How I Healed from Crippling Social Anxiety After 15 Years — My Story

How I Healed from Crippling Social Anxiety After 15 Years — My Story

Before I tell you how I healed, I need to tell you how bad it got. Because if you're in the grip of social anxiety or panic attacks right now, I want you to understand something: I was worse. Much worse. And I got out.

This is my story.

I Wasn't Born Anxious

I joined the New Zealand Police at 20 years old. Before that, I was your average fun-loving, outgoing young man — probably a little bit cocky, if I'm honest. I thought I was ten feet tall and bulletproof. I did all sorts of stupid things without a second thought about the consequences.

I grew up in a large family — six brothers and sisters, a hard-working mum, and a father who was, for most of his life, a physically and verbally violent drunk who never provided for his family. He died of lung cancer at 69. He was home for the last week of his life, and I was able to make my peace with him. I'm grateful for that.

What I'm also grateful for — in a strange way — is some of what he taught me. He showed me exactly how not to treat your wife and children. I have four beautiful children. Neither their mothers nor I have ever laid a finger on them for any reason, and they are the most respectful, loving, well-behaved kids you could wish for. I broke the cycle. In some sad way, I owe that to him.

I also had three older brothers I looked up to who took good care of me — apart from the times they tested how long they could hold my head underwater. Bless.

What the Police Does to You

A career in the police is dangerous sometimes and stressful almost all of the time. Not everyone who serves develops high anxiety — why I did and others didn't is irrelevant to the healing process, so it's not worth dwelling on. What matters is that I did.

From a very young age I was exposed to horrific scenes and life-threatening situations. On my very first nightshift, alone, I was called to a motorcycle accident. The rider had lost his helmet before hitting a palm tree. He was already dead when I arrived. His head had swollen up like a basketball — picking him up was like trying to hold a bag of broken pottery. I dealt with the whole thing by myself, at 20 years old.

I could tell hundreds of stories like that one. Physical attacks. Constant threats to my life and my family's. Child abuse and rape cases. Homicides. Suicides. You get the picture.

How did I deal with it? Not well. Counselling wasn't how we rolled back then. Instead, I drowned my sorrows in alcohol and overindulgent behaviour — loudly, socially, with my colleagues. It was very effective at masking the symptoms. But it didn't do a single thing to reduce the anxiety building underneath. Year after year, my anxiety levels crept higher and higher. I didn't know how to relax. I didn't know how to recharge. I laughed at any suggestion I seek professional help.

My anxiety levels just kept building — quietly, invisibly — until one day they couldn't be ignored anymore.

The First Panic Attack

It was 1993. I was 23 years old, a constable, standing in front of a classroom full of children.

Without warning, my heart started hammering out of control. My hands were shaking. I felt dizzy, sweaty, unable to talk properly. My throat closed up. My body went numb and I felt strangely disorientated — like I was watching myself from outside. I had this overwhelming, desperate urge to escape. Every instinct was screaming at me to get out of that room.

But I was standing in front of a room full of kids. I couldn't leave.

So I sat with it, terrified. And then — rather quickly, actually — it passed. The horrible sensations vanished and I was fine again. I completed my talk, walked out, and thought: "What the hell just happened?"

Then I shrugged my shoulders and soldiered on.

That was a mistake. But I didn't know that yet.

The Crime Scene

Four years later, in 1997, I was a plain clothes Detective Constable working in a crime squad in Palmerston North. My squad was called to a rape complaint at a residential address. I was made officer in charge of the crime scene — the victim's bedroom.

I walked in with four colleagues and my supervisor. The room was small.

The moment the victim walked in, I felt that horrible anxious feeling building again. Heart racing. Chest tightening. Stomach heavy. And then that spotlight feeling — like the whole world was watching me, like I was being examined under a microscope.

As the officer in charge, it was my job to question the victim and reconstruct what had happened. But I couldn't focus. I was consumed by the sensations. I became more and more self-conscious, more and more desperate to get out of the room before I lost my composure entirely.

I fumbled my way through a few questions. My supervisor had to step in and fill the gaps — asking follow-up questions I should have been asking, getting information I should have been getting. I was so preoccupied with the panic building inside me, so focused on the door, so busy calling myself a failure, that I could barely function. Like a self-fulfilling prophecy, every self-critical thought made it worse.

Eventually I made up some excuse about needing to canvas the backyard. Everyone bought it. I got outside and paced the perimeter of the yard, trying to calm down, notebook in hand — pretending to write in it while actually just trying to stop myself from falling apart.

As soon as I was outside, the panic started to ease. My supervisor came out to check on me. By then I'd composed myself enough to go back in and finish the examination. And here's the thing — nobody said a word about my behaviour. Nobody noticed. Nobody.

