Social Anxiety to Social Confidence

When you have a fear like being scared of speaking in a group of people, the strength of the anxiety you feel can seem unjustifiably strong. There seems to be no apparent reason why you feel so scared but yet you feel terrified. One of the reasons for this is that we often have deeper fears in our unconscious that lie behind the surface fears that we are consciously aware of. These deeper underlying fears relate well to the strength of the emotion you feel and tie in closely with your needs but at the same time they are fairly far removed from the reality of the situation. In contrast, your surface fears are very relevant to the situation you are in but are further removed from the intensity of the emotion you feel and seem less connected with your basic human needs.

This is actually quite a cleaver system that your brain has in place. Your deep fears cause anxiety to motivate you to take action to protect the fulfilment of you basic human needs while surface fears help you work out what action would be relevant to the situation. When our fears are appropriate to a situation this system works very well to keep us safe and helps us meet our needs, but of course when our fears are inappropriate to the situation, as is often the case in social anxiety, our strong anxiety and behaviours can of course be more of a hindrance than a help.

These deeper fears that lie in your unconscious are not so buried that they are unreachable. In fact, you may be aware of many of them already. They do not have to be uncovered through dream analysis or by describing ambiguous pictures as some very traditional therapists may have you believe. A simple line of questioning and some quiet thinking time actually suffices very well and gives much more accurate results. This questioning basically asks you what would you fear happening next if the thing you are currently scared of took place. You then keep asking this question for every answer given until you get down to a final needs related fear.

For example, if you had a surface fear such as being scared of blushing you would ask yourself, ‘well, what if I do blush, what do I fear would happen then?’. Your answer might be that you fear people would notice the blushing, so your next question would be, ‘well, what if people do notice the blushing, what do I fear would happen then?’. Your answer might be that you fear that people will think you are hiding something, so your next question would be, ‘well, what if people do think I’m hiding something, what do I fear would happen then?’. Your answer might be that if people think you are hiding something then they might not trust you enough to want to spend time with you, so your next question would be, ‘well, what if they don’t trust me and don’t want to spend time with me, what do I fear would happen then?’ Your answer might be that you fear that you will not be able to make them understand that you actually are trustworthy, so your next question would be, ‘well, what if I can’t make them understand that I am trustworthy, what do I fear would happen then?’ Your answer might then be your final needs based fear; that you will end up lonely and be unable to fulfil your social needs.

As you can see, the fears string together like a chain taking you from the situation to your needs with each link connecting the next. In the example, the deeper fears, such as someone rejecting you for being untrustworthy and you not being able to fulfil your social needs, are quite far removed from the original situation but are easily related to the strong feelings of fear, shame or embarrassment that you might feel in that situation. Also, the surface fears, such as fear of blushing and people noticing that blushing , are very relevant to the situation but seem more disconnected from the emotions until you peal back the layers and are able to relate them to the deeper fears. Understanding your own versions of these ‘fear chains’ can help you understand your emotional responses better and can help you take some of the power out of your fears. As discussed in the comments below though, this is not a complete solution to social anxiety and I will include the more significant steps you need to take in my audio program when it is finished.

Below I have set out the six main links of socially anxious fear chains going from surface situational fears right down to deep needs based fears. I have also given some examples of the types of fears that go with each. These six links are not strict and you may find smaller more subtle fears that link inbetween them.

SURFACE FEARS (Related to the situation)

1. Fear of showing vulnerability
Fear of showing signs of anxiety (blushing, shaking, being unable to speak, sweating etc.). Fear of doing anything embarrassing that might put you in a bad light. Fear of making mistakes or showing inadequacy. Fear of saying or doing something that annoys people. Fear of revealing personal opinions and preferences.

2. Fear of vulnerability being noticed
Fear of being put under the spotlight. Fear of drawing attention to yourself. Fear of people watching you. Fear of people staring at you. Fear of having your inadequacies and mistakes highlighted. Fear of people noticing your anxiety symptoms. Fear of people noticing your mistakes or inadequacies. Fear of people knowing personal things about you.

3. Fear of negative evaluation
Fear of people looking down on you. Fear of people judging you. Fear of people criticising you. Fear of people thinking bad things about you. Fear of people thinking you are stupid, boring, strange, weak, useless, unpleasant, anti-social, arrogant, ugly, repulsive or lacking in personality. Fear of people disliking you. Fear of people misinterpreting your symptoms and behaviours.

4. Fear of rejection
Fear of being humiliated. Fear of people laughing at you. Fear of people telling you off. Fear of people getting angry or aggressive with you. Fear of people physically harming you. Fear of people ganging up against you. Fear of people poisoning others against you. Fear of people leaving you. Fear of people not wanting to be with you romantically. Fear of people punishing you. Fear of being disadvantaged. Fear of people taking or damaging your possessions. Fear of being asked to move out of your home.

5. Fear of being unable to counter rejection
Fear of being assertive and standing up for yourself. Fear of not being physically strong enough to defend yourself. Fear of people not listening or believing you. Fear of not being able to correct untrue information or rumours that have been spread about you. Fear of not being able to make people like you. Fear of not being able to get people to understand you. Fear of not being able regain or replace lost relationships. Fear of not being able to cope with intense and unpleasant emotions.

6. Fear of needs being unfulfilled
Fear of being alone and lonely. Fear of being unable to fulfil social needs. Fear of being homeless. Fear of being seriously harmed. Fear of never being able to fulfil sexual and physical intimacy needs. Fear of having to endure unbearable emotional pain. Fear of not being able to achieve what you want in life.

