An Inquiry: I have GAD (generalized anxiety disorder) and SAD (social anxiety disorder) and because of this I have no friends. I do see a psychologist and am on medication but I …need friends and/or a girlfriend. …How can I make just 1 or 2 friends or get a girlfriend?
How We Would Respond: You’re misdiagnosing your problem. Your problem is that you’ve bought into a line of negative judgment about yourself. Your psychological diagnostics, GAD and SAD, and your lack of intimate relationships are the symptoms of your problem. You want to somehow treat the symptoms but leave the problem, the cause of the symptoms, entirely intact.
What will this result in? Some temporary relief, at best. But the problem will remain and so other symptoms of it will, naturally, eventually appear.
If you should effectively treat the problem however then the symptoms will be taken care of, because their source will be gone. So how to treat the problem? Tune into your thinking, hear the judgments that you’re making about yourself, and stop granting them truth status. You don’t need to say no to or somehow deny these judgments; just don’t say yes to them.
Lastly, you do not need friends or a girlfriend. This sort of reasoning says, in effect, that your happiness is the result of external circumstances and this is totally false (though it is widely accepted as true). Your emotional well-being is, and will always be, an internal process that is fully under your control; and it comes down to what judgments you accept as truth.
