My Social Anxiety Treatment

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Understanding that anxiety is a fear-based reaction, the first aim of my social anxiety treatment is to boost your tolerance levels for the feelings that you're now avoiding, including social anxiety. The reason for this is that anxiety grows when we try to avoid the feelings. So conversely, when you learn to boost your tolerance level for experiencing feelings and sensations that you normally avoid, anxiety will begin to dissolve. Normally when a person starts to feel an uncomfortable sensation, the initial reaction is mental avoidance (suppression). But with anxiety, avoidance is just what you don't want to do. If you attempt to suppress anxiety or run from it, you're only giving it power. This is because fear of anxiety creates more anxiety. The key is to confront it, feel it, and accept it. Also, you don't want to try to ignore the symptoms... Even if your heart feels like its pounding out of your chest, the key it to just feel it. No matter how bad it is, the way out is to face it. The more energy you put into feeling such episodes, the less strength anxiety will have to affect you the next time. In other words, a major key to overcoming social anxiety is to embrace it. It's for that reason that increasing tolerance for all emotions will be the first objective of our social anxiety treatment.

So for me to suggest "just feel it" is easy to say, right? Don't worry -- soon we'll perform an exercise that will demonstrate a powerful approach to achieving this objective. For now, just know that acceptance and awareness of inner sensations is essential to overcoming social anxiety, and that we are not out to "suppress" social anxiety, or any other negative emotion for that matter. In order to experience higher emotions, we MUST also be able to experience the lower ones. How good can a person ever feel if their positive feelings (e.g. social confidence and joy) are accompanied by a constant fear of losing that feeling? Everybody experiences rejection, failure, embarrassment and other inner adversity sometimes. If you look to such possibilities with emotional avoidance and constantly fear the possibility of them occurring, anxiety will flourish. But if you instead choose to experience such feelings with acceptance when they come, even with an appreciation for the humanness they grant you, you will be creating the kind of mental environment in which social anxiety cannot take root.

Hopefully at this point you have a general understanding of why it is that the first goal of this program is to learn how to properly experience body sensations and emotional energies. To be able to do so in a controlled manner will defeat the subconscious tendency toward avoidance which leads to social anxiety. Without fear and avoidance of negative emotional energies, social anxiety dissolves. The benefits of this practice in my life have been truly astounding, and I believe they will be for you as well. Once you've gained confidence in your ability to handle any feeling, you will have eliminated the fear of feelings that causes social anxiety in the first place.

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