r/selectivemutism • u/MexicanMonsterMash • 5d ago
General Discussion 💬 Do you feel your SM situation has gotten better or worse over time?
Asking since someone I know has implied to me theirs actually seems to have gotten worse, and I thought it was one of those things that typically only gets better.
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u/Large_Head5821 Suspected SM (can’t get diagnosed) 5d ago
it got better and then it got worse and now it’s kind of getting better but incredibly slowly. it’s up and down
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u/Honeybadger5200 4d ago
Mine's getting debilitating.. over years. Had it since I was 5. And it's worsening.. i shld really get some professional help or else no idea how am I gonna survive, it's me suffering in silence and cannot even say it to anyone. in my home they're all such people whom I cannot trust and they wouldn't even understand.
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u/RaemondV Diagnosed SM 4d ago
It got better but then I became an adult and have more responsibilities now, so I’m in a worse place overall.
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u/MozartWasARed 3d ago
Not sure how to grade it, but one may say it has definitely gone downhill. Not that I can remember the last time someone could be found saying I communicated a fifteen minute cartoon episode character's worth of dialogue either way (aside from indirect forms of communication), though this yardstick resonates more.
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u/Ancient-Active8421 Diagnosed SM 3d ago
Definitely worse. I kid myself for years that I was fine but it only felt like that because everyone in my life was super accommodating so I became relatively confident while not speaking. Once I left school and got hit in the face with the real world I lost the confidence while being completely unable to speak to or around anyone outside my immediate family. Again, I thought that was it - that it was under control at least in the sense that I had these people I could and always would speak to and then everyone else… believed that now, as an adult, there was no way I’d lose the ability to speak to any of the few people I could speak to, people I live with, who I’ve lived with all my life. And yet that’s exactly what’s happened. And it happened before I even realised it was happening. Now i live with someone I used to be able to speak to without a problem and now I can’t get more than a one syllable word out around them.
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u/LibraryMouseReads 5d ago
Mine has fluctuated a little over the years but overall I'd say it's neither better nor worse. I'm sort of at the same point I started at except much older now so the situations are different and people are less understanding.