I’m sitting here with Eric. Eric, just for the listening audience, you’re, can you say what you do a little bit, how old you are, what you do for a living? I’m 29 years old. I work at more of the investment banks in New York. As an analyst, I pretty much analyze bonds and do some programming here and there to derive interest rates. So it’s fairly technical. You’ve had your problem with social anxiety for a pretty long time. Could you share what the problem has been like, how long it’s been there, how it’s affected your life? I guess I pretty much had social anxiety for, I guess, most of my life. I was always known as a shy kid, but what’s always kind of different from being completely shy and out speaking. I was also a fairly angry person. It would manifest itself either just by being completely silent, feeling like everybody’s just a waste of my time or whatever, or just the point of the anger would be just a form of protection, I guess, from being picked on or beat up or whatever. Do you understand the relationship of your anger to the social anxiety? One of the things I know about the anger is that, like I mentioned before, it’s a form of protection. It keeps other people who potentially might hurt me in a way. So
I wouldn’t be so much of an easy target. No one’s going to pick on some person who looks like they’re about to snap at them or something like that. This anger started way back, didn’t it? Yeah, as far as I could remember, I guess I came from an angry family or an angry environment or something like that. Everyone I know has some amount of anger. You know my parents maybe they’d be fighting with each other or whatever, or just the people who I grew up with, they seemed like a borderline violent people or something like that. It was a blue collar, Italian-American neighborhood in Brooklyn. So everyone there was a tough guy and you pretty much had to go around proving yourself or something like that. And you had some situations growing up that were pretty intense that resulted in anger.
Could you share a few? Oh, pretty much, I guess, in high school or whatever. I really didn’t fit in. Kids would pick on me for whatever reasons either because of my name or I guess because I just seemed different or something like that. I was probably a little bit smaller than other people. And I guess the way I kept people from picking on me more was just completely withdrawal myself in word and just project this rage at people. You would look at me from far away and you’d see some person who was just seething or something like that. What’s the first situation that comes to mind when you think of anger in the past, something that caused your anger? Okay, one thing that pops up to mind is there’s this kid or group of kids that bully me all throughout most of high school and they would say shit like, you’re an ugly fuck or just make jokes about me or whatever. And I sort of swore to myself after I graduated if I see them or something, I would just get into a fight with them or whatever. I guess the thing that I would feel is that that makes me really pissed off.
Is that I didn’t do anything to them and yet for some reason I’ve been singled out. And it just doesn’t seem fair, I guess. You know, if the audience, this obviously is an audio program, if the audience were here watching what was happening, they would see an attractive, intelligent guy who’s relatively successful at age 29. And here’s a guy that’s in the midst of dealing with his anger. And one of the issues that has been ongoing for you is with the opposite sex in dating. And I think that there is a certain amount of anger that is present with that. Could you share? Yeah, one of the feelings I have, I guess you could probably put it into, I guess, the idea of fairness that I sort of feel like, well, one thing I see other guys who are, I guess, not as successful as me who seem, you know, I guess for lack of a better word, like a bum or anything who are with, you know, trying to women or whatever. And me who I had to like, you know, bust my ass, alter my life, and I just had to pretty much work hard at everything. You know, I can’t get ahead for whatever reason. So that just, I guess, pisses me off for, for whatever reason.
I guess it seems like a lot of people have it easy and I just don’t have it easy. Just, I would have to try a lot harder than other people. And yet I just get like almost nothing in return for all the efforts that, you know, I put into stuff. And the other thing with women, I guess, that I’m trying to cope with is that I sort of feel like women have it a little bit easier than, than guys, especially like me. I guess if, if you’re a woman in your 20s or something like that, you know, meeting a guy is like no big deal, just pretty much you just wait for it to happen where on my side, I just have to put a lot of planning and work into it to meet people. Where do you feel you are now with your anger? It sort of like goes up and down like, if things are going good or for whatever reason, you know, I’m pretty okay with my anger. The only problem is like any type of a situation that doesn’t really go that good for me or anything that happens to me that causes me to get angry. It just, it, it just seems like it’s so easy for me to, to get angry and it just lasts a lot longer to get over it than for me to, you know, I guess to be okay with stuff to be, you know, kind of like in a good mood. Do you see the connection between anger and depression? Yeah, they sort of feed on each other either anger causes depression or, you know, depression causes the anger. It’s like this, this vicious cycle that sort of, you know, like I mentioned, like feeds each other. The more
angry I get, you know, the more isolated I become from other people, which causes me to become, you know, more depressed. The more depressed I am, again, you know, I become more isolated from other people from other things. And, you know, the more angry I start getting feeling like that life isn’t fair. Do you buy my concept that anger is energy? And it’s important to learn how to use this energy because if you don’t, it’s really going to get you. Yeah, I mean, anger is, well, for me, it’s been, I guess you could say like I’ve been addicted to anger. What it does is it was a great motivator for me, especially in, in college. I sort of felt that it seemed that, you know, like nobody wanted me to, to go to, to a good college or, you know, to make something of myself. So I sort of forced myself to, you know, go to college, do well in it. Mostly, I, I guess like, you know, out of spite to prove everyone like, Hey, you know, the hell you, and this is, I know what I’m doing. And, you know, if you don’t believe me, screw you, watch me. So anger sort of like is a, was a powerful motivator for me. The only problem is it’s, it’s a little bit too strong, I guess it’s sometimes you could just burn yourself out completely with anger, which sort of would happen. Well, I, which I sort of experienced, you know, a few years ago.
Where would you say you’re at in general with your overall problem? I guess I’m like in the, the halfway point. Sort of like if 10 was being successful, you know, over, you know, overcoming it, I feel like I’m at a, like a four or five or something like that.
