Social Anxiety Therapy: The active ingredients of change.
Do you want to know if social anxiety therapy really works? Are you looking for information on what to do about symptoms of excessive shyness that have come to the point of a social phobia? Read on. This article addresses both questions.
First, let me clarify something for you that is often very confusing. The symptoms of social anxiety vary widely despite some common elements. When I say widely, I mean extremely widely, to the point that you may not recognize another person’s symptoms as having anything to do with yours despite a common root that an expert in social anxiety therapy would be able to easily recognize.
I’ll give you an example of two symptom manifestations of social anxiety symptoms. I once had a patient who presented with the following complaint. “My hands shake whenever I have to write something in front of someone else.” He added, “it’s gotten to the point where I have to make up excuses at work to avoid signing off on the work orders in front of my men.” And here’s another person’s complaint that will sound quite different to you; “My husband always makes fun of me because I won’t ask an associate for help me find something in the stores I frequent. I just feel like I’m bothering them or getting in their way. But what bothers me more is that I can’t seem to feel comfortable with inviting one of my friends to do something with me because I’m afraid that they may think I’m being too pushy or needy or something.”
A common root in this comparison involves a preference to avoid the anxiety that is inherent in the desire to make a certain kind of impression on certain other people. In the first example, the gentleman at some point in the past became hypersensitive to observation. He was concerned that shaking hands would be interpreted by others as a sign of weakness or some other problem that he viewed as undesirable. We all like to make certain kinds of favorable impressions on others, but in the case of a person with social anxiety, the fear of what we don’t want begins to overpower our efforts to focus on what we do want. The results are disastrous.
In the second example, the woman’s difficulty in approaching sales associates in retail stores is due to her fear that she will engender some sort of anger or negative reaction because of her intrusion. She is hypersensitive to the idea that she is being overbearing (or simply appearing as a person who is insensitive or overbearing). The common root is a fear of appearing in such a way that would go against our desire for the right impression on others.
So how does social anxiety therapy work when peoples’ symptoms vary so widely? The answer, as you may have guessed, has to do with identifying and correcting the root problems that underlie all social anxiety symptoms, no matter how different they may be. There are many different root issues that combine in various ways to form the unique symptoms experienced by a person with social phobia. One of the most important roots to be undermined by successful social anxiety therapy is the unconsciously held catastrophic fear about what the negative thoughts or reactions of others would really mean. I’m talking about a process of undoing the tendency of the mind to hold poorly formed, vague fears about how awful it would be if someone did notice your fingers shaking when you write.
These examples of some of the root causes of social anxiety probably strike you the same way they do many other people. You likely have a thought that goes something like, “That’s dumb. I don’t have any unrealistic fears about what would happen if people had negative thoughts about me.” My response to this is that good social anxiety therapy involves a process of helping you to recognize unconsciously held beliefs and fears that you think you don’t have because you don’t consciously think unrealistic thoughts. Good social anxiety therapy goes beyond conscious thoughts to what cognitive therapy researchers call “ automatic thoughts.” Automatic thoughts are simply the rapid thoughts that we have thousands of times per minute without our conscious evaluation. By learning to catch these automatic thoughts and change them, we can control the minute adjustments they make to our emotional status and physiological reactions to our environment. This is one of the core elements of change for a person who feels too shy to approach a sales representative, or too anxious about appearing “put together” to coworkers.
This is just an example of how intervention for social anxiety can be helpful. I hope I have already answered the first question regarding whether or not social anxiety therapy works in the process of answering the second question regarding how it works. In case I did not make it obvious, the answer is “yes, It works!”
To learn more about beating social anxiety, I would recommend that you sign up for my mini-course on social anxiety which involves about ten e-mail segments sent to your inbox once per day with tips and tricks for addressing various aspects of life with social anxiety. You can easily find the box for signing up for this free mini-course by looking to the right hand side of this web site.
Be Courageous!
Dr. Todd Snyder
