Social Anxiety to Social Confidence

While Christmas can be anxiety provoking with work parties, family get-togethers and present giving and receiving, New Year’s Eve can be a depressing time of year for those with social anxiety. I hope for all it is not, but unfortunately, for many it will be.

Our loneliness and isolation can be amplified when we know others around us are socialising and having fun. We may even feel jealous or envious with a sense of unfairness about the situation, and even though we know this is unhealthy, we may find it hard to shake the feelings.

It is good to know that some of the social anxiety sufferers I know are getting together this year to celebrate the new year and I hope that many other people with social anxiety have enjoyable celebrations lined up too, but I know there will also be many on their own, or who will feel alone while in the company of others.

I have had my fair share of New Year’s Eves that I do not wish to remember. Many of them were times when I felt very alone. If you are alone this New Year’s then I understand why you may be feeling sad or even depressed. Unfortunately, I cannot take that sadness away for you, but I encourage you to use it to your advantage.

There may not be enough time to find the confidence you need to fully enjoy this New Year’s Eve, but you have a whole year to make sure that next year’s is a different story. Use your sadness to drive you to start making steps towards building your confidence. You may not know how to yet, but when we have a strong need for something and start actively searching for answers, usually we will find them. It is quite probable that they will not be the answers you were expecting, so be prepared to search beyond what seems immediately obvious. When you step into 2009, make sure you have a plan to make this year different.

Make New Year’s Eve a time for you to reflect on the last year and put in place plans to make the next year your best to date. What better time than the last day of the year to plan for a life-changing year ahead. Others may be out having fun, but while they are out doing that, you could be taking the first steps towards something great. Make the last day of the year really count.

Whether you will be planning a new life or just enjoying the moment, I wish you all the best for the new year. I hope your plans for the year ahead will be all that you hoped for and more.

Unfortunately, I do not have any photo's of myself from the time

The hairdressers is something I used to dread. In-fact, I just did not go at all. My long untidy hair earned me the nickname of ‘Happy Hippy Hanlon’. The happy part was a sarcastic comment about my generally miserable demeanour at the time. Eventually a friend I made in the last year of school gave me an exceptionally stylish 90s undercut. This probably only slightly improved the situation, but I was grateful at the time. A year or so later my sister had a go which had better results I seem to remember.

While many fear the dentist, hairdressers seems to be a more common fears for people with social anxiety. Having your mouth stretched open with a mirror stuck in it seems much more preferable than having to make polite small talk while someone holds sharp pointy things to your head. Today, I do not mind either and shall be off to my Italian friend for a slightly overdue trim later, but I know that for many, deciding whether or not to go to the hairdressers remains an uncomfortable dilemma.

If you are a social anxiety sufferer then it is quite likely that there has been a time when it has felt like people are laughing at you. Sure, everyone gets laughed at a few times in their life, but the difference with social anxiety is that, it feels like people are laughing at you, but they are not.

I used to be so self-conscious and paranoid about how I appeared to others that I would frequently feel like people were laughing at me. Was I walking oddly? Was there something stuck on my back? Was my hair sticking up? Maybe my flies were undone? Or perhaps, did they think I just looked pain weird? I did not feel able to, for example, check if something was stuck on my back because it felt like I was playing into the joke or would just look odd checking nothing. I would end up trying to look in shop windows to check how I was appearing to others, but struggled to find a way to do it discretely. As with many people with social anxiety, my self-focus was not an act of vanity, I was trying to manage what felt like an intimidating and vulnerable situation.

Even though my appearance was not great, I now understand that there was nothing about myself that warranted other people to laugh at me and those people probably did not even notice me at all. My feelings felt very real, but as much as I tried to convince myself that they were probably laughing at something else, doubt kept in creeping into my mind. Eventually, though, I did overcome this problem. This was quite an ingrained problem and was one of the last aspects of my social anxiety to leave me.

Although not a complete solution, an important part of overcoming this paranoia is to look up at the people who are laughing. That can be hard to do as our natural response is often to be submissive and look down or away, but through looking away we starve ourselves of any information that may counter our paranoid assumptions. By looking up at the people who are laughing, we get to find out if they are really looking at us. As you might know logically, it is quite unlikely that they are, but by actually seeing for yourself you get real evidence, and that can have a powerful effect on your feelings. Of course, it may be that they really are looking in your direction and laughing (although this is rarely the case), but in this situation the exercise can still be valuable. What we see with our eyes is usually not as bad as what our imagination can create for us, so by looking up we still help ourselves.

