Social Anxiety and Social Phobia
Social anxiety or social phobia is among the problems which many people in our society suffer from. Fearing being judged by other people is debilitating and can be a learned behaviour. It is sometimes passed down from a parent or caregiver who was socially anxious or socially awkward. Lieb, Wittchen, Hofler, Fuetsch, Stein and Merikangas (2000) found that ’there was a strong association between parental social phobia and social phobia among offspring’.
Sticking to the ’rules’ of society in order to be accepted is a common need for people who fear being judged and those socially anxious parents can tend to be overly judgemental of their children. This can also result in developing the perfectionist way of thinking and therefore develop a fear of failure.
People who are socially anxious have a huge and sometimes distorted belief system around how their social anxiety affects them and this is more to do with what they think about social situations, rather than the reality of that experience. Their belief system has been formed over many years so it will be quite significant and they will be more likely to recognise evidence which supports it rather than any evidence which refutes it, this is called confirmation bias.
Strong social anxiety usually supports low self esteem. In addition sufferers will also have difficulty picking themselves up from unexpected and uncontrollable or challenging events in life and may feel quite out of control at times.
So how do we overcome social anxiety or social phobia? The Thrive Programme is an evidence based programme which is extremely effective in helping people to turn themselves around and lose their social anxiety, raise their level of self esteem and become much more resilient and in control.
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