She suggests that my body is misinterpereting it's responses. When your body is aroused, and not by fear, but by excitement etc, your heart beats faster etc. My body may be interpreting the excitement response as something wrong, and it triggers the fear reaction, the sweating, the inability to think. So in essence, I have to train my body to interpret the fast heart beat etc as a happy excitement, rather than nervous fear. A way to do that would be proper deep breathing, but I do that and so far it hasn't worked. Maybe I need to do it more.

It's a great idea though, and I am going to try to do that with myself and just make it into an enjoyable experience, rather than a panicked fear.

Apparently, it's a darwinian thing, IE, being singled out in front of a crowd of other animals is an extremely dangerous position to be in. You can be attacked by predators, by fellow animals, you may be excluded from eating etc. So this is something that is from years and years of breeding and instinct that we are trying to overcome. 95% of the population can't even stand in front of a group of people, and won't. 5% can. Of that 5% it's an even smaller number of them who can do it all without the trace of fear.

Performance anxiety is another diagnosis. I don't know what the avenues of cure are for this one, but I am willing to look into it and see what I can do to improve my situation. If I can't audition, I don't work as an actor. It's that simple. I'm going to look this up on the net....back later to talk about what I find!