You don’t have to live in constant fear of rejection. With ‘Social Anxiety Hypnosis”, you can turn those negative feelings into positive results.
There are so many people who suffer from a social anxiety disorder. If you’re one of them, you know it can cause you a lot of harm in your life. In this article, we will look at why hypnosis can be an effective way to treat social anxiety.
Social anxiety is a common mental health disorder in teens and young adults. If you suffer from social anxiety, you’ve probably tried everything there is to try, from therapy to medication to alcohol or marijuana. But have you ever considered hypnosis?
Why do you think we have emotions? Wouldn’t life be easier without them? Are they simply there to make us feel bad about ourselves?
Of course not. Emotions are a part of the human experience and help keep us safe, alive, and capable of thriving.
Movement is inspired by feelings.
A second word, motion, is contained within the word emotion. Emotions exist to move us. Either towards something or away from it.
We all have deep, fundamental needs, including those for food, shelter, safety, love, and connection. We also have other needs, including the need to feel safe and significant in our lives. We want to learn and create, which requires stimulation and encouragement. Some emotions push us toward situations that would help us meet these needs and guarantee our survival. Additionally, other feelings act to drive us away from experiences or situations which, we feel, would prevent us from meeting our essential needs.
But what happens when our emotions lead us in the wrong direction?
Your needs push you toward interaction with others, while your social anxiety pushes you away.
We move in response to our emotions in one of two directions: toward what we feel we need or away from what we don’t want. Consider the emotions that drive us toward an experience: lust, love, anger, greed, and hunger. And consider the emotions that make us want to run away from something, such as fear, terror, and disgust.
Our emotions should steer us in the right direction, away from harmful things and toward things that are good for us. They don’t always, though.
The socially anxious person desires and avoids social interaction. Their emotions cause them to move both forward and backward. Being terrified of social situations would be great if social contact was harmful to us because it would save our lives. However, a person who experiences social anxiety is pulled and pushed at the same time by their emotions… tricky! .. And it only gets more difficult.
We shun what we fear, but we make the fear worse by shunning something.
One issue is that fear grows stronger around something the more you avoid it. It’s as if your emotional brain infers meaning from what you do. She’s always avoiding this situation, so it must be genuinely dangerous. I’ll add more fear to this situation to be sure she won’t try to jump in.
Some people can overcome their fears, but others can’t. Fear is an instinctive and natural reaction to things that could potentially harm us, and you can learn to control your own fear. Think about snake catchers and skydivers.
I wouldn’t advise taking up any of these activities. The key is that if you allow yourself to feel emotionally safe, even risky behaviors like these may begin to feel normal.
Thus, while it is true that we avoid what we fear, we can also develop a fear of something.
Many strategies have been tried throughout history to get around the challenges this poses. None are as effective as hypnotic therapy. Think about how exposure therapy and cognitive therapy work when overcoming fears like shyness and social anxiety, for example.
Is exposure therapy going too far?
Emotions are physical drivers towards or away from something. Exposure therapy is widely used to treat phobias. (1) Using this strategy, you typically come into increasing contact with the things that frighten you. Thus, a person who is afraid of spiders might see a drawing of one in the first week, a picture of one in the second, a toy spider in the third, touch the toy spider in the fourth, a movie about a spider in the fifth, and a real one in the sixth week.
In an ideal world, the person would remain calm during this, but in reality, it may take a lot of repetition before this is achieved. This is called systematic desensitization, and it can be effective. I think it would be easier and faster to use hypnosis and the rewind technique.
The idea is that spiders need to start to feel a normal part of the experience by going towards rather than away from; classic behavioral therapy. Maybe that’s what the snake catcher did to get the nerve he needed in the beginning.
Flooding is another type of exposure therapy that employs a less gradual method.(2) This could involve putting a person afraid of spiders in a room full of them in the hopes that surviving their worst fear will make their fear go away. Seems a bit full on to me.
Does it work, though?
Therapy after therapy.
Yes, provided the patient receiving the therapy is taught to relax completely. However (you knew there would be a but), I can’t tell you how many clients I’ve had to help recover from the negative effects of this type of therapy when it went wrong. These people didn’t improve, struggled to move past the spider photo in week two, and suffered severe trauma from being forced to speak in front of a crowd of 100 people while still being extremely shy.
There must be another option, and thankfully there is.
The effectiveness of hypnosis in overcoming fears.
Hypnosis is an excellent means to expose someone to a situation they have been avoiding safely and in a relaxed way. In terms of your emotional brain, if you experienced deep relaxation and spontaneity at a party a few times while under hypnosis, this is a sufficiently convincing indication that this situation is not dangerous and that this type of social event can now be retagged as something you may go safely. As long as their body and mind are at ease, they have complete control over the exposure therapy. This all happens before they have even been to a party.
They will already feel more comfortable and less threatened when they do it in real life. Dare I even say that the once-dreaded social gathering might actually turn out to be enjoyable and relaxing?
It’s crucial to realize that we’re discussing more than just what a person believes.
Thoughts and feelings may conflict.
Even if you firmly believe something is beneficial to you, you may still run away in terror. You can firmly believe that something (or someone) is bad for you while still feeling emotionally drawn to it (or them). Due to the fact that fears are often more motivated by more primitive emotional conditioning geared toward survival than by flawed thinking, cognitive approaches to overcoming fears frequently fail. It is much simpler to access and change these basic drivers through hypnosis rather than through rational thought.
When we treat social anxiety, it’s usually clear the person no longer has the phobia the moment they open their eyes because exposure to the feared trigger under hypnosis while feeling completely at ease changed their response. They are aware that it wasn’t real, but even so, a positive new subconscious pattern for reacting calmly and effortlessly in social situations has been established. The new standard is to be socially relaxed.
The new 10 steps to overcome social anxiety course, like all the ten steps courses, has a hypnotic download for each step of the way. This is partly because social skills can be developed and honed during hypnotic rehearsal. We also want people to experience hypnotic “safe” social experiences before they go into these situations for real. In this way, the horrible away from feelings of fear can gently be replaced with happier toward feelings of pleasure and positive expectations when it comes to socializing and meeting new people.
Notes
- See: Wikipedia entry: Exposure therapy.
- See: Wikipedia entry: Flooding