DEEP FEARS (Related to your basic human needs)

If you decide to write out your own fear chains then be sure to avoid these common pitfalls.

• Giving your answer to what you fear happening as something that moves you up the chain rather down it. e.g. What do you fear happening next if people do laugh at you? – Then they might notice that I’m shaking. This moves up from link 4 to link 2 rather than down to link 5.
• Giving an answer that moves down the chain but skips a link. e.g. What do you fear happening if they do notice that you are quiet? – That they won’t want to spend time with me. This jumps from link 2 to link 4 without explaining why you think being quiet would make them not want to spend time with you. The inbetween link 3 might be that you fear that they think you are boring.
• Giving your answer as an emotion rather than a fear. e.g. What do you fear happening if people see you blushing? – I would get embarassed. Embarassment is an emotion rather than a fear.
• Not giving yourself enough time to identify what you fear happening. Often because it is not immediately obvious what the fear is people will conclude that they do not know or that they are not scared of anything. Because as you go down the links you are connecting with deeper and more unconscious fears you need to give you mind time to look for the answers. If you keep searching and think about the question, the answer to what you are scared of will eventually come to the forefront of your mind.

As a final note, notice that these fears cause anxiety and anxiety symptoms which can be the very object of our fears creating a loop. Also, the behaviours our anxiety motivates us to perform can have negative social consequences which can also be the object of our fears.  For example, fearing that you might make a mistake and that someone will get angry with you and harm you causes you to become very anxious meaning you are much more likely to make a mistake.  Breaking these vicious cycles is the main goal in overcoming social anxiety.

I hope the subject of this entry is as interesting for you as it is for me. My interest keeps me developing my understanding of social anxiety and I hope that through sharing my knowledge I can help you understand and overcome it. I also hope that through developing my own theories and understanding I offer insights that you will not find elsewhere. Thanks for reading

Blushing and Sweating are two common concerns of the social anxiety sufferer. To some, blushing is a sweet and endearing quality, but for the social anxiety sufferer it can feel like a nightmare. For them, rather than a slight pinkness in their cheeks, their blushing can often be more describable as looking beetroot red, feeling like their face is on fire and something that not only affects their face, but spreads in a blotchy manner to their neck and chest.

Likewise, for the social anxiety sufferer who is concerned about sweating, it is often not just a matter of a slight dampness under the arms on a hot summer’s day. Many report profuse sweating on the palms their hands, face, armpits and other areas of the body. This is usually exaggerated when in social situations where they least want it to appear and it can be particularly problematic for people whose job involves shaking hands a lot.

When we get anxious, our sympathetic nerve activity is increased. This results in various changes in our body, including blushing and sweating, which serve to help ready us for an adverse situation. In the distant past, most adverse situations usually involved a physical danger that needed to be run away from or fought off. This can still be true, but is less so in the world we live in today. Both running away and fighting involve physical activity and that produces excessive body heat. To make our bodies more efficient and increase our chances of survival, humans have evolved to start cooling themselves through sweating when danger is anticipated. This is great when the danger is a swarm of killer bees and you need to run as far as possible, but it is not so great when the danger is the potential rejection of your colleagues when giving a presentation.

Blushing seems to be less explainable than sweating. Scientists have not figured out exactly why we blush when we are anxious or embarrassed. It is possible that it serves to communicate our remorse to others which may mean we are treated less harshly when we get things wrong, but the exact reasons for it’s function remain elusive.

Although blushing and sweating is a natural and healthy part of being human, many social anxiety sufferers end up feeling very self-conscious and anxious about these physical traits. The big problem is that getting self-conscious and anxious makes one blush and sweat more rather than helping with the situation. People often get stuck in a vicious cycle where they fear the onset of blushing and sweating in social situations and then this causes them anxiety which then actually creates the very blushing or sweating that they feared happening in the first place. The thought of other people noticing this then causes more anxiety and consequentially more blushing and sweating and so on.

Although it often does not feel like it for the sufferer, the main issue that needs to be resolved is not the actual blushing or sweating, but rather the fact that they think something bad might happen if other people notice their blushing and sweating. Once these psychological issues are resolved and the cycles are broken, blushing and sweating will not be exaggerated by anxiety and they will cease to be a problem.

Often the ways that people have come up with to try and cope with these physical traits, such as habitually hiding them, tend to only serve to worsen the problem in the long-term. This can lead to people feeling like they are fighting a losing battle and like they are stuck with an excruciatingly embarrassing physical problem they cannot solve. This desperation is reflected in the increase in the number of people who risk irreversible surgery to reduce their visible anxiety symptoms.

For some, operations such as Sympathectomies can seem like the best escape route out of their suffering, but these operations can sometimes lead to worse problems that cannot be easily solved, or solved at all. These include permanently increased sweating elsewhere on the body and abnormal facial features. These risks can be avoided if people get the appropriate psychological help to address the root cause of their severe blushing or sweating.

It is fully understandable how when someone feels stuck with a problem, and when their own efforts to overcome it result to nothing, they turn to such drastic measures to seek relief. People considering this option should know that there are effective and risk free alternatives that actually address underlying psychological issues rather than just treating the symptom. Ponder the question: If someone has a spider phobia, would you treat them by killing all the spiders in the world, or would you work to help them come to terms with the fact that the everyday spiders they are scared of pose no threat to them?