Thank you for your comment, it gives me an opportunity to clarify my entry. I didn’t quite understand your comment about maths. I like to be quite logical and methodical in my explanations. I’m not sure if that’s what you meant, but I’m glad you like maths if it sounded like maths.

First of all, I’d just like to explain to my readers that this entry wasn’t meant to be offered as a complete solution for social anxiety. I’m saving the serious (or fun) stuff for my audio product. As I mention in the entry, working out your ‘fear chains’ will help you understand your social anxiety better (foremost), and will also take some of the power out of your fears (with an emphasis on some). There are much more effective things you can do to overcome social anxiety, but this is still a useful exercise and is worth doing. I do offer some other tips in some of my replies to other comments though, but I only cover them briefly.

Replies to your comments…

1. I separate the types of fears into needs based (more unconscious) fears and situation based (more conscious) fears to shows where the fear chains start and end. Each fear chain is really just one fear as all the links work together. We often describe just one link when we describe our fear, but it can be useful to understand how those that we consider to be separate fears are actually part of the same fear, but represent a different point in the chain. It helps demystify the complexity of social anxiety a bit (hopefully).

2. I find it more beneficial to ask about what people fear happing if they first fear came true because it deals with the present. Asking ‘why’ questions tends to only highlight how people became anxious in the first place which then gives a recipe for anxiety rather than confidence. Also, recalling past experiences that might have contributed to the anxiety can reinforce and strengthen it. Our past is an important part of why we might feel socially anxious today, but in the present we are only dealing with the effects of that past rather than the actually original events, so it’s better to focus on what’s happening in the present.

I rushed my comment on the end about loops and I should have explained myself more carefully (I will edit it). What I was referring to was the fact that people with social anxiety fear the onset of anxiety symptoms and also the fact that the behaviours they use can have a negative effect triggering concerns about performance. I did not mean that the actual line of questioning loops. The fears chains have a definite beginning and end as you correctly point out, and also as you point out they are like layers. You peel back the layers and eventually there are no more layers to peal – you are at the centre, but the anxiety caused by that final deep layer (or the chain/onion as a whole) can then create a situation that triggers a surface fear causing a loop. This loop then continues until the person exits the situation or implements an appropriate therapeutic intervention. The loops or vicious cycles in problems with anxiety and depression are why people’s emotions don’t naturally resolve themselves on their own. They are what separates what they call an ‘emotional disorder’ from more adaptable regular anxiety and sadness.

A short example would be that we fear the onset of anxious shaking because people might notice it, think it’s strange, reject us and not want to spend time with us meaning we can’t meet our social needs. But because we have that fear we then get anxious which causes us to start shaking. Because we’re shaking our fear stays active keeping us anxious and keeping us shaking. We break the loop when we exit the situation or implement an appropriate therapeutic intervention.

3. The answer to this is that they are related to both the situation and past events. The blushing, shaking sweating etc. that someone experiences when they are socially anxious actually becomes part of the situation (as does their anxious behaviours). Also, we wouldn’t be concerned about those symptoms without the situation being a social one, so the situation and the people in it do relate to the start of the chain, but as I explained, as the fears go deeper the situation becomes less relevant.

4. As I mentioned above, the purpose of this entries is to help people understand their social anxiety as well as help them overcome it. There are more significant things people need to do to overcome their social anxiety other than what I have mentioned in this entry and I will cover them in my audio program.

One of the deepest fears we have is of dying, but we also have another (slightly less important) fear of not being able to procreate, hence the presence of our social needs. It might be that I should have another link on the end of the chain to cover these basic fears, but I am unsure if they are actually fears as such or just the evolutionary reasons for our basic needs and the fears that surround meeting those needs. It is something I need to give more thought.

Thanks for some stimulating comments and thanks for being another force out there helping people with social anxiety.

All the best,

Nick

Here are a few tweaks to improve your understanding:

1. In the beginning, you don’t need to separate between the different types of fear. They behave in the same way but you are not aware of which one is controlling the show.

2. When you ask the questions, Don’t ask “What do I fear would happen then” ask instead “Why do I have that fear? When did I had in the past the same fear?” If you keep asking your questions you keep going in circles and finding more surface fears. This is why it appears that they create loops. They don’t create loops. They go deeper and deeper like pealing the layers of an onion.
If they would create loops it will be 10 times harder to overcome it and social anxiety cases would be almost incurable.

3. You say that the surface fears are related to the situation. They are not related with the situation at hand or reality. They are related with a past situation or trauma which is very similar to the situation at hand.

4. “You then keep asking this question for every answer given until you get down to a final needs related fear.” The purpose of these questions is to get to the deepest fear in order to overcome it. At least in this article, you seem to only explore the fears, not to cure them. You shouldn’t dig deep just to get to the basic “needs”. The deepest fear is ALWAYS the fear of dying or the fear of living life. They are the same. There is no point in diving into them just for this purpose.

Thanks for your article.