If you are someone who experiences a lot of anxiety about social interactions or performances, or who sometimes avoids situations for fear of being judged by others, counselling for social anxiety may be helpful to you. 

When you are shy, it can be difficult to imagine ever not being so, but most people will become less shy as they get older – even without any particular effort to overcome it. If you were afraid of flying, you would have to carefully set up opportunities to expose yourself to flight. However when you are afraid of other people, life sends you opportunity after opportunity for exposure. Thank you, life. 

Blushing, shaking, sweating, cracking voice, feeling like you have no thoughts in your head or that they dissolve as you try to catch hold of them, difficulty making eye contact – these are sensations you may feel in situations where others may see your work, hear your ideas, or observe your appearance. 

Having opportunities to get positive feedback and therefore gain confidence can certainly help us to become more willing to show ourselves. However, gaining confidence is not all of what overcoming social anxiety is about. It is about untwining your sense of your own value from some idea of your strengths or weaknesses in the eyes of others. Someone once described their experience of shifting from being a shy person to a not shy person like this: “I just figured out that people don’t need you to be perfect, they just need you to be authentic. In fact, they don’t really like it when you are perfect.” It may be hard to imagine letting go of the idea that you need to be perfect, or that every social interaction has a pass/fail outcome that is a measure of your worth. But many people have made that journey.

Counselling is where you can begin to understand the role of social anxiety in your life. You may have already noticed that while there are some social situations in which you feel anxiety, there are others that do not make you feel anxious at all. By better understanding the mechanisms by which social anxiety affects your experience of life, its influence becomes smaller, and yours grows.

In counseling we use strategies of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, Narrative Therapy, and Emotion Focused Therapy to support clients in this growth. In particular, clients identify what is important to them, and start to take steps to build that valued life, making way for their own inner compass to be their guide.