Sometimes when we are anxious and it feels like other people do not like us, then we can react in a negative way when there is actually nothing to react to. This can sometimes cause the situations we fear happening, to actually happen. So when you look up at people who are laughing, make sure you are operating from an attitude of curiosity rather than defence. Just take a quick look and do not stare. Also, if you make eye-contact, then give a quick smile and keep going about your business. It is always best to take the approach of innocent until proven guilty. It is often more our reactions to situations that give them meaning than people’s original intentions.

Everyone’s experience in unique, so please feel free to share yours by posting a comment.

Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) is considered by most accademics and clinicians to be the best long-term solution for people with severe social anxiety. So what is CBT and does it really work? Academic reasearch says that, yes, for most people CBT does lead to significant improvements, but there is a lot more to the phrase ‘does CBT work?’ than first meets the eye.

Firstly, CBT is an evolving therapy. This means that CBT today is not what CBT was 15 years ago. CBT for social anxiety used to mostly be about learning relaxation through controlled breathing, visualisation techniques, simple exposure, and replacing negative self-talk with cognitive coping strategies. These may still be used today, but through research CBT has moved on. Today, if you visit a well trained CBT practitioner your therapy might well be more focused on using behavioural experiments to gather evidence to counter negative beliefs, eliminating the use of safety behaviours, focusing outwardly to reduce self-focused attention, video feedback, and even exposure through virtual-reality.

The basic premises of CBT have continued to be the same; we can change our feelings and increase our quality of life through changing our thoughts and behaviour, but how we do that has changed over time. This is an important point to make for those who may have tried CBT a good few years ago or have been unlucky enough to visit a therapist who has not updated their training. If CBT has not helped you much in the past then it is quite possible that it could be more beneficial if you tried it again with more up-to-date techniques.

Much of the help I offer people resembles CBT and I may even use CBT terminology from time to time. In many respects it is CBT because I focus on helping people change the way they think and behave to overcome their social anxiety, but some of the theory and techniques I employ are unique and would not commonly be found in a typical course of CBT (although I hope that they will be in the future). So when answering the question, ‘does CBT work?’, the answer is not so straight forward. It really depends on what that CBT consists of. Not all CBT is the same.

A second point to make regards the relationship between therapist and client. In CBT this is commonly called the therapeutic alliance. It is important that you get on well with your therapist and feel like they are someone who can understand and help you. If you do not gel well together then it could be a significant barrier to progress. The idea of the therapeutic alliance is not so much that the therapist is there to help you, but rather that together, as a team, you can work through your difficulties. If you wanted to visualise this then you might like to see you and the therapist sitting together facing the problem as opposed to you sitting opposite each other with the therapist looking at you with the problem. If your therapist is not someone you can feel understood by, trust and cooperate with then sooner or later it will get in the way of the therapeutic process, so another answer to the question, ‘does CBT work?’ is that it depends on your relationship with your therapist.

Some personalities fit together better than others and it is not necessarily a failing of your therapist or yourself if you do not connect. If you do not get on well with your therapist then be brave and bring up the matter with them, it could lead to a major break-through in your progress. If things still are not working out, ask to see someone else. It is possible that they can refer you to a colleague who will be a better match. I understand that this can be difficult to do when you have social anxiety, but it might be a key step towards you making significant progress.

Finally, CBT never works for anyone. What I mean by this is that CBT is just a set of theories and techniques. It has to be you who puts in the time and effort to turn those theories and techniques into changes in your life. Although most people understand this, and it can seem patronising to state the obvious, the unfortunate truth is that a lot of people still stand back and take a passive approach to therapy in the hope that change will happen to them. Fear of failure is a big reason for this, but it is important to remember that if we do nothing, then nothing will change, and worse, our situation could even deteriorate.

As you can see, when someone asks the question, ‘does CBT work?’, the answer is not as straight forward as a simple yes and no. CBT does help many people overcome their social anxiety, but your success will depend greatly on what exactly your CBT consists of, how good your relationship is with your therapist and whether or not you are ready to make the commitment of time and effort that is required by it.

What have your experiences of CBT been?