I’ve had this idea to tackle social anxiety and make it easier to talk to others by trying to make friends and hold conversations with others using VRchat. VRchat is a game where you can move around a space with an avatar of your choice and interact with other people’s avatars as well as the space. It’s possible to play the game without VR or a VR headset, although I’m sure the experience is 10x more immersive in VR.
Since people have the safety of their avatars and there’s a high degree of freedom…there’s a natural state of chaos in VRchat. People are usually swearing at each other, trolling, saying racist things as a joke or sometimes not as a joke, and somehow almost every conversation turns sexual. If you’re a girl and have a girl voice, people won’t skip a beat to point out that you’re a woman and might begin to gather around you.
From what I described you might think that such a platform is the least ideal place for exposure therapy or to train casual conversational and friend-making skills. However, I would argue that although the chaos is higher than real life there’s a sense of ease as well. This is because people are less worried about their behavior when playing since they are using a “character” There’s an extra layer of protection and I feel safe knowing I can just block or ignore someone I don’t want to talk to. I can even exit the game at any time I want. It makes it the perfect testing platform and trains you to take what people say less personally.
Oftentimes in society when having a face to face interaction with somebody at, for example, a party – we put up a personality and say what we’re supposed to say. This has always disturbed me. I understand that it’s necessary for people to change how they present themselves depending on what role they are playing in that moment, and if there are no boundaries or limits to what you can see of someone’s personality it’s just not productive or healthy to interact with them. But I can’t help but see past that facade when talking to people, and sometimes by accident I see past it for just a flicker of a moment. Often what I see is chaotic or dark or inappropriate and when this happens I’m always flooded with a sense of fear and confusion. I want to get to know people better and move past that facade, but I ask myself if that also means coming closer to those darker things I see.
I know that it’s a fear of those chaotic and darker parts of myself that keeps me from following my curiosity and continuing conversations. So I really do believe that getting to know those parts of me better will aid my conversational skills and vice versa.
With VRchat, that chaos and offense is out in broad daylight. So although the initial anxiety is higher, I don’t have to worry about what people are hiding and with the lack of context (we’re all just strangers on the internet) it’s much easier to observe my own reactions to what people say.
I played some VRchat a few days ago. The first day I wasn’t able to start any continuous conversations after jumping around for a couple hours and only experienced some light harassment. The second day I played I was able to make some acquaintances but the conversation didn’t stay authentic past 4 second stretches…and it was mostly talk about boobs and sexual topics.
It makes me want to give up even trying if the experiences are all skewed to the negative. Is it even possible to use VRchat to train conversational skills or make friends?
I thought this to myself and realized that I haven’t given it a proper chance. The difficulties I have connecting with people in real life are the same difficulties I experienced with my few times in the game. It’s easy to blame the people around you, but in the end of the day we’re all human.
I wasn’t the friendliest person as a kid, but during those times I found it extremely easy to talk to others and had virtually no social anxiety. It was only when I began actively able to try to change how I acted when the social anxiety started kicking in and conversations became increasingly more difficult to continue. Ever since it came to my awareness how mean and hurtful I was being to others and that this was hurting the people around me, I had a desire to change. But only after I moved to a new town did the opportunities and circumstances for that change arise. I even further repressed these negative, malicious and hurtful parts of my personality after experiencing a toxic friendship during middle school. During that time I was convinced that some higher power, God, whatever was punishing me for my evil deeds and bullying as a child. I was forced to feel how others must have felt when I was being toxic toward them. These experiences compounded with the constant messages at home from my parents that “I was never good enough” created a huge fear of, as well as repression of the more manipulative and dark parts of my personality.
Jung calls these dark parts of one’s personality the shadow self. The further you repress your “shadow” the darker and more powerful it becomes.
I’ve been into witchcraft lately and listening to a book called “Existential Kink.” A lot of the book is focused on the shadow self and integrating the darker parts of your personality you’ve repressed through pleasurable acceptance.
This practice can be applied to repeating negative patterns in your life where you feel a sense of being wronged or something being difficult. You can take these situations from a perspective of complete acceptance if you consider that your shadow or repressed thoughts are creating that specific situation because you “secretly” desire to feel a certain way. I’ve found a lot of truth to this method – the reasoning behind it is finnicky but using the reasoning of Freud’s Reaction Formation (which is covered in the book) explains how this method of radical acceptance works.
Reaction formation is a defense mechanism in psychoanalytic theory where emotions which are deemed “wrong” by your mind are covered up with a strong emotion, oftentimes opposite to the one that is deemed “wrong”. By doing this, your mind is able to stop or cover up the bad emotion or thought from your unconscious before it reaches your conscious awareness.
For example, if you love someone or something you’re “not supposed” to love, your mind might come up with a feeling of disgust or aversion to cover this up. And thus, that impulse of love remains in your Shadow self, trapped in the darkness, while your persona will only express the feelings of disgust. You yourself will consciously believe that you are disgusted – but in truth a part of you feels the opposite.
Using a personal example related to social anxiety and VRchat: I have trouble keeping conversations going with strangers and feeling comfortable taking conversations where I would like them to go. Instead of seeing this from the point of view of “I hate these feelings of anxiety and my inability to create fulfilling interactions”, Existential Kink postulates that we flip this POV on its head. Instead, I tell myself, “I hate feeling no anxiety when talking to others and the ability to create fulfilling interactions.”
It may seem crazy, but repetitive patterns that show up in life are there to protect us. If I can learn to love the protection that negative feelings bring, it becomes easier to see the reasoning behind them.
I’ve always understood that accepting negative patterns and feelings would help me understand why they are there in the first place and help to let go of them. However, a vital piece of the puzzle I believe I was missing was the fundamental keystone of PLEASURE.
Pleasure is something which is so taboo in society, and especially in the way I was raised: No Pain, No Gain.
Taking Pleasure in your own Pain is what releases yourself from the elaborate maze of a protective pattern and breaks the shame which holds it all together. In the end of the day, that darker side of you just wants to help you. It brings you everything you want – and never gets any acknowledgement for any of it. Let yourself feel good about your self-sabotage.
So every time I sense the darkness from others in VRchat and feel it reflected within myself, I’ll try to fall deeply into the pleasure of experiencing it.
When I was a bully to others as a kid, it would be a lie to say I didn’t enjoy it. I enjoyed that far more than “being good”. But I saw that enjoyment as a negative thing due to how much I was hurting others. However, repressing those sadistic feelings within myself is also too extreme and ends in harmful behaviors ☯
Jung famously said, “I’d rather be ‘whole‘ than ‘good‘”.
Some of us are unaware of our destructive behaviors, but many of us are also unaware of how our desperate desire to be ‘good’ results in equally destructive behaviors.
I’d like to see where sticking to this practice will take me. When you’re not brash and offensive, when you lead with honesty, people notice and may try to provoke. Although it’s scary to just be yourself and allow the other person to take you as you are, VRchat might be the best place to try doing just that.