Suffering Social Anxiety
Introduction
In this part of the 2-part blog post “Managing Social Anxiety with Hypnosis,” I introduce social anxiety as a common and troubling emotion that interferes with, if not makes impossible, a social phobic’s successful living and the satisfaction of a wide variety of their human needs.
The Purpose of Emotions
Do you wonder why we humans have emotions? Do you sometimes think life would be simpler without them? We have emotions for more than just to give people something besides politics, sports, food and the arts to talk about or to provide screenwriters with script material.
As with everything else in our human makeup, emotions exist to keep us safe and alive and able to thrive.
Emotions motivate our movement. Embedded in the word “emotion” is another word: “motion”. Emotions are there to get us to move–either towards something we desire or need, or away from something we fear or despise.
Humans have deep basic survival needs–needs for food, clothing, shelter, and security, as well as for warmth, love, and connection. We also have psychological and spiritual needs for status, significance, and attention; and to feel a sense of purpose and connection to something greater than ourselves, making our lives matter. In addition, we have mental and cognitive needs for stimulation, to exercise our creativity, to learn, explore, invent and produce in the world.
Some emotions drive us toward experiences that would help meet these needs and ensure our survival. And other emotions serve to drive us away from experiences or situations which we feel would prevent us from meeting our essential needs.
The “motion” in “emotion” has us moving either towards what we feel we need or away from what we feel we don’t want. Think lust, love, greed, craving– all feelings that motivate us towards an experience. And think about feelings that drive us away from something– fear, terror, disgust.
Hopefully, our emotions get it right and drive us toward what is good for us and away from what is bad for us. But sometimes they don’t.
But what happens when we get directed in opposite directions by our feelings? For example, when we are pulled towards social contact by our survival needs, and perhaps away from it by social anxiety.
The Social Phobic’s Conflict
The social phobic both wants and doesn’t want social contact. They are both pulled and pushed in different directions at the same time by their feelings. If social contact were bad for us, it would be great if we were terrified of social events because it would be life saving. But a socially anxious person instinctively knows they need social contact at the same time as fearing it; simultaneously, they are pulled and pushed at the same time by their emotions, putting them in a bind. And it gets worse.
Not only do we avoid what we fear; we also fear what we avoid. So the more you avoid something, the more the fear around it increases. It’s as if your “emotional brain” draws conclusions from your behavior: “She’s avoiding this situation all the time, so it must be genuinely dangerous. So I’ll ramp up her fear of this situation even more to make sure she won’t go near it.” This can feel like an insurmountable dilemma.
Nevertheless, some people can switch off their fear around stuff they should fear simply because they have made themselves go towards it. Consider the old-time circus lion-tamer who calmly put his head in a lion’s mouth, and the perennial favorites, human cannonballs who willing get themselves fired from a cannon. The point here is that even dangerous acts like these can start to feel “normal” to the emotional brain if you voluntarily and repeatedly do them. Your “emotional brain” concludes: “This must be safe, else why are we choosing to do it and doing it repeatedly?” So yes, we avoid what we fear, and often come to fear what we avoid, but we can also overcome our fear of something by exposing ourselves to it again and again. Given this, the social phobic can overcome their social anxiety by voluntarily and repeatedly exposing themselves to social situations they find scary.
For a more detailed account of Exposure Therapy and the use of hypnosis for systematic desensitization of social anxiety, see “Managing Social Anxiety with Hypnosis – Part 2”.
