Overcoming Social Anxiety Disorder One Step at a Time

Written by Sebastiaan van der Schrier

If you are aware that you’ve been suffering from a social anxiety disorder and have tried anything and everything, to no avail…

… or if you’re a practitioner who has struggled with helping people overcome a social anxiety disorder…

…or if you just want to know more about how to overcome a complex issue using EFT…

this article will help you.

I am 26 years old and I suffered from social anxiety disorder myself for nearly a decade. It massively impacted the quality of every relationship in my life and it massively impacted the quality of my entire life.

It took me on a long journey of isolation and the suffering that came with it. It took me on a long journey of low self-esteem and the pain of that.

It took me on a long journey of commitment to dig deep within myself, to face my inner demons and to do whatever was necessary so I could live life to it’s fullest; so that I could find and be my true and happy self.

What eventually turned my life around? I found and applied EFT “in the right way”. I say “in the right way” because once I found EFT and tried it, I did not experience the immediate success that so many people experience. Not at all. It took patience and commitment for me to realize that “the right way” for me was different than “the normal way” for others. Still, I persisted because I was convinced it would work for my struggle too. It had to…

Eventually I succeeded in finding my true self, in feeling comfortable, confident and at ease interacting with people and being in social situations.

My journey has been so empowering that I committed to sharing it with others who are suffering in the same or similar ways; I committed to mastering the art of EFT and applying it to clients with Social Anxiety Disorder.

After nearly 5 years of experience with EFT, and two years of solely working with clients suffering from Social Anxiety Disorder, I have created a formula for success and that is what I am writing to share – the insights I have gotten from my own journey, and the insights I’ve gotten from working with a lot of clients, helping them to get to “social confidence”.

I call this system 8 Steps to Social Freedom. By following it, your journey can be a lot shorter than mine, giving you the opportunity to live life to the fullest as soon as possible.

Lets begin with the basics.

What is Social Anxiety and what is the difference between Social Anxiety and Social Anxiety Disorder?

The biggest difference between social anxiety and social anxiety disorder is the severity of the anxiety, and how debilitating it is.

Most of us have actually experienced some social anxiety at some point in our lives. It is common to have some anxiety in certain social situations or social interactions. It is normal to have some concern or fear of negative judgement.

For instance, maybe, at one time you have been worried or concerned about an important conversation you were going to have with your boss. Or maybe you’ve felt a bit apprehensive in a “new” situation, one where you didn’t feel “at home”.

Or maybe you’ve experienced some discomfort meeting new people?

If you can relate to any of the above, or to situations like these, relax! You’re not alone. A lot of people have normal levels of social anxiety and are able to deal with it. For them it doesn’t have a major impact on the quality of their life.

However, people who suffer from social anxiety disorder or SAD (which can also be referred to as social phobia) live with a constant and intense fear of being judged, and are more-or-less totally terrified of embarrassing or humiliating themselves in social situations. They feel a need to present themselves in a particularly favourable manner and, at the same time, feel totally incapable of being able to do so.

People with SAD constantly walk on eggshells in social situations. They constantly worry about anything and everything related to socializing. They are constantly anxious about the next socially negative experience they expect will happen. And because of this, anything and everything in their life that involves other people is something they prefer to avoid.

Can you even begin to imagine how isolating this is, how devastating this is, how massively this impacts the quality of their life?

On the surface they may seem normal, but inside they are fighting an enormous emotional battle, unaware they’ve imposed it on themselves and unable to gain the perspective to overcome it. They live as victims, in a negative feedback loop, continually attracting more negative experiences to perpetuate the SAD.

Fortunately there is great hope!

In fact, there is much more than that, I am living proof that complete healing is not only possible, it is practically guaranteed. If you are willing to do the work, I am ready to take you on the journey to social confidence!

Using EFT To Overcome Social Anxiety Disorder (SAD)

After almost five years of trial and error, learning and applying various tools and techniques from the Masters, here is my basic 8 step strategy. Tried and true, it is the same technique I use to help clients overcome their social anxiety disorder so that they can feel comfortable and at ease in social settings. It’s not a custom approach, as no two clients are the same. But it has proven to be a very effective blueprint for achieving “social confidence”.

8 Basic Steps To Social Freedom:

Because the last step, “Changing Your Thought Patterns” is such a powerful exercise that you can apply at any time in your day or in your life, and because you can use it for any issue, for any situation, I thought I’d give it to you now, in it’s most basic, generic form so you can use it to jumpstart your success in all areas of your life.

Mastering this one step, will start you building on an empowering foundation, one that you have total control over. In Part Two of this Article, I’ll give it to you as the final step of the Basic 8 and it will be specifically for Building Social Confidence. But for now, here is the generic exercise.

