Social Anxiety is a Mirror (but not a good one)

Anxiety is one of the primary reasons that people seek therapy with me.

Anxiety is something pretty much all of us have but some people have it in a way that can be quite disabling. Helping each client figure out how to best manage their particular pattern and experience of anxiety is a challenge I truly love. 

In my long journey as a trauma and anxiety therapist, I came to notice a peculiar thing about social anxiety in particular: while it seems the person is focused on other people and how they feel about them, they are actually just focused on themselves.

In the battle against the fear of other people thinking negatively about them, the socially anxious person tends to only see the other people as mirrors in which they can see themselves through the eyes of the other.

The big problems with this are:

• We may be getting it entirely wrong since we can’t read minds and as anxious people are more prone to assuming that others are judging us and see “evidence” of that, and

• We don’t actually see the other person. It’s like being stuck in mirrored room where all we can see is distorted reflections of ourselves. 

So paradoxically, in our worry about being liked and included socially, we are separating ourselves from others by not even seeing them and thinking only of ourselves. (“What do they think of me? Do they think I’m stupid? I’m not as attractive as most of the people here. Do they think I dress badly? They think I don’t belong here. They know I don’t have as much education as they do. I’m a loser.” And so on.) 

Instead of being open to the experience of others, we get locked into our own echo chamber and miss out on having the actual experience of being with people. Which is sad because our human desire is to be in connection with others. 

Social anxiety can be so painful it causes this defensive reaction, which gets in the way of the meaningful, positive social experiences that we need to build confidence. Because of this, some people end up avoiding social interaction whenever possible, and often just endure the ones they can’t avoid. The good news is that it doesn’t have to be that way!

My approach to any kind of anxiety is to work with both the physical and the mental aspects of anxiety. First, we learn to tolerate and then reduce the physical alarm symptoms (accelerated heartbeat, tension, shaking or sweating, spacing out, etc.) The we can notice and challenge the thoughts that drive and sustain the anxiety. 

For the “mirror problem” in social anxiety, I ask clients to try and put the mirror aside and start seeing the other person. This could mean:

• Developing an attitude of curiosity and openness about other people by noting when we switch to making assumptions or judgments about others that we do not have evidence for
• Notice when we start comparing ourselves to others in a social situation and try to focus on others as they are
• Using skills to manage the physical manifestations of anxiety so that they become tolerable and less likely to drive us into fight/flight/freeze mode. Once we’re there, connection is not possible
• Focusing outwards using grounding techniques to avoid getting stuck in our heads. 
• Use the “lab coat and clipboard” technique of treating a social event as an experiment in which we are simply gathering data to review. 
• Accept that awkwardness is a common experience, and as I am fond of saying, is an unpleasant but non-fatal experience. 

It’s always useful to remember that most people are not really thinking that much about us, they’re wrapped up in their own lives.