When you meet someone new and feel that uncomfortable tightness in your chest, your body is doing exactly what it was programmed to do. Your nervous system learned early on that being seen carries risk. Perhaps as a child, your excitement was met with annoyance, your ideas were dismissed, or your emotions were treated as inconvenient. Maybe you were praised only when you performed correctly, creating a deep belief that your authentic self is somehow wrong or unacceptable. Your brain remembers this and still tries to protect you the same way. When you meet new people, it sends the same warning signals. Feeling awkward doesn't mean something is wrong with you. It is your survival system doing its job, trying to protect you from the rejection or judgment it learned to expect.
This discomfort often stems from a profound disconnect between who you actually are and who you believe you need to be to earn acceptance. When you were younger, you likely developed a strategy to manage relationships based on what kept you safe or loved. If you had anxious attachment patterns, you learned to scan others constantly for signs of approval or rejection, making every new interaction feel like a test you might fail. If you leaned avoidant, you learned that needing others was dangerous, so you built walls that now make genuine connection feel threatening. Either way, meeting new people triggers this old operating system. You are not actually responding to the person in front of you. You are responding to the internalized voices that tell you that you are too much, not enough, or fundamentally flawed in some invisible way.
The awkwardness intensifies because you are essentially trying to solve an impossible equation in real time. Part of you desperately wants to connect, while another part is convinced that being truly seen will result in abandonment or criticism. This internal war creates a kind of paralysis. You might notice yourself going blank, saying things that do not feel authentic, or replaying conversations afterward with brutal self criticism. What you are experiencing is not social incompetence. It is the exhausting work of managing a nervous system that perceives social situations as genuinely dangerous. Your body releases stress hormones as if you are facing a physical threat, because to the younger part of you that formed these patterns, rejection or judgment was a threat to your survival.
Healing this pattern requires more than learning small talk techniques or forcing yourself into more social situations. You need to deal with the deeper hurt that made you believe people won't like the real you. This means finding the exact times you learned to hide yourself, deeply feeling and processing the sadness about what you missed out on, and gradually proving to yourself that people can see the real you without something bad happening. The goal is not to become effortlessly charming or socially fearless. The goal is to develop enough internal safety that meeting new people stops feeling like an audition for your right to exist. When you no longer need others to confirm your worth, the awkwardness loses its power, because you are finally free to show up as yourself without the constant terror of being found insufficient.
Think about getting help with unresolved childhood wounds around visibility, acceptance, and the learned belief that your authentic self is fundamentally unworthy of connection.
Feeling awkward around new people doesn't mean something is wrong with you. It means you're human. If social anxiety is holding you back from the connections you crave, talking to a counsellor can help you understand why these moments feel so uncomfortable and give you real strategies to feel more at ease. You deserve to move through the world with confidence and ease. Book a counselling session today and start building the social confidence you've been looking for at kindcompanyproject.com