A doctor shares how childhood shame in classrooms creates lasting fear of public speaking. He describes being laughed at as a child and argues that public-speaking anxiety can be more traumatic than major life losses for some people.
Chapters
If a person gets publicly humiliated, like a kid in a classroom says something and the teacher puts that person down, that's bad. But if everyone laughs, it goes in very deep. It goes into the shame territory. Weird person. I'm screwed up. Everyone's laughing at me. People should laugh at the kind of person I am. That's really, really bad. And then some people can never come out and speak in public because of those events. Speaking in public is one of the scariest things for people in the research. Speaking in public is scarier than losing a parent. Having a parent gets cancer, having a war. Why is speaking in public just itself so scary? It's because people were hurt, ridiculed, put down in public. Oh, my God. And shamed and shamed about their reactions because they couldn't do it, because they were too tender, because they weren't tough enough for all these different. They felt shame around it. And because of that, we have a lot of voices that don't come out. Being put down in front of a group of people can look small. You could be in a classroom at 6 years old, and I can say, mihail, that's the laughingest thing I ever said. A bunch of kids could laugh. That. That's not. That's not that big. But if you're vulnerable, that could go in in a way that will silence you for 30 years.