As I’m guessing you have already experienced, we tend to be creatures of habit, to be set in our ways, and most of us are very attached to the way we are and the way we think, so it naturally follows that our thinking patterns also tend to be repetitive and habitual. While all of the steps we take to improve our lives have the potential to make a tremendous change in our thought patterns, it’s ideal to do the following exercise to solidify the foundation we want to build on.

Seeing as it takes a minimum of 21 days to form new neural pathways, begin today and make a commitment to set aside 10 to 30 minutes every day for the next month to do this simple exercise.

Get yourself a special Notebook. Begin by writing the date on the top of each of the first 30 pages. Now beginning on the first page for today, on the left hand side, write down all the negative thoughts you’ve had today. After you’ve done that, go back and review the list and put a star by each of the common negative themes you see running through the list.

Now, on the right hand side of that same page, write down the exact opposite of whatever negative thought you have written, making sure that you write each one in the present tense.

Once you have completed your list, you are going to use it to tap on each item you have written (putting a little extra focus on any items you might have put a star next to). So, beginning with your first entry, use a simple choice statement (thank you, Patricia Carrington, EFT Master) to change it to whatever positive one you’ve noted. So –

On the Karate Chop Point:

After you’ve done the above, tap one full round on just on the negative thought, tapping on every point.

Follow this with one full round on the new positive thought/belief you want to install.

Finally, tapping on the third round, alternate between the negative and the positive, doing one statement for each point and ending on a positive thought/belief.

When you do this for all the negative thoughts on your list, every time, one by one you will change them into positive thoughts and beliefs. The result will be that your common negative thoughts will change into positive ones.

Here’s a little Bonus Exercise that goes along with Step 8, to maximize the potential for your success:

Using your positive list, create reminder cards or post-it notes for each of the new thought/beliefs you have chosen. Put them in places where you will see them often throughout the day.

Making a point of practicing this, you will start to form new neural pathways replacing your automatic negative thoughts with automatic positive thoughts. This is practically a guarantee that you will positively impact all areas of your life which in turn has a hugely positive and often unrealised impact on the lives of everyone you meet. Win-win!

1. THE FIRST STEP : Overcome subconscious resistance

Consciously you may really want to let go of your SAD, whether or not you are aware of it, whether or not you choose to acknowledge the impact it is having on your life. But, at the same time, your subconscious mind, the one who is actually in charge (and the one that is much more powerful than your conscious mind) might think that it’s better or safer for you to keep the SAD.

This is called “subconscious resistance” and it is present in 99.9% of my clients who suffer from SAD. Even though I was not aware of it, it was present in me and it was a constant roadblock in my journey to social confidence.

The bottom line is that as long as the subconscious mind is resisting letting go of the SAD, no matter how hard you try, you won‘t make much progress. And even if you do, your results will only be temporary.

The subconscious mind is extremely powerful and in order to get lasting results, it’s resistance needs to be addressed and dissolved.

Here’s another way to put it: Imagine the social anxiety disorder resides in a big room and that big room is sealed by a huge steel door. That huge steel door is your subconscious resistance. By tapping directly on that resistance, whether it is conscious or unconscious, we can open the door and so address the social anxiety hiding in that room. Opening the door, we can address the SAD head on. Until we open the door, we can’t deal with what lies behind it.

So keeping in mind that tapping on the subconscious resistance does nothing more than remove the block to working on the SAD, and does not cure or eliminate it, and taking full responsibility for yourself and your emotional well-being, and assuming you know how to tap, beginning on the karate chop point:

Shake out your hands and take a breath.

This will almost always release your subconscious resistance. If it hasn’t, then continue tapping, continuing to voice your resistance whatever it is, whatever you imagine it to be, whether it makes sense or not.

The end of step one is the end of your resistance to letting go of the problem. Having removed that resistance, we can now begin to address the problem. That takes us to Step 2.

2. Get acceptance of self and the problem

The first goal of Step 2 is to get to a place of acceptance of self because people with SAD have become so associated with it that they have lost themselves. They cannot separate themselves from this problem of SAD. So rather then seeing themselves as someone who has a condition of social anxiety, they can only see themselves as socially anxious. They don‘t know or think of themselves as having a problem, they actually believe that THEY ARE the problem.

When we change this we can arrive at a place of acceptance of self. In this acceptance of self we are in a position to get rid of everything that is standing between the pain of SAD and the joy of emotional freedom.

First speak a statement out loud to test this.

Begin by saying out loud: “I accept myself while I have this social anxiety” and then rate how true it feels on a scale from 0-10 (10 being I completely accept myself while I have this social anxiety, and 0 being I don’t accept myself with social anxiety at all). Once you have rated this and made a note of it on a piece of paper, we can begin to tap again.

