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OP, how severe is your social phobia? Can you go get gas at a gas station and go inside to pay at the little mini-mart? Can you go to a movie or to a fast food restaurant (inside) alone? Or do you just have problems making friends?
What specifically are you afraid of? If you spoke to someone, what do you believe will happen?
Because traditional therapy and medication is not working for you I would suggest looking into non-traditional therapies.
Two that have shown a lot of promise are the use of autogenic phrases and MBSR. The VA is now teaching MBSR in various places to help soldiers with PTSD and anxiety. If you can't find a class near you, there are several free classes online. I don't know how well a free online course would work, but I can confirm that MBSR has helped me with anxiety. You must do the work though.
Or, by the same token... a therapist with whom you have effective rapport.
This is so true. For change to occur, the client must feel comfortable with the therapist. No corrective emotional experience can take place without that. If a client doesn't feel this w/ a therapist, he needs to keep looking.
Quote:
Originally Posted by rrah
Because traditional therapy...is not working for you...
CBT is not traditional therapy. The insurance companies like it, though, because it's short term. It usually doesn't help the client in the long run. The client will often find himself back in the therapist's office when he faces another major problem in his life, since CBT does not address one's underlying feelings.
OP, how severe is your social phobia? Can you go get gas at a gas station and go inside to pay at the little mini-mart? Can you go to a movie or to a fast food restaurant (inside) alone? Or do you just have problems making friends?
What specifically are you afraid of? If you spoke to someone, what do you believe will happen?
Going to the gas station and dealing with cashiers etc... I can do, but it's a struggle. It takes great effort and I really have to push myself. I manage to do it everyday, but it never gets easier. As for making friends, that's out of reach. I cannot bring myself to converse with people no matter how hard I try.
I'm afraid of being judged and rejected the most. Rationally I can say that a cashier is obviously not going to reject me from buying something. I mean duh. But social anxiety is not a rational disorder. I'm am a pathetic human that can't even function in society.
So you did or didn't make any of the changes necessary?
I put in great effort for a while, but at some point the challenges got too difficult. And even the ones I did do (like making eye contact) aren't any easier than when I first started. I'm just programed to be afraid of humans I guess.
I put in great effort for a while, but at some point the challenges got too difficult. And even the ones I did do (like making eye contact) aren't any easier than when I first started. I'm just programed to be afraid of humans I guess.
No you're not. There is a lot to be said for negative self talk. I know with anxiety it's this tape that plays in your head constantly running through every way this could go wrong, analyzing everything someone says or does, reminding you of past situations and other difficulties. It takes a lot of work and energy to quiet that tape down or to tune it out. But it can be managed.
When the challenges got to hard that's a time to stop and tell your therapist what you're struggling with. It might take a few tries to find someone you click with.
Modern neuroscience and attachment theory are the foundation for how meditation and mind-body skills provide significant relief.
The saying, "neurons that fire together, wire together" illustrate how habits of negativity or happiness become familiar patterns in the brain.
Finding someone skilled in mind-body medicine and a well-trained clinician, as well as daily practice of meditation and diaphragmatic breathing may be a helpful combination, as well as medication until you're able to function without it.
When you are more determined to be well, instead of comforted by your misery, you have the best chance for success.
Going to the gas station and dealing with cashiers etc... I can do, but it's a struggle. It takes great effort and I really have to push myself. I manage to do it everyday, but it never gets easier. As for making friends, that's out of reach. I cannot bring myself to converse with people no matter how hard I try.
I'm afraid of being judged and rejected the most. Rationally I can say that a cashier is obviously not going to reject me from buying something. I mean duh. But social anxiety is not a rational disorder. I'm am a pathetic human that can't even function in society.
I was like that too though! And I was able to get past it as I wrote in my above posts. I believe it's possible.
Having social anxiety doesn't make you pathetic. There is no use heaping self-contempt and shame on yourself. It's bad enough that social anxiety limits one's life so much and causes so much misery. I really believe you can ameliorate or at least reduce it to a level where it's not interfering so much with normal human discourse.
When you say therapy got difficult, you were most likely getting good therapy and getting down to some root causes of your anxiety, that's the time to push through the anxiety, keep going, tell the therapist you're having difficulty, and the difficulty becomes the focus, don't expect therapy to make you feel warm and fuzzy, and in some aspects you're right, anxiety in whatever form it takes, is hard wired in the brain and hard if not impossible to just turn off. You have to learn alternative ways of coping with everyday challenges, learning to live in the moment and understand that "feelings" come and go, we have little control over them, but that doesn't mean there aren't alternative self-directed thought processes that when practiced, can drown out the negative [anxiety, predicting failure, predicting rejection, etc] feelings but it takes work and it's difficult and again, when therapy gets difficult, that means you're getting somewhere, not that you need a new therapist.
Your brain is very powerful. There have been 3 large studies that have come out over the past 20 years claiming that antidepressants are no better than placebo. They were right but here's the point, studies show that the placebo effect dropped off fairly quickly in patient's taking sugar pills [placebo] where ~30% of patients had sustained relief from their symptoms going forward who were taking antidepressants. Placebo effect is not fakery, it has been proven with PET brain scanning [measures glucose uptake by brain cells indicating activity] that placebo effect is associated with changes in brain activity simply by expecting a positive outcome. Nacebo effect is equally powerful, when you have negative expectations of medication and/or therapy, that's what you will get, self-directed failure, ["self-fulfilling prophesy"]. Your thought process is a sword that cuts both ways.
You most likely will never shed your anxiety, but your quality of life can improve, you must take action steps that are achievable, put one foot in front of the other, and keep trying. if people with traumatic brain injuries can form alternative neurocircuits by struggling with difficult mental and physical tasks training their brain to go around damaged areas of the brain and regain function, you can form alternative neurocircuits and retrain your brain around the active areas of your brain the modulate your anxiety and if you keep practicing, that bumpy dirt road [new thought processes] will eventually turn into a 4 lane divided highway with practice, and neurons will prefer that circuit, because it's the path of least resistance. The existing pathways that are modulating your anxiety will eventually quiet down and grow weeds but will never go away completely and that's OK.
Bottom line, you can grow your brain no matter how old you are and overcome many obstacles but it's hard work and you have to keep trying and struggling, that's what it's all about, if you don't struggle and form new ways of thinking, [push through your anxiety], nothing will ever change and you will remain "in the basement."
No you're not. There is a lot to be said for negative self talk. I know with anxiety it's this tape that plays in your head constantly running through every way this could go wrong, analyzing everything someone says or does
What does anxiety have to do with negative self talk? It's a flooding of emotions, however misplaced. You would have to address the feeling before you deal with the cognitive part. Anxiety takes place on a subconscious level....that's why it's so crippling and so difficult to treat.
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