Whatever you call it, it’s a postmortem review of the bloopers reel of your social performance. As post-event processing expert Cyndi Lauper sings, “You can look and you will find me.” So we do: the Inner Critic looks and finds the imperfections—the awkward silence in conversation, the answer that didn’t come out quite right, the time someone laughed at the wrong point of our story—and strings them together into a Möbius strip of lowlights. And it’s this focus on the lowlights that keeps social anxiety going strong over years and decades, despite nothing horrible actually happening or even
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