Emerging from the Pandemic is causing anxiety for many people. The level of anxiety depends on your comfort level in various public situations. But you may have social anxiety disorder experience if you experience this kind of social anxiety feeling on an ongoing basis. What is different about social anxiety disorder than a temporary uncertainty about a particular place or situation? When do you need to consider social anxiety therapy?
Social anxiety disorder is characterized by overwhelming anxiety and excessive self-consciousness in everyday social situations. People with social anxiety disorder constantly fear being watched and judged by others and being embarrassed or humiliated by their own actions. The fear can be so severe that it interferes with work, school, or other activities. Typically, you need to experience significant problems in two of those areas to warrant the diagnosis.
You may experience social anxiety disorder in only one type of situation, such as fear of public speaking, or it can be more generalized, like if you experience symptoms whenever you are around other people. Physical symptoms often accompany the intense stress of social anxiety disorder. These can include blushing, sweating, trembling, nausea, and difficulty speaking. Because these symptoms increase the fear of disapproval, they can become an additional focus of fear. This creates a vicious cycle of social anxiety feelings. Social anxiety disorder typically begins in childhood or early adolescence and rarely develops after age 25.
Related Reading: Depression and Anxiety Therapy
Causes of Social Anxiety Disorder
Genetic:
While it is usually caused by a combination of factors, social anxiety disorder is heritable. This means you may be genetically predisposed to developing it. If you have a first degree relative with social anxiety disorder, you are two to six times more likely to develop it.
Direct Conditioning:
Children can learn social anxiety through direct conditioning. Social anxiety from childhood trauma can produce this. For example, you forgot your lines in a class play or you were a victim of constant bullying or teasing. The experience of any kind of trauma or abuse is associated with social anxiety disorder in children.
Observational Learning:
If you didn’t experience a traumatic event yourself but you saw someone else in a traumatic social situation, this can have a vicarious impact on you if you’re already vulnerable to the disorder.
Information Transfer:
Fearful and socially anxious parents unknowingly transfer verbal and non-verbal information to their children about the dangers of social situations. So if one or both of your parents were socially anxious, you heard, saw, and experienced the world through the filter of their anxiety.
Brain chemical imbalance:
Imbalances of chemicals in your brain called neurotransmitters can cause your brain to react to social situations differently than in people without social anxiety disorder.
Social Anxiety Therapy
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy
If you have social anxiety disorder, you may tend to think that your thoughts are factual and put too much focus on them. You might have behavioral symptoms include avoiding social situations to reduce anxiety or avoiding negative evaluations by others. Cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) is a form of effective psychotherapy that has traditionally been used to treat social anxiety disorder. The goal of CBT is to reduce anxiety by eliminating beliefs or behaviors that help to maintain the anxiety disorder. Part of this involves exposure in which people confront the things they fear. This is done in stages and is accompanied by anxiety management training.
Somatic Experiencing
Another social anxiety therapy is Somatic Experiencing (SE). Developed by psychoneurobiologist Peter Levine as a treatment for trauma, SE also has been used to treat anxiety including social anxiety. This approach gently helps you learn how to “titrate” your experience so that it is more manageable. As you have more and more social experiences that are not overwhelming, your capacity for tolerating anxiety-provoking experience grows. This has the effect of diminishing the intensity of your social anxiety feelings.
Mindfulness
Mindfulness can also be very helpful in treating social anxiety disorder. There are two components of mindfulness. The first is “self-regulation of attention”. This means observing and attending to the changing field of thoughts, feeling, and sensations from moment to moment. It leads to a feeling of being alert to what is occurring at the moment.
The second component is “orientation to experience”, which encompasses an attitude of openness, acceptance, and curiosity about the present moment. If you have social anxiety disorder, you likely tend to avoid your own experiences such as thought, feeling, behavior, and sense of body. Mindfulness training reduces this tendency by increasing the orientation to experience. Mindfulness training includes activities like body scan, yoga, sitting meditation, walking meditation, and many more.
A therapeutic intervention that includes mindfulness training is called a Mindfulness-Based Intervention (MBI). One type of MBI is Acceptance and Commitment Therapy. The goal of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy is to improve orientation to experience and to shift mental contexts by cultivating your awareness. This allows you to view your thoughts as thoughts and not as facts. Rather than trying to control the content of thinking and emotions, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) helps you change your relationship to events. One of the steps in this process is Flexible Attention to the Present Moment. This helps you to respond to current environmental demands rather than the “what if” context based on past experiences and anticipation of future ones.
Another MBI is Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR). This type of mindfulness was originally developed in the 1970s by medical doctor and professor Jon Kabat-Zinn. He used Buddhist principles and yoga to inform this modality, which is often taught in groups. MBSR has many exercises that you can also use as an individual.
Therapists at Life Care Wellness can help you with social anxiety by using Somatic Experiencing, Mindfulness, Yoga, and other techniques. If you are in the northern Illinois area, please reach out to us in our Glen Ellyn, Chicago (Jefferson Park), or Sycamore offices.
Rhonda Kelloway is the owner and principal therapist at Life Care Wellness, a group psychotherapy practice in Glen Ellyn, Sycamore, and Chicago (Jefferson Park neighborhood), Illinois. She is a trauma specialist utilizing a Somatic Experiencing framework to utilize the body’s wisdom in healing. She also uses EMDR and a variety of traditional psychotherapy approaches in her work. In addition to being a psychotherapist, she is a trained divorce and family mediator.
