DOING THINGS RATHER THAN AVOIDING THINGS
Avoidance is like an extreme form of keeping safe, therefore it is necessary to dedicate it to an entirely new section.
Avoiding the things we fear is an entirely natural reaction. If you thought you were going to be laughed at and humiliated in front of others it would seem
only logical to simply avoid it. The problem with social phobia starts when we begin to avoid almost everything that we fear. We avoid working, avoid personal relationships, avoid feeling our emotions, avoid important appointments, avoid doing things we want to do and to say. And this avoidance begins to seriously affect our way of and quality of life. So what we must do is to start doing the things we have been avoiding. Avoidance doesn't have to necessarily be total. You can say go to a party, but spend most of your time in the kitchen helping out rather than mingling with others.
The first thing to do is to identify what you avoid because of fear. Come up with as many things as you can. To help you out, think of something that you fear and just think about doing it. Say for example, think about approaching someone and asking them out on a date. Do you feel a sense of alarm and a lack of confidence as if you can't go through with it ? If so, this is likely something that you avoid. Notice when this happens in real life situations, when you feel like shrinking from sight, or turning around and quickly walking away. Write them down in a similar way you did with the list of safety behaviours.
Avoided situation: saying hello to someone I find attractive
Avoided situation: making an appointment to see the doctor
Avoided situation: taking up an invitation to a party
Avoided situation: standing up for my right to return something faulty
Avoided situation: stating my personal opinion
Avoided situation: being around people most likely to ask me about my weekend
Avoided situation: being seen out in public alone
Avoided situation: driving along unfamilar roads
The next thing to do is to find the connection between what you avoid and what you think. You can use the questionnaire you used when trying to uncover your negative thoughts to fill in the mood diary. Things like "what do I expect to happen ?", "what is the worst thing that could happen to me ?" It is important to find out what you think will happen. What will people do to confirm your fears ?
The next step is to actually face the avoided situations. It is best to start with the things you find the easiest to do but still avoid. This may be something simple like checking the letterbox when other neighbours are outside. Then you can move onto something little harder once you feel you have conquered the easy stuff. Remeber, use the attentional focus technique to reduce self-consciousness so you don't end up drawing biased conclusions about the situation.
The final phase is to observe what happened and to see how it fits in with what you thought in step 2. It is the conclusions you draw from the experiment. What did you observe ? What do those observations mean to you ? Were you fears confirmed ?
Here is how to do it on paper.
Avoided situation: Taking the dog for a walk during the day
Prediction: People will make smug and negative comments on what I am doing, my dog will try to smell or bite another person and I will be embarrassed fr it
Experiment: Take the dog for a walk
Outcome: Nobody said anything smug or insulting. My dog didn't misbehave even when others walked past. People aren't that mean and nasty as I thought and my dog is more well-behaved than I thought.
Try to get used to doing things that you find you would rather avoid. Let's say you undertake an experiment, repeat it again and again, until you feel your anxiety has disappeared. As you go about trying to get over social anxiety old patterns of thinking and behaviour may re-emerge even after you thought you were getting better. The best way to deal with this problem is to not give up. You may need take things more slowly and not to try too hard or do things obsessively.
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UNCOVERING UNDERLYING BELIEFS, ASSUMPTIONS & RULES
Ok, so you've been doing the mood diary, practiced reducing self-conscious feelings and been giving up safety behaviours and have begun doing things you'd rather just avoid but you still don't seem to making as much progress you would have hoped to even though you have had success after success, or your anxiety and the way you think about people and yourself seems to be too intense to go through with exposure. The reason for this may be due to certain underlying beliefs, assumptions and rules that you may be harbouring.
Beliefs are the deepest and will typically take the form of things like "I'm worthless" or "people are repulsive". They tend to be unconditional and totalistic, where nothing can change. Assumptions tend to take the form of things like "if I'm not 100% confident, people will point out my shyness and laugh" or "if I look weak people will put me down". They often are conditional which means the outcome can be altered through certain behaviours or things to do. A rule is a way to live, a kind of standard to follow. They may be things like "if I don't know what to say, I should say nothing" or "saying my opinion is only acceptable when I am asked". All these things guide our behaviour and the way we think and feel and they help lead to our cognitive distortions and where our attention focussess on.
How do you uncover these thoughts ? If you have been doing the mood diary, say for perhaps 4 - 6 weeks, you should hopefully have built up a good collection of mood sheets. Go through the automatic thoughts of each situation and pick out the ones that keep coming up or the ones that have themes to them or seem connected.
Say for example, you think you can't stand up for yourself, and you feel others pick on you, those kind of thoughts are connected. The purpose here is to not find cognitive distortions but to find the root causes of your anxiety. Those repeating thoughts are pointing towards your underlying beliefs, assumptions and rules.
