Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for Social Anxiety: How Residential Treatment Supports Healing
Because your brain is both powerful and flexible, you can use your brain to transform itself. This is the idea behind cognitive behavioral therapy for social anxiety disorder. With compassionate, expert guidance in the right therapeutic setting, you can restructure your limiting beliefs. You can redesign your experience of life through progressive new patterns of thought.
When you are in the midst of a social situation and your anxiety is firing up, who or what is in the driver’s seat of your experience? Your anxious thoughts and feelings? The people you perceive to be judging you? It can certainly feel that way.
Truthfully, it is your own perception that is driving your experience, your reactions, thoughts, and feelings. You’re perceiving yourself to be unsafe and helpless. And your anxious reactions and symptoms kick in as if you were in real danger. Perhaps your heart rate quickens, your palms sweat, your throat tightens up, your stomach starts to burn, and you want to hide.
The real problem is that there is a disconnect between what you’re perceiving to be danger—people are judging you, they don’t actually like you, they might humiliate you, they might ask you to do something you’re not ready for, or they can tell you’re nervous—and the reality that these perceived eventualities are probably not actually playing out. The anxiety is a result of this disconnection. It’s not the situation itself that causes the anxiety; it’s the filter of your limiting beliefs that causes the anxiety.
The goal of treatment for social anxiety disorder is to shine a light on these confused reactions and to loosen the grip of the belief that you are in real danger—and that you are helpless. You are far from helpless, and a significant shift in perspective will illuminate this fact. With cognitive behavioral therapy for social anxiety, you can shift the source of control so that you are in the driver’s seat of your experiences.
How Does Cognitive Behavioral Therapy Work for Social Anxiety Disorder?
Your beliefs are very powerful. And when you bring into focus the fact that you can choose and affect those beliefs directly, that concept is an empowering one. Your beliefs have a huge impact on your thoughts, your feelings, and your behaviors. So, if you can consciously restructure your beliefs in a positive way, with an understanding of how this will affect your direct experience, you can choose how that experience will manifest. This is the function of cognitive behavioral therapy or CBT.
Through this involved process, you can choose a path away from anxiety by laying a completely new path—and then maintain that path and keep your eyes open to this enlightened perspective you’ve discovered.
This incredible transformation is entirely possible, but the process isn’t quite as simple in practice as this quick way of describing it. Specialized therapists are trained to safely and effectively guide clients through their beliefs, as well as through the thoughts, feelings, and behaviors that complicate triggering experiences. And on your part, it is not a passive form of treatment. It is not a treatment approach that is done to you or a medicine that you take. It involves your conscious effort to reshape your beliefs as if they were clay that you could smooth out and create anew. After all, your brain is a flexible, impressionable system. Thanks to neuroplasticity and cognitive behavioral therapy, you can unlearn cognitive patterns and create new ones that are healthy and progressive.
CBT can help you transform one limiting belief into another through focused practice.
For example,
I am in danger. > becomes > I am not in real danger.
I am unable to cope with the stress and anxiety. > becomes > I have the tools I need to cope confidently.
When you’ve done the work to reshape your beliefs about the presence of social danger and your ability and readiness to cope with a social situation—and then you find yourself in a scenario that would have triggered your anxiety in the past—these new beliefs will not inform your experience in the same way. When you believe there is no real social danger, there is no reason for anxiety to arise. When you believe that you have the tools and the ability to cope successfully—and you certainly do—the anxious response isn’t relevant.
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877-727-4343Where Can You Practice CBT for Your Social Anxiety?
When you have social anxiety, it takes time to untangle the distressing thought processes. Consider that it took many years and many, many experiences to develop the anxious thought patterns in the first place.
Cognitive behavioral therapy is a challenging process. But it is by no means a task that you must complete on your own. And it is one that you can work through at your own pace in the right treatment setting. In fact, because you must approach your fears and anxiety triggers in order to transform them, it makes sense to set yourself up for a careful, slow-paced journey to recovery.
If you can immerse yourself in a comprehensive treatment setting, you can apply dedicated attention to your own healing. In a residential treatment setting, the peaceful, nurturing environment promotes feelings of security and inspires healthy habits. Trained clinicians and staff recognize that when you feel supported and empowered, you face your best chances of therapeutic transformation. And a community of peers also in recovery offer a welcoming opportunity for you to practice your progressive new beliefs and thought patterns—but only when you’re ready. Remember, you can be in the driver’s seat. And from that perspective, you can turn your life around.
Bridges to Recovery offers comprehensive residential treatment for people struggling with mental health disorders as well as process addictions. Contact us to learn more about our renowned Los Angeles programs and how we can help you or your loved one start the journey toward healing.
