Not looking forward to it

[deejay94]

My dad tells me we are having an engagement party out our house (June 2)
So I asked how many people we were expecting and he tells me 45+ people!

How am I supposed to cope when I am in my safe-zone?
Damn it all.

[littleredhen]

do you have your own room there? With 45 people in a house, it should be quite easy to slip out of sight. I sometimes find it easier to go to BIG things because it's easier to be 'not missed'. When there are only a few people,inevitably someone will say "where's Little Red Hen?"

[deejay94]

Yeah, got my own room but people are going to want to see me, I may need to go out of the house for the day or something.

[Hawthorn]

Hey deejay

I just want to say, I know where you're coming from, but running away won't help the anxiety problem, just compound it further.
If you want to recover, eventually you're going to have to start facing these things - and to me perhaps your own safe zone is a fairly good place to start
Challenge yourself, and praise yourself for what you do manage to achieve. If you manage 30 minutes that is great, but don't berate yourself for not managing the whole shebang.
I know it's really, really hard to be around people sometimes, but avoiding them just throws up a whole lot of guilt, a whole lot of 'I feel a failure' and does nothing to help you feel better about yourself or social situations.
I avoided things for so long but recently joined an art class. I was petrified the first time I had to go. Cold sweat, couldn't breathe.....took me an hour just to be able to speak to the guy running the class and I couldn't wait to run away again...but that little art class I can now go to with only minor discomfort beforehand, and it's kicked off a chain reaction in that once I realised nothing bad was going to happen because I was around people (actually I quite enjoy not being so isolated) other things became easier, and I felt a little better about myself.
I don't think that this will ever go away without this kind of challenge sadly. I wish it could but at some point you will have to face these kinds of things, whether or not you want to.
Don't waste years and years like me, hiding away, putting it off - only to ultimately do what I should have done in the first place and challenge it before it ever really took a hold of me like it did.

[grotbags]

I would go out the house for the day, but then that is how I ended up agoraphobic. I avoided things rather than faced them!

---------- Post added at 17:50 ---------- Previous post was at 17:49 ----------

If you stay and see it through you might feel ok and surprise yourself, which would probably give you the incentive to tackle more phobias...