You can use something call the downward arrow technique and distill many of your automatic thoughts, assumptions and rules into core beliefs. It simply consists of writing down the automatic thought and then asking a question like "what does that mean to you" or "why is that so scary ?" "what would happen if you did that ?", then come up with an answer and draw an arrow under the answer then ask another similar question again and repeat until you hit something that seems important to you. Many times, you will uncover beliefs that seem totally outdated and ridiclous that they just lose their power almost immediately. But things won't always be so easy. Anyway, these beliefs, assumptions and rules must be challenged to get any real deep and meaningful change since they are the things causing you to become anxious, panic, or to shy up around others, and that is what we will do.
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CHALLENGING UNDERLYING BELIEFS, ASSUMPTION & RULES
One way to weaken your deeper thoughts is to challenge them in the same way you did in the mood diary with your automatic negative thoughts. It is best to get yourself another book so you can seperate your mood diary from your beliefs and assumptions and rules that you will be working on.
Write down any particular belief or assumption or rule you want to change. You need to come up with a more useful or helpful or realistic alternative way of thinking about yourself or others or how you relate to yourself or others or how you engage with the world and other people. Here are some questions to help you think differently.
Would you think like this about someone else ?
What would you tell someone who thought like this ?
How fair are you being on yourself ?
Are you forgetting that eveyone makes mistakes and that is nobody is perfect ?
Are you ignoring you strengths and focussing on your weaknesses ?
What cognitive distortions might be affecting my thinking ?
Are painful memories of the past affecting the way I see others or myself ?
Are there other ways I can describe myself or others that is less emotionally loaded ?
There are heaps of ways to challenge beliefs. David burns' WHEN PANIC ATTACKS has dozens of them. You can also look many of them up in my post of 46 anti-anxiety techniques.
A helpful thing you can do is to make a list of all things that seems to contradict the particular belief no matter how small it is. Think of things that have happened in the past that counters the belief or assumption.
Here is a way of challenging a belief or assumption or rule on paper.
Belief: people think I'm a loser
Power in belief: 100%
a. Is there anyone out there who I think is a loser ? Do I absolutely hate them and want to humiliate them endlessly or doesn't even really bother me that much ?
b. What exactly am a loser at ? How much am a loser am I ? Have I ever won anything in my entire life ?
c. How many people have told me I am a loser ? One, two ? How many people have expressed this thought in one way or another ?
d. Am I a loser or just a person who doesn't receive much in life ?
e. Is there anyone else like me who others don't see as a loser ? Why are they any different ?
f. Do people really think I'm a loser or do I only feel like people do ?
Power in belief: 80%
You get the idea. Challenge a belief anyway you want and write it out how you like. In any case you are only weakening beliefs and assumptions and rules so that you have a little bit more confidence to go onto the next stage which is behavioural work.
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Avoidance is like an extreme form of keeping safe, therefore it is necessary to dedicate it to an entirely new section.
Avoiding the things we fear is an entirely natural reaction. If you thought you were going to be laughed at and humiliated in front of others it would seem
only logical to simply avoid it. The problem with social phobia starts when we begin to avoid almost everything that we fear. We avoid working, avoid personal relationships, avoid feeling our emotions, avoid important appointments, avoid doing things we want to do and to say. And this avoidance begins to seriously affect our way of and quality of life. So what we must do is to start doing the things we have been avoiding. Avoidance doesn't have to necessarily be total. You can say go to a party, but spend most of your time in the kitchen helping out rather than mingling with others.
The first thing to do is to identify what you avoid because of fear. Come up with as many things as you can. To help you out, think of something that you fear and just think about doing it. Say for example, think about approaching someone and asking them out on a date. Do you feel a sense of alarm and a lack of confidence as if you can't go through with it ? If so, this is likely something that you avoid. Notice when this happens in real life situations, when you feel like shrinking from sight, or turning around and quickly walking away. Write them down in a similar way you did with the list of safety behaviours.
Avoided situation: saying hello to someone I find attractive
Avoided situation: making an appointment to see the doctor
Avoided situation: taking up an invitation to a party
Avoided situation: standing up for my right to return something faulty
Avoided situation: stating my personal opinion
Avoided situation: being around people most likely to ask me about my weekend
Avoided situation: being seen out in public alone
Avoided situation: driving along unfamilar roads
The next thing to do is to find the connection between what you avoid and what you think. You can use the questionnaire you used when trying to uncover your negative thoughts to fill in the mood diary. Things like "what do I expect to happen ?", "what is the worst thing that could happen to me ?" It is important to find out what you think will happen. What will people do to confirm your fears ?
The next step is to actually face the avoided situations. It is best to start with the things you find the easiest to do but still avoid. This may be something simple like checking the letterbox when other neighbours are outside. Then you can move onto something little harder once you feel you have conquered the easy stuff. Remeber, use the attentional focus technique to reduce self-consciousness so you don't end up drawing biased conclusions about the situation.
The final phase is to observe what happened and to see how it fits in with what you thought in step 2. It is the conclusions you draw from the experiment. What did you observe ? What do those observations mean to you ? Were you fears confirmed ?
Here is how to do it on paper.
