The Freeze Response to Anxiety
Three Responses to Anxiety
You may have heard of the 'Fight or Flight' responses to anxiety. Basically, the idea is that in nature two possible primitive responses to a perceived threat are to fight it or to flee from it.
There is also a third kind of primitive response sometimes referred to as the Freeze response. Imagine you are in a street late at night and hear someone or some thing you think is potentially dangerous and your instinctive reaction is to press yourself against the wall of the building next to you and stay quiet, hoping that the dangerous person or thing will not notice you and will simply go past leaving you unharmed. That would be an example of the freeze response (It might be a sensible strategy to adopt in that situation, depending on how real the threat is, how likely the freeze strategy is to work in the particular situation and what alternative options there are).
Camouflage can be seen of an example of where evolutionary development has produced a feature that acts like a freeze response. An animal that is camouflaged against its background is not noticed by predators and remains safe because of that.
In human beings, the fight, flight and freeze (or camouflage) responses can all be appropriate in particular circumstances faced with particular threats. Problems arise when you start to respond in one of these three ways when the perceived threat is more in your imagination than real.
Social Anxiety & Camouflage
If you are someone who experiences high levels of social anxiety, worrying about what people will think of you, then you may well exhibit either the 'flight' or the 'freeze/camouflage' response. If you avoid social interaction altogether that is a kind of 'flight' or avoidance response. If you do interact socially with people but when you do so, you try as best as you can to conform to what you think is the social norm, or you try to stay quiet in the background, without regard to expressing your own real thoughts, wishes or feelings then you are in essence trying not to stand out, or to camouflage yourself so as to avoid adverse reactions that you think (possibly incorrectly) might result from revealing yourself in a more genuine or fuller way.
It's fine to camouflage yourself and merge into the background or follow the social norm sometimes but if you do this consistently and never or rarely reveal your true thoughts or feelings, particularly difficult ones, to anyone, then you may find it harder to develop deep relationships because others only see one side of you - the appearance that you present socially. You also put a huge pressure on yourself because you are continually putting on an act, trying to live up to an image of what you think is 'socially acceptable' or 'cool' and suppressing or disguising aspects of yourself which you think don't fit that image.
Uncamouflaging Yourself
If you think that you might be the kind of person who camouflages yourself too much in the way described, then my suggestion would be that you start to try step by step to reveal a bit more about what you think and feel when you are in social situations or with friends. Don't go overboard with this though! Just try it at first with one or two friends you feel closer to or trust most, then if that goes well consider trying it in slightly more challenging social environments.
Recognising Differences between Now and the Original Experiences that Led You to Want to Camouflage Yourself
Secondly, if you know where this anxiety about what people will think of you (or about how they might react to you if they know the real you) originated then you may find it helpful to remind yourself that it is understandable that you experience the anxiety because of the circumstances where it originated (such as negative childhood experiences) but that those circumstances were different from the circumstances you are in now, and you too are different/older from how you were then, so there is a good chance that either your fear won't materialise in your current situation or that even if it does, you will be able to deal with it better.
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