I remember sitting in the car afterwards thinking: "What the hell just happened? Why does this keep happening? And how do I make it stop?"

Of course, back then I had no idea. So I shrugged my shoulders and boxed on.

When It Started Destroying Everything

Over the years that followed, the panic attacks became more frequent and more unpredictable. I noticed a pattern — they happened most in social settings. Anywhere I felt observed. Trapped. Exposed.

My strategy became escape. Avoid. Cope. Repeat.

I developed a suite of excuses for why I had to leave any room, any meeting, any gathering at a moment's notice. I had a reason for every occasion. What I didn't realise was that every time I escaped, I was reinforcing the anxious pattern — teaching my brain that the threat was real, that escape was the only solution.

After leaving the police in 2000, I moved into leadership roles — exactly the kind of work that put me constantly in social situations. I could perform when I needed to. But the social component became unbearable. I developed full social phobia and agoraphobia.

By the mid-2000s, going out and socialising was, as I put it at the time, "about as much fun as drinking from a fire hose."

I became a different person. Argumentative. Aggressive. Controlling. A high-functioning narcissist, if I'm being completely honest. That wasn't who I was — it was what unchecked anxiety had made me into.

I sabotaged sporting, business, music, and social opportunities. I left jobs. I burned bridges. I went bankrupt in 2008. My relationship with the mother of my two oldest children, Finn and Paige-Huia, broke down. She had endured the worst years of my life. I don't blame her.

The Lowest Point

The height of it came while I was working as a team leader at Toyota New Zealand in 2008.

I spent lunch breaks in the sick bay. I locked myself in toilet cubicles during panic attacks. I avoided meetings, social functions, colleagues — anything and everything I could. After nine months, I resigned. My panic attacks had reached the point where I found it almost physically impossible to leave the house.

That was the last straw. My relationship ended. I was completely desperate.

And for the first time, that desperation wasn't just about me — it was about my kids. If I didn't fix this, I would jeopardise their wellbeing. That realisation gave me something I hadn't had before: the motivation to do whatever it would take.

The Turning Point

Here's the cruel irony: I already knew everything, intellectually.

I'd been researching anxiety conditions since 2004. I understood the anatomy of a panic attack. I knew logically that everything I feared had no basis in reality. I knew I needed to walk into the fear rather than run from it.

But knowing it and doing it are two completely different things.

My breakthrough came when I understood this: it doesn't matter what you know intellectually if you're not willing to commit to recovery.

I had to throw away every coping strategy, every safety crutch, every escape route I'd built up over 15 years — and face the fear completely. Not manage it. Not reduce it. Face it. Touch the ghosts. Let them engulf me. Resist every instinct to run.

That required belief. It required trust. And it required more courage than I thought I had.

But once I let that knowledge guide me, things started to shift. I chose to see every anxiety-provoking situation as an opportunity to practise a new attitude. I persevered. I stayed disciplined. There were many, many setbacks. But I moved forward with courage no matter what.

Through committing to expose myself to the situations I feared most — and practising and persevering with the right attitude — I healed myself of social phobia, agoraphobia, and the underlying GAD that had been driving it all.

What Healing Actually Looks Like

Today, I am at peace.

I love and accept myself unconditionally. I'm grateful — genuinely grateful — for everything I went through, because it gave me a purpose: to help others find the same way out.

I have four beautiful children. A wonderful wife. And the ability to look someone suffering in the eye and say: "I've been exactly where you are. And I got out. So can you."

None of this means life is perfect. I still step in it sometimes. I still have bad days. But being at peace means living in the present moment — embracing the good and the bad, taking action on what I can control, and letting go of what I can't. That's a conscious choice I make every single day.

Once I thought I was a complete failure. Now I think I'm the luckiest man alive.

Watch My Full Story

If My Story Sounds Like Yours

You're not broken. You just haven't been shown the right way out yet.

The anxiety you feel is real. The fear is real. But the danger isn't. And the patterns keeping you stuck — the escaping, the avoiding, the coping — can be unwired permanently. Not managed. Not suppressed. Removed at the root.

That's what I've spent 17+ years helping people do.

There are two ways to get started:

[Book a free consultation] we'll have a conversation, see if I can help, and go from there.

Or start with [the book] the same roadmap I used to heal myself, now in its Second Edition.

Your freedom is closer than you think.

— Shaun Grant, attackpanic™

Shaun Grant is an anxiety coach, author, and fully recovered sufferer. He has helped over 3,000 people worldwide break free from panic attacks, social anxiety, agoraphobia, and GAD through his attackpanic™ system.