Social Anxiety
You present well. It is what happens afterward that costs you.
For the person who runs the meeting well and dreads the drinks afterward. We use behavioral experiments to test what you believe people are thinking, rather than practicing exposure for its own sake.
Overview
The replay is where the anxiety does its real work.
You can present to forty people. You have a role in that room, an agenda, and a reason to be talking. The part that undoes you is the twenty minutes afterward, in the hallway, with no structure, where the only task is to be a person other people enjoy. That is where the calculation starts: how long before leaving is rude, who to stand near, what to do with your hands.
Then comes the replay. On the drive home, at midnight, and sometimes for three days: a specific sentence you said, examined from every angle for evidence of how it landed. Social anxiety is not shyness and it is not a personality trait you have to accept. It is a prediction error, a very confident forecast about what other people are thinking, that has never been properly tested. Most of the work is testing it.
At a Glance
- Adults and couples, in person in San Diego
- Telehealth Monday through Friday across California
- EMDR certified, Gottman and EFIT Level 1 trained
- Free 15-minute consultation
Individual sessions are $210, or $325 for 90 minutes. Couples sessions are $225, or $345 for 90 minutes.
Full fees and policiesDoes This Sound Familiar?
The specifics, not a symptom list
Open any line to see how I would think about it with you.
You replay one sentence from a conversation for three days.Open
Post-event processing is the engine of social anxiety. It takes an ambiguous moment and finishes it in the worst available way, then stores that version as memory. We work on interrupting the review, not on getting better at it.
You use one drink to get into the room.Open
It works, which is the problem. Anything that gets you through the door without you learning that you could get through it unaided keeps the fear intact. We fade the tool rather than banning it, and we make sure something replaces it.
You turned down a role because it came with visibility.Open
This is where social anxiety gets expensive. When a career decision is made by the part of you that wants to be unobserved, it deserves to be examined properly rather than filed as a preference.
You rehearse small talk in the car.Open
Preparation feels like control and functions as avoidance of the unscripted moment. We do experiments where you deliberately arrive unprepared and collect data on what actually happens.
You are pretty sure people noticed how nervous you were.Open
Almost nobody notices, and the gap between what you feel and what shows is measurable. We test it in real settings, because being told this is not the same as seeing it.
The Work
CBT with experiments, not endurance
Name the prediction precisely
Not I will embarrass myself, but they will look away within ten seconds and I will not recover. A vague fear cannot be disproved. A specific one can, which is the whole point of writing it down before you go.
Run the experiment
You go into the situation with a defined prediction and a defined thing to observe. This is not exposure for endurance, it is data collection. The point is not to survive the happy hour, it is to find out whether your forecast was accurate.
Drop the safety behaviors
Holding a glass, keeping to one topic, arriving late and leaving early. Each one prevents the experiment from counting. We remove them in a chosen order so the result is clean and you can believe it.
The Arc
A shape, not a protocol
Everyone moves differently. This is how this particular work usually unfolds here.
We build your actual list, ranked. For most professionals it is not public speaking, it is unstructured social time, being watched while working, or one particular person whose opinion carries too much weight.
Questions
Answered plainly
Anything not covered here is worth asking on the free 15-minute consult.
Is social anxiety the same as being introverted?
No. Introversion is about where your energy comes from and it costs you nothing. Social anxiety involves fear of judgment and it shapes decisions you would otherwise make differently. Plenty of extroverts have it, and plenty of introverts are perfectly comfortable socially.
Are you going to make me do something humiliating?
No. I do not use shame-based exposure exercises and nothing happens that you have not designed and agreed to. The experiments are yours, chosen at a level you consider hard but doable.
Does this work if my job requires constant client contact?
It often works faster, because you have built-in opportunities to run experiments every week. The material is already in your calendar, which means less contrived practice.
Can we work on this over video when the fear is about in-person situations?
Yes. The session is where we design and debrief the experiments. The experiments themselves happen in your life either way. I work with clients across California by telehealth and in person in San Diego.
What if I have felt this way since childhood?
Long-standing social fear usually has a history worth understanding, and we can go there. But we do not wait for that piece before working on the present, because your week is happening now.
Free 15-Minute Consult
Fifteen minutes to find out whether this is the right work.
Tell me what is actually going on. I will tell you honestly how I would approach it and what to expect.
In person in San Diego, and by telehealth across California.