On the Karate Chop Point:

After this tapping there is the possibility for quite a profound shift:

Both the self and the social anxiety have been acknowledged. And likely for the first time, both have been acknowledged as being totally and completely separate from each other!

So in this first step we have begun to untangle the tightly held neural network that has kept the self bound to this condition; we have begun to untie the knot that has kept the self tied up; we have begun to liberate the self.

This can be enormous progress. When there are still residual feelings or emotions about the condition of social anxiety and judgment about having it (shame, frustration, anger, disappointment, etc), continue to tap. Otherwise, congratulate yourself on your courage, your progress, your convictions and move ahead to the next step.

3. Change the expectations from presuming a negative experience to presuming one that is positive

Often people who resort to seeking an EFT professional practitioner for help with SAD, have already tried anything and everything. If this is the case, we want to help them change their beliefs about what is possible.

Take the SUDS on this statement (rate it from 0-10):

“I am convinced I can and will overcome my social anxiety.”

Now tap on whatever comes up between you and your totally owning this statement at a 10 out of 10.

This might involve any of the following:

4. Deal with trigger event/s

This step is a series of steps. The goal of them is to discover the trigger event and tap down the emotional charge that is still on it, and to change the limiting decision/s made from it.

Many of my clients have been anxious for as long as they can remember (more about this at step #5). Others had a specific experience (their trigger event/s), which caused them to become socially anxious.

To give you an idea what I mean by a “specific trigger event”, I will share with you one that I had.

I was twelve years old and I was sitting in the back of the class room, throwing around pieces of paper and basically being difficult. The teacher caught me and had me sit next to her desk in the front of the class. We were about to watch a documentary on the TV, so a few minutes later, they rolled it in. When they turned it on, the teacher yelled at me from the back of the class “Sebastiaan, please move your big ears away from the TV because the rest of the class can‘t see a thing!”

My face turned bright red and everyone in class laughed at me and pointed their fingers at me. This was a “Trigger Event” for me and because of it, I made some life-altering decisions. One was that “people are out to get me” and another one was that “nobody likes me, that I am basically unlikeable”.

From that day onwards, these decisions dictated my sense of emotional well being. I felt anxious in social situations. I believed that people were out to get me, that no one liked me because I was unlikeable, and naturally I had become afraid of being embarrassed again. To make matters worse, I lived as if these decisions were true and this drew more of them to me.

On my healing journey, in order to heal myself from this SAD, I had to discover my trigger events, own the decisions I made as a result of them, release the charge on the events and then change the decisions I made.

This is what the first part of this step is all about. First we want to discover the Triggering Event/s. Having done this, we want to change the decisions we made. It is important to note that making these decisions is rarely a conscious process. The subconscious mind, perceiving danger due to the adrenalin that is being pumped into the system, makes these decisions in order to honour it’s prime directive to protect the system, in order to keep the self safe.

For many of my clients, there is such a specific triggering event also. In order to find out, we begin by asking yourself or your client discovery questions to find out what triggered the social anxiety. Questions such as:

This gives us one or more good clues about the Triggering Event, and even though the answers to these questions can be very useful to tap on, there’s a different line of questioning that I get into where I get very specific first. This often leads us to the main trigger event more rapidly.

This line of questioning starts by asking:

“What is the worst thing that can happen to you in a social situation?”

Their reply will often be some form of “to become embarrassed/humiliated/judged/criticized/disapproved of/rejected, etc.”

So, then I ask them to imagine that very thing happening in the here and now.

As they are doing that, I ask them a lot of questions about the strongest negative emotion they experience:

Once they are fully tuned into that negative emotion, I ask them what the first time is they can remember feeling that way. Or I ask them what situation or event that reminds them of. This process can help get to the Triggering Event immediately.

Note: Sometimes there is a S.E.E. (Significant Emotional Event) that happened more recently. It is likely that will come up first as it is screaming for resolution.

If for example the trigger event is an experience where you became embarrassed during a play for school when you were seven years old, but you had an intense negative experience when you were 17 where you were rejected by your crush in front of everyone, then the event where you were crushed might come up first.

What you want to do is to just trust the first event that comes to mind when going through the above steps, and work with that event. So you just treat that first event by reducing the emotional charge on it. As the emotions are coming down, you will be closer to discovering the Triggering Event. What often happens is that you won’t be able to get the emotional intensity down to a 0 completely. This is a sign for you that there is a deeper reason for the emotion being there. Often this is the trigger event.

Once this happens, you want to ask the questions again: “When is the first time you can remember feeling this way” or “what situation or event does this remind you of?”

This will then most likely get you to the Trigger Event. If you again run into an event or experience where you can’t get the emotion down completely, you ask the same questions as above again. Continue doing this until you are at the Trigger Event, which you can then clear completely by releasing all the negative emotions, and changing the decisions made that day.

