Telephone terrors

I hate talking on the phone. I don’t make social phone calls, ever. I won’t even talk on the phone to my mum. Receiving an unexpected call is the stuff of nightmares to me, and 99% of the time I do not answer my personal phone. If it is important they will leave a message, and then I can email them, or, if absolutely necessary, call them back when I have suitably prepared myself. And it does take a lot of preparation to call someone! I need to write myself some sort of script, think of the various directions the conversation might take and prepare suitable responses, and, the hardest part, work up the courage to pick up the phone and establish a level of calm which I will hopefully be able to maintain throughout the call. I have to give myself a little pep talk: “It’s ok if there are awkward silences, it’s not the end of the world if you accidentally talk over them, it’s ok to ask them to repeat themselves if you don’t hear what they say, no one will mind if you stutter, just smile, take slow deep breaths, and stay calm. You can do this!”

I can cope with business calls well enough, because a) there are certain expectations and goals for the call, and b) I am playing a role. I put on a mask and it is not me who is talking, it is a Competent Professional who is simply there to get a job done. It is still terrifying, my heart may be beating a mile a minute as I sweat through my shirt and my hand gets clammy around the phone, and I may have to take a moment rock myself into some sort of calm afterwards, but I can keep up that fake smile and cheerful voice long enough to get what needs to done sorted.

Personal calls are not so easy, because then there is no role to play, there is no Competent Professional mask to put on, there is just me, the anxious, socially awkward woman who stutters when stressed. If I am not sure what the goals and expectations for the call are I panic, I don’t know what to say, I can’t tell when I am supposed to talk and when I am supposed to listen, I don’t know when the conversation is supposed to end, or how to end it. I have difficulties with auditory processing, which means that I often miss what people say or don’t entirely understand what I hear, and there isn’t really any way to gloss over that on the phone.

This is something that I have always found hard, but as my anxiety levels have worsened in the past year I have gone from ‘having to work myself up to make a phone call, and needed to calm myself down afterwards’ to ‘sitting on the floor with the phone in my hand crying, before even dialling the number, and eventually giving up and doing without’.

Ironically, this inability to talk on the phone almost meant that I was unable to receive the therapy which I hope will make it easier for me to do so. My local NHS mental health services are absolutely terrible at replying to emails. I repeatedly contacted them saying “I cannot discuss my referral on the phone due to anxiety issues, please contact me at this email address” only to have them call me and then send a letter saying “we were unable to contact you on your registered number, please contact us within ten days or we will close your case”, and then not acknowledge my emails, meaning that I had to get yet another referral and repeat the process all over again. What a nightmare.