Recovery from social anxiety and related conditions.

Robert F Mullen, PhD
Director/ReChanneling

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The distinction between social anxiety disorder and social anxiety is a matter of severity; reference to one includes the other. The recovery tools and techniques provided apply to comorbid emotional malfunctions including depression, substance abuse, generalized anxiety, and issues of self-esteem and motivation. These malfunctions originate homogeneously, their trajectories differentiated by environment, experience, and the diversity of human thought and behavior. 

“Dr. Mullen is doing impressive work helping the world. He is the pioneer of proactive neuroplasticity utilizing DRNI – deliberate, repetitive, neural information.” – WeVoice (Madrid, Málaga)   

“Success depends upon previous preparation,
and without such preparation, there is sure to be failure.”
– Confucius

The primary goal of recovery is to dramatically alleviate the anxieties, apprehensions, and fears associated with social anxiety. To achieve this, we identify three objectives:

1. Replace or overwhelm our negative thoughts and behaviors with healthy, productive ones.
2. Restructure: produce rapid, concentrated positive stimulation to offset the abundance of negative information in our brain’s metabolism.
3. Regenerate our self-esteem through mindfulness of our assets.

As strategists for our recovery, we are responsible for developing a cohesive plan to meet our three objectives. These can involve multiple coping strategies. Coping mechanisms are tools and techniques that implement our coping strategies. The distinctions are important.

• Recovery Goal: the outcome we seek to achieve.
• Recovery Objectives: the steps we take to achieve our recovery goal.
• Coping Strategies: The plans of action designed to meet our recovery objectives.
• Coping Mechanisms: tools and techniques utilized to implement our coping strategies.

Social anxiety disorder is culturally identifiable by the persistent fear and avoidance of social interaction and performance situations, which causes us to miss the life experiences that connect us with the world.

Situations

A situation is a set of circumstances – the facts, conditions, and incidents affecting us at a particular time in a specific place. A feared situation provokes fears and anxieties that negatively impact our activities and associations.

Two Types of Situations

Anticipated situations are those that we know, in advance, will provoke our fears and anxieties. Examples range from restaurants and the classroom to job interviews, family gatherings, and social events. They can be one-time situations like a job interview or social event. They can be recurring situations such as the classroom or work environment.

Unexpected situations are those that catch us by surprise. Examples include an accident, the unexpected houseguest, and losing your wallet. 

Automatic Negative Thoughts

Automatic negative thoughts (ANTs) are the immediate, involuntary, emotional expressions that occur when our situational fears challenge us. They are the unpleasant, self-defeating things we tell ourselves that define who we are, who we think we are, and who we think others think we are.

ANTs result from our negative self-appraisal, e.g., “No one will talk to me.” “I will do something stupid.” “I am a loser.” Adverse behaviors consequently accompany these self-maligning thoughts.

Identifying situations and unpacking associated fears and corresponding ANTs are crucial to recovery. Our responses are as distinctive as human thought and experience.

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9 STEPS TO MODERATE SITUATIONAL FEARS AND ANXIETIES

Alleviating our associated fears and corresponding ANTs demands an integrated approach. Through the 9-Step Process for Rational Response, we learn to: 

1. Identify our feared situation. Where are we when we feel anxious or fearful, and what activities are involved? What are we thinking? What might we be doing? Who and what impacts these insecure feelings? 

2. Unpack our associated fear(s). One way to identify our fears and anxieties is to ask ourselves: What is problematic about the situation? How do I feel (physically, intellectually, emotionally, spiritually)? What is my specific concern or worry? What is the worst thing that could happen to me? What do I imagine will happen to me?

3. Unmask our corresponding ANTs. How do we express our fear or anxiety? What are our involuntary emotional expressions or images? How do we negatively self-label? What do we tell ourselves? “I am incompetent.” “I am stupid.” “I am undesirable.”

4. Examine and analyze our fears and ANTs. What are the origins of our fears and anxieties? How do we express them? Discovery approaches include cognitive comprehension, introspection, psychoeducation, and the vertical arrow technique.

