Entry for 8 June 2023:
Background: I’ve just recorded another episode for the Emotion-Focused Podcast, hosted by Lou Cooper of the Australian Institute for Emotion-Focused Therapy in Melbourne, Australia. The previous episode, which I recorded with Lou in November 2022, was on empathy and whether it can be learned. This previous episode can be found at: https://www.emotionfocused.com/ I invite readers of this blog to sample the other fascinating episodes of this podcast, which is primarily aimed at lay people but is also relevant to professionals.
The title of the new episode is “I’m Shy”; I don’t know exactly when it will go up, but it should appear in the next month or so; in the meantime there is plenty to listen to on Lou’s fun podcast. As I did for my previous episode with her, I wrote a detailed script for the interview, but then used almost none of it, as I instead talked more about my own experiences of shyness and social anxiety. If you want to hear more about that, look out the podcast. In the meantime, here is the script I wrote:
1. Language: Shyness, Social Anxiety, and Introversion
The word “shy” originally came from ancient words having to do with fear and avoidance (“gun-shy”, “The horse shied away from the fire”).
As an adjective, shy means “nervous or embarrassed about meeting and speaking to other people”. Synonyms include: bashful, diffident, timid, introverted and so on. Shy specifically implies a basic tendency to shrink “from contact or close association with others, together with a wish to escape notice”.
On the other hand, being introverted can be something quite distinct from being shy or socially anxious. An introvert can be defined as “a person who prefers calm environments, limits social engagement, or embraces a greater than average preference for solitude.” Psychologically, following Carl Jung, introverts are people who are concerned “primarily with their own thoughts and feelings,” in other words, their inner world rather than the outer world of other people. A critical issue might therefore whether a person genuinely prefers their own company out of a basic inclination, or whether they do so out of fear of other people, while deep-down longing for more connection to others. For this reason, I wouldn’t want to say that introversion and shyness are the same thing, and want to hold out for the possibility a person could an introvert and not be shy.
In any case, while I wouldn’t want to say that all shy people are socially anxious, there is certainly a lot of overlap, and shyness does seem to generally involve fear and avoidance, especially of situations with other people.
So: We want to be careful to recognise the possibility that some shy/introverted folks might be perfectly happy with being on their own. On the other hand, my experience (in my own life and with my clients) is that socially anxious folks generally long for connection to other people, and are miserable both in the company of other people and on their own. As an emotion-focused therapist and former miserable shy person, it’s that misery that concerns me. I’m also not interested in diagnosing people, so I want to be guided by the person’s own sense of whether their dis-preference for being around others is a problem for them, or not.
2. Definition of Social Anxiety
So what is the formal definition of social anxiety?
-It’s a fear of other people or social situations, a fear that the person finds unreasonable.
-This fear is pretty consistent over situations of a particular type, like public speaking or informal social situations, like hanging out with one’s friends.
-This fear is unwanted; the person doesn’t like being afraid of other people, because it causes them a lot of distress and/or messes their life up, that is, gets in the way things that are important to them, like finding meaningful, fulfilling work, or develop caring relationships.
Note that social anxiety can vary in severity from being miserable in social situations (that was me as a young person) to having my fear of other people essentially destroy the possibility of having a successful life.
3. Origins and nature of social anxiety
In our research and clinical work, my research team and I at the University of Strathclyde found that severe social anxiety (as opposed to more garden variety shyness) almost always involves some kind of social trauma/humiliation/degradation, at the hands of family, friends or peers. This is then internalised as a sense of being basically defective, accompanied by a part of self that continually beats us up (in internal humiliation), possibly in attempt to prevent the external humiliation from happening again.
The result of this process is a deep sense of shame over one’s defectiveness, which further results in a fear of other people and social situations, motivating the person to avoid situations in which they might again be shamed, by having their defectiveness seen by other people. Another part of the person comes to act like a kind of guard, trying to keep the person safe for humiliation by reminding them of their defects, pushing them to prepare for social situations, and generally scaring them into avoiding those situations. This coach-critic-guard part becomes so good at its job that it frequently overwhelms the person with fear, freaking them out or creating an anxiety attack or panic.
This all sounds more or less straightforward, but in fact everyone’s social anxiety is unique, tied to different social traumas, experienced differently in the body, although there are common body feelings, like tightness or butterflies in the throat, chest or stomach, and fuzziness in the head during anxiety episodes. Each person also symbolises their core defective sense of self in their own way, the thing they are most afraid of other people seeing about them.
4. Therapy for social anxiety
Common sense, including everyone from Freud to our grandmother, tells us that when we are unreasonably afraid of something we should face our fears in order to overcome them. This is the basis of most CBT treatments of social anxiety. The problem is, it’s not so easy to face one’s fears, especially when they are deep-seated and based on a history of trauma. In done poorly or insensitively, this approach can easily become re-traumatising, and some clients hate such treatments.
Instead, in EFT, we find it’s important to first create an atmosphere of safety and trust in which the person can feel genuinely understood and accepted.
Then, there is a period of exploration, in which we want to hear the person’s story of their fear of other people. We also want to hear how they experience this fear in their body. Going a bit further, we want to hear what is it that they are most afraid others will see in them, their core defective sense of self.
After that, we ask the person bring in examples of times when they found themselves afraid of other people, so that we can experience these episodes in imagination along with them. As we help them unfold these times, we begin to hear the voice of the coach-critic guard scaring them, and we suggest that they show us what this inner conversation looks like by enacting it in the therapy room. (We usually use chairs to represent the parts of self, but it’s not absolutely necessary.)
Acting out this inner conversation makes it clear to the person that their fear of other people is not primarily something that happens to them but is instead an internally-generated process that they do to themselves, with the best of intentions, trying to be helpful. They also come to see how this inner dialogue sometimes overwhelms them, causing the very thing it’s trying to prevent.
As we work with this process it becomes clear that there is also a harsh internal critical part of self that continually reinforces and feeds the sense of defectiveness, even now in their life. This critical voice doesn’t soften, even when confronted with the damage it does. So we begin to wonder with the client where this voice comes from. Because it’s generally so obvious to them at this point, clients don’t really need our help to see the connection to past social trauma such as bullying. From here, we can then move on to exploring the unresolved feelings left over from these past traumas, often by having clients confront the bullying others in imagination (usually using an chairs to represent these others).
This process of confrontation helps the person reach the thing that hurts the most about what they’ve been through, what we call the core pain, and once they’ve reached that we offer genuine validation and compassion to the parts of the person that still carry this pain. At this point we can ask these parts what this pain needs; the answer turns out to be connection, validation, recognition, protection and compassion. We then ask the person if they can offer these things to the wounded parts of themselves, which releases a set of powerful, useful emotions: connecting sadness, protective anger, and self-compassion.
Finally, it’s important to note that it may not be enough to go back to the core pain, find out what it needs, and help the person provide that for themselves. Afterall, the fear of others typically has become a kind of experiential habit that will often need to be worked with, using the new, useful emotions that the person has activated: The connecting sadness points to a deep hunger for connection, which motivates the person to go out and face their habitual fear of others, while the protective anger helps them to withstand their own inner critical, undermining voices and the self-compassion helps them enhance their resilience in the face of life’s inevitable struggles and setbacks. Working together, these adaptive, growth-oriented emotions help the person get unstuck and move forward in their life.