Avoided situation: Taking the dog for a walk during the day
Prediction: People will make smug and negative comments on what I am doing, my dog will try to smell or bite another person and I will be embarrassed fr it
Experiment: Take the dog for a walk
Outcome: Nobody said anything smug or insulting. My dog didn't misbehave even when others walked past. People aren't that mean and nasty as I thought and my dog is more well-behaved than I thought.
Try to get used to doing things that you find you would rather avoid. Let's say you undertake an experiment, repeat it again and again, until you feel your anxiety has disappeared. As you go about trying to get over social anxiety old patterns of thinking and behaviour may re-emerge even after you thought you were getting better. The best way to deal with this problem is to not give up. You may need take things more slowly and not to try too hard or do things obsessively.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
UNCOVERING UNDERLYING BELIEFS, ASSUMPTIONS & RULES
Ok, so you've been doing the mood diary, practiced reducing self-conscious feelings and been giving up safety behaviours and have begun doing things you'd rather just avoid but you still don't seem to making as much progress you would have hoped to even though you have had success after success, or your anxiety and the way you think about people and yourself seems to be too intense to go through with exposure. The reason for this may be due to certain underlying beliefs, assumptions and rules that you may be harbouring.
Beliefs are the deepest and will typically take the form of things like "I'm worthless" or "people are repulsive". They tend to be unconditional and totalistic, where nothing can change. Assumptions tend to take the form of things like "if I'm not 100% confident, people will point out my shyness and laugh" or "if I look weak people will put me down". They often are conditional which means the outcome can be altered through certain behaviours or things to do. A rule is a way to live, a kind of standard to follow. They may be things like "if I don't know what to say, I should say nothing" or "saying my opinion is only acceptable when I am asked". All these things guide our behaviour and the way we think and feel and they help lead to our cognitive distortions and where our attention focussess on.
How do you uncover these thoughts ? If you have been doing the mood diary, say for perhaps 4 - 6 weeks, you should hopefully have built up a good collection of mood sheets. Go through the automatic thoughts of each situation and pick out the ones that keep coming up or the ones that have themes to them or seem connected.
Say for example, you think you can't stand up for yourself, and you feel others pick on you, those kind of thoughts are connected. The purpose here is to not find cognitive distortions but to find the root causes of your anxiety. Those repeating thoughts are pointing towards your underlying beliefs, assumptions and rules.
You can use something call the downward arrow technique and distill many of your automatic thoughts, assumptions and rules into core beliefs. It simply consists of writing down the automatic thought and then asking a question like "what does that mean to you" or "why is that so scary ?" "what would happen if you did that ?", then come up with an answer and draw an arrow under the answer then ask another similar question again and repeat until you hit something that seems important to you. Many times, you will uncover beliefs that seem totally outdated and ridiclous that they just lose their power almost immediately. But things won't always be so easy. Anyway, these beliefs, assumptions and rules must be challenged to get any real deep and meaningful change since they are the things causing you to become anxious, panic, or to shy up around others, and that is what we will do.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHALLENGING UNDERLYING BELIEFS, ASSUMPTION & RULES
One way to weaken your deeper thoughts is to challenge them in the same way you did in the mood diary with your automatic negative thoughts. It is best to get yourself another book so you can seperate your mood diary from your beliefs and assumptions and rules that you will be working on.
Write down any particular belief or assumption or rule you want to change. You need to come up with a more useful or helpful or realistic alternative way of thinking about yourself or others or how you relate to yourself or others or how you engage with the world and other people. Here are some questions to help you think differently.
Would you think like this about someone else ?
What would you tell someone who thought like this ?
How fair are you being on yourself ?
Are you forgetting that eveyone makes mistakes and that is nobody is perfect ?
Are you ignoring you strengths and focussing on your weaknesses ?
What cognitive distortions might be affecting my thinking ?
Are painful memories of the past affecting the way I see others or myself ?
Are there other ways I can describe myself or others that is less emotionally loaded ?
There are heaps of ways to challenge beliefs. David burns' WHEN PANIC ATTACKS has dozens of them. You can also look many of them up in my post of 46 anti-anxiety techniques.
A helpful thing you can do is to make a list of all things that seems to contradict the particular belief no matter how small it is. Think of things that have happened in the past that counters the belief or assumption.
Here is a way of challenging a belief or assumption or rule on paper.
Belief: people think I'm a loser
Power in belief: 100%
a. Is there anyone out there who I think is a loser ? Do I absolutely hate them and want to humiliate them endlessly or doesn't even really bother me that much ?
b. What exactly am a loser at ? How much am a loser am I ? Have I ever won anything in my entire life ?
c. How many people have told me I am a loser ? One, two ? How many people have expressed this thought in one way or another ?
d. Am I a loser or just a person who doesn't receive much in life ?
e. Is there anyone else like me who others don't see as a loser ? Why are they any different ?
f. Do people really think I'm a loser or do I only feel like people do ?
Power in belief: 80%
You get the idea. Challenge a belief anyway you want and write it out how you like. In any case you are only weakening beliefs and assumptions and rules so that you have a little bit more confidence to go onto the next stage which is behavioural work.
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