5. Generate rational responses. We become mindful of the irrationality and self-destructive nature of our associated fears, anxieties, and corresponding ANTs. We unmask, examine, and analyze the cognitive distortions and maladaptive behaviors that validate or reinforce them. Then, we devise rational responses to counter their false assumptions.

6. Reconstruct our thought patterns. Through proactive neuroplasticity and other cognitive approaches, we convert our thought patterns by replacing or overwhelming them with healthy, productive ones. This process is an essential component of recovery.

7. Devise a structured plan. Utilizing our learned tools and techniques, we develop our coping strategies and mechanisms to challenge our situations, associated fears and anxieties, and corresponding ANTs.

8. Practice the plan in non-threatening situations. We strengthen our rational responses by repeatedly implementing our plan in simulated situations and practicing exercises, including role-play and other workshop interactivities.

9. Expose self to the situation. We challenge our fears and anxieties on-site in real-life situations. This action transpires after a suitable period of graded exposure to accommodate the reconstruction of our neural network and ensure familiarity with our strategies and coping mechanisms.

Coping Strategies

Researchers point to over 400 coping strategies to address emotional malfunction, including problem-focused, emotion-focused, social, and meaning-focused.

Our social anxiety recovery program emphasizes response-focused and solution-focused strategies but considers multiple approaches to facilitate an individually targeted recovery program.

Emotion-focused coping strategies focus on managing or regulating our emotional response to feared situations. Identifying the emotions associated with a stressor is essential to mitigating them. In the first three of our 9-Step Process for Rational Response, we identify the feared situation, associated fears, and corresponding ANTs.

Problem-focused coping strategies employ the same tools and techniques as our solution-focused strategy. One crucial difference: the pathographic disease model of mental health focuses on the problem, whereas the wellness model we favor emphasizes the solution.

Recovery is a here-and-now process. The past is immutable. We have no control over it beyond our reaction and response to it. It is the here-and-now and how it reflects on the future that is of value in recovery.

Meaning-focused coping strategies entail rationalizing or delegating responsibility for our thoughts and behaviors to a moral or religious code or influence. These, however, can encourage negatively valanced emotions like shame, guilt, and blame, which are major impediments to recovery. The more rational approach emphasizes personal accountability and self-determination.

Social coping strategies are essential to counter our fears of human interconnectivity and avoidance of social situations. Graded exposure includes practiced cognitive-behavioral techniques that reduce sensitivity to our feared situations. The 9-Step Process for Rational Response encourages systematic desensitization of our fears/anxieties in non-threatening workshop environments before exposure to real-life situations.

Avoidance-focused coping strategies pursue alternate activities to avoid situations that endanger our emotional well-being. They are short-term solutions. In the long term, we mitigate our fears/anxieties by learning to respond rationally to them, allowing us to engage in feared situations at our discretion.

Restructuring, replacing, and regenerating comprise the framework for recovery and self-empowerment. A coalescence of coping strategies is needed to accommodate these goals as well as the diversity of human thought and experience.

Best Coping Strategies for Social Anxiety

Response-based coping strategies, which we focus on in our recovery program, pay particular attention to generating rational responses to our maladaptive thoughts and behaviors. We learn to rechannel our emotional angst to intellectual evaluation and response. We facilitate this component of recovery in the first four of the 9-Step Process for Rational Response.

Solution-based coping strategies keep our attention centered on finding solutions rather than researching the origins of our problems. Recovery is a here-and-now and how it reflects on the future process. We define ourselves by our character strengths, virtues, and attributes rather than our symptoms.

Recovery relies on self-reliance and self-motivation. The onus of emotional well-being rests with the recovering individual. A comprehensive recovery program is individually targeted to emphasize the solution rather than the problem.

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Committing to recovery is one of the hardest things you will ever do.
It takes enormous courage and the realization that you are of value,
consequential, and deserving of happiness.