcohol and marijuana just to feel like I could relax a little around other people. But those activities often resulted in feeling bad the next day, not even sure what I had done the night before, and if I could remember, not being very proud of it.

Focusing helped me turn all of that around. I remember one time I was traveling to a convention. I realized that I had been pumping myself up to be lively and smart funny as soon as I arrived. And I realized that I was doing that because I didn’t feel trusting that I could just be myself when I got there.

I didn’t know what to do— because I didn’t feel I could just be myself, and I didn’t feel any longer like “pumping myself up” to be lively and smart and funny.

So what did I do? I just acknowledged. “Something in me… just wants to be myself… and something in me… doesn’t feel like that’s OK.”

And when I did that all the nervousness just dropped away. I felt myself taking a deep breath.

I wasn’t even sure what would happen when I got to the convention… but I knew that I was no longer in a state of inner struggle.

And sure enough, when I got there, my relationships with the people were quite different than they would have been otherwise. I was more relaxed, I was more present.

So let me show you how you can have that same kind of profound and powerful shift.