How To Help A Person With Social Phobia: 6 Support Tips
Social phobia is a more common anxiety disorder than we can imagine although the intensity in which it occurs is usually varied.
There are cases in which people who present this psychological alteration manage to hide the discomfort it causes them, while in the most intense cases the limitation becomes very evident.
In this article We are going to review some effective tips and strategies to know how to help a person with social phobia in support of psychotherapy attendance, so that little by little the irrational fear (phobia) of other people is overcome, especially when it comes to large groups.
To know how to help a person with social phobia, we must first understand what this disorder is. Social phobia is the irrational and intense fear that people feel in any situation related to social contact ; The feeling of discomfort becomes more intense in direct relation to the number of people with whom one must interact and the degree of ignorance of these people.
As we saw previously, some people are able to hide this fear, but that does not stop it from significantly affecting the subject’s quality of life. This only indicates that the intensity of social phobia is less than in other cases, where it is not possible to hide the anguish represented by having to interact with others.
It is important to clarify the difference between social phobia disorder and shyness, because superficially they may seem like they are the same. Basically, the difference lies in the intensity of the distress and the thinking style of the people. Shyness is nothing more than a personality characteristic that appears occasionally. That is, the triggers for shyness are expressed in specific circumstances in which you have to interact with others in person and in real time.
Social phobia, on the other hand, is very intense and deeply irrational, that is, there is no logical trigger that generates the fear that the subject feels towards interaction with other people; It is a condition of anxiety focused on interpersonal interactions, which manifests itself constantly and intensely in the subject’s daily life damaging their quality of life even when no one is around (for example, avoiding going out shopping so they don’t have to talk to the store owner).
How to help those who have social phobia?
Now we are going to see a list of tips focused on providing support and help to those who suffer from social phobia.
1. Accompany therapy
For the proper treatment of phobias It is best to accompany the person to therapy with psychologists The behavioral professional will be able to adequately evaluate the subject and determine what the possible causes of social phobia are.
It is important to keep in mind that each patient is unique, and we cannot expect to base ourselves exactly on the reality of some cases to help others. That is why it is best to attend therapy, to somehow have a clearer picture. The advice that we will see is to help and support people who are going to therapy for their social phobia problems, but this first step is essential, and no non-professional support can replace it.
2. Help you reframe your thoughts
The second step for the person to stop feeling a lot of anxiety in complex social situations is to encourage them to adopt other thoughts associated with interaction with others. Social phobia is intrinsically associated with a catastrophic (anxious) thinking style, in which he imagines that everything will go very wrong if he communicates with others
It is necessary to make the subject see that contact with other people does not have to end badly, but can even be a rewarding experience for all parties involved, as long as it is an interaction within social norms of respect.
On the other hand, it is also advisable to help them relativize the importance of rejection (or approval) by others. Thus You will begin to accept the idea of ​​not always making a very good impression so keep in mind that the latter is impossible for anyone.
3. Make it easier for you to adopt social tools
Social skills can be learned, and in cases of social phobia it is necessary to implement a didactic teaching method through which subjects can clearly understand how socialization works not only from theory, but also from practice. To do this, you can accompany someone who has social phobia and create situations in which you can interact with people more or less known , so that this task does not become too difficult for you. Of course, always with the consent of the person who suffers from this anxiety disorder.
4. Help you set goals
Overcoming social phobia goes through a step-by-step process, where the person will gradually overcome some goals. This will not only help you gain confidence and security, but will also give you practice and implicit knowledge about how a normal conversation develops.
Of course, These goals must be oriented towards sociability with other people, and must be concrete and short-term , so that they have the ability to motivate. For example, a good idea is to set an initial goal of starting a daily conversation for a week, so that as the days go by this behavior becomes normal. In any case, this should always be done in coordination with the psychologist who conducts the psychotherapy sessions, so that both processes (inside and outside the consultation) go at the same pace.
An effective way to combat any type of phobia is make controlled exposures to what generates discomfort In the case of social phobia, the procedure is to accompany the person to social events where they have to experience how other people speak in public and interact with each other. Once again, this must be discussed beforehand with the person conducting the psychotherapy sessions.
6. Do not encourage him to be impatient about the results
Each person has their own pace of evolution, and it is not positive to try to accelerate people’s progression in achieving a goal especially in cases of anxiety or social phobia.
If the person notices that there is pressure from us to see immediate results, they will begin to feel more anxious about it and will want to stop committing to therapy and our approach to psychological support to help them. In any case, it is important to be clear that this is a journey whose most spectacular results will be noticed in the medium and long term, that is, on a time scale of months.
Of course, it is better to put emphasis on simple short-term goals , such as completing a challenge agreed upon in therapy for that weekend; In the first stage, when you are just beginning to combat social phobia, the satisfaction of overcoming yourself can be the source of motivation that replaces the fact of noticing that you are a totally autonomous person in terms of social interactions (an experience that will occur later, in the last phases of therapy).