Note: Clearing up the Trigger Event is a key step, but there might be various Pile-on S.E.E.’s (experiences that have worsened the social anxiety) that need resolution as well. A bit further in this article I advice you to get rid of your blocks to social confidence, and here some Pile-on S.E.E.’s might get in the way of clearing all the blocks. Clearing the Pile-on S.E.E.’s will be the on of the keys to completely eliminate the blocks to social confidence.

5. Get rid of the deepest cause to being vulnerable to SAD

I have found that the deepest cause of being vulnerable to SAD is the repetitive negative experiences that happen during one’s formative years.

While it’s possible to be born with genes that have higher susceptibility to social scrutiny, and while it’s also possible to inherit some of your parents social anxiety, it is also true that no one is born with a full blown social anxiety disorder.

This is really good news! It means that you have “learned” your SAD somewhere in life, and anything you have learned, you can unlearn!

During your formative years between ages 0-12 (and especially 0-6), repetitive negative experiences have likely led you to make some decisions that resulted in you holding negative core beliefs (“I‘m not good enough”, “I must be perfect to be loved/accepted”, “I‘m different/weird”, “I‘m unlovable”, etc).

And these beliefs make you vulnerable to developing social anxiety, and SAD.

This one was a biggie for me. I had solved quite a bit of my trigger events, but since I still suffered from very low self-esteem I would still feel anxious around most people. I never dealt with the deepest cause of being vulnerable to SAD – my childhood.

What happened was that I lost my father when I was 5 years old, and my mother was left with me and my year old sister. Due to this loss and other reasons, my mom had become emotionally distant which led to many repetitive negative experiences. I decided (consciously or subconsciously) that I was unlovable. This decision became a belief I held and acted on.
I believed “I am unlovable”.

It was this belief (and other core negative beliefs I had) that increased my vulnerability to developing social anxiety, and later full blown social anxiety disorder.

When working with clients, they sometimes report that they’ve felt anxious for as long as they can remember. When I ask them about when they first started to become uncomfortable around people, they often mention that they can think of some events which made their anxiety worse, or some event that triggered their social anxiety, but they often don’t know when they started feeling anxious and simply say, “I’ve always been anxious”.

When this is the case, I ask them what repetitive negative experiences they had as they were growing up. I do this to figure out WHY they felt anxious/insecure/unsafe growing up (and that WHY is because of repetitive negative experiences/messages).

So if you have felt anxious for as long as you can remember, or if you’ve always felt low self esteem, I would advise you to explore your childhood and see what repetitive negative experiences could have been responsible for this.

Maybe you were often/constantly criticized, put-down, shamed, bullied, humiliated, betrayed, abused, ignored or over-disciplined…

… Or maybe you never felt loved, accepted or unsupported. Maybe you constantly felt abandoned or unacknowledged…

What you are looking for is the reasons you felt anxious, unsafe or insecure during your formative years. From these repetitive negative experiences you made decisions and these decisions have become core beliefs. It is these core beliefs that are the deepest cause of a social anxiety disorder.

Let me share a few examples of repetitive negative experiences some of my clients experienced in their early childhood, from which they formed negative core beliefs (I have changed the names to maintain confidentiality):

“Toby” came from a wealthy family where there was a high demand on his performance. He was always compared to his brother who outperformed him in everything. As a result, he felt inferior. He made the decisions (consciously or subconsciously) that formed the negative core beliefs:
“I’m never good enough” and “I must be perfect to be loved”. This made Toby more vulnerable to becoming socially anxious.

The dad of my client “Peter” was an alcoholic and repeatedly had bursts of anger and rage and repeatedly spoke negatively about his family, criticizing and ridiculing his son. As a result, Peter grew up feeling unworthy, and unsafe, which became his negative core beliefs.

“Jenna” grew up with constant criticism; she could never do anything right. She came to believe she was unlovable, and that she had to be perfect to be loved. It is no surprise that she felt stuck, paralyzed, and was frustrated believing that she could never live up to her potential.

It’s these beliefs formed in early childhood that can create a general insecurity, low self- esteem or anxiety. It is these beliefs that increase ones vulnerability to the effects of what would otherwise be a normal situation into a trigger situation that can kick-start social anxiety.

The ground is then fertile for the social anxiety to get progressively worse as you repeatedly draw to you negative life experiences that support your beliefs, and from these negative life experiences you then again make more decisions about yourself, others and the world around you. Decisions that support your negative core beliefs, the culmination of which form the basis of social anxiety disorder.

The good news is that whatever repetitive negative experiences you discover that led you to feel bad about yourself as a child, can be changed with one very powerful technique!

“The Bundling Baggage Technique” (which we have to thank EFT Master Lindsay Kenny for) eliminