Anxiety is a natural, adaptive survival mechanism that helps us to focus and react in a useful way to the environment. Anxiety disorders, however, are an exaggerated response to an imagined external cue or trigger. This disorder can cause an enormous amount of suffering.
Social anxiety is the most common of all the anxiety disorders and reflects a persistent fear of social and performance situations. People who have social anxiety are constantly and self-consciously aware of their behavior and how that behavior may appear to others. They are constantly assessing how their behavior meets to meet socially-determined criteria and societal expectations. The fear is that if they fail to meet those criteria/expectations, they will be exposing themselves to potential shame and a sense of humiliation. Yet, in most situations, the person with social anxiety is
not confronted by another person and shamed or made to feel humiliated or told that their behavior was inadequate, wrong, or ridiculous. There is no societal response to the person's presumed fear of an inappropriate response. Over and over again, the person with social anxiety holds on to the fear of being shamed, being wrong, and yet nothing in the naturalistic world supports that fear. The question for therapists and researchers is: why isn't the person with social anxiety
learning that their fear is not based on reality and why is the person not able to
extinguish their fears?
Clark and Wills (1995) wrote an article called
Why Fears Persist in which they were able to identify the two main reasons why people with anxiety disorders, specifically social anxiety, persist in keeping the anxiety even in the face of
dis-confirming societal feedback. First, Clark and Willis discovered that people with social anxiety shift to an
internal locus of attention. They begin to "notice" all the negative internal signs that confirm the fear. They notice that their heart may be beating faster than normal, they may notice that their hands are sweaty and clammy, they may feel crushing pressure on the chest, they may notice they are having difficulty in taking deep breaths, they may notice the coiled knot in their stomach, and that they have difficulty speaking. They focus on all of those internal negative signs and use them as evidence that something terrible is about to happen.
Secondly, people with social anxiety use this
internal information to infer how they appear to others… they take on the "observer" perspective and believe that observers (other people) are seeing their internal experience of fast beating heart, clammy hands, pressure on the chest, knot in the stomach, the difficulty in speaking and breathing. They are VISUALIZING their fears and PROJECTING them onto other people.
The third step in understanding why fears persist is that once the fears have been visualized and projected onto the minds of other people, the person with social anxiety begins to implement
"safety behaviors." The most common safety behaviors is to
withdraw in some way from the experience, either physically or emotionally, and no longer be present in the experience. When the person withdraws from the present moment, they are trapped completely in their internal awareness and are unable to receive any information from the outside world, which is telling them that everything is actually all right.
What the researchers concluded is that the act of withdrawing from the present moment (or any safety behaviors intended to protect one from shame or potential humiliation) prevents learning. As long as one is desperately using safety behavior, one cannot learn anything new.
What one wants to learn is that the expected societal rejection or judgment will not happen. Once that lesson is learned, the person becomes less focused on the self, less focused on monitoring internal body sensations and feelings, and thus more able to accurately receive and interpret external cues. The person becomes more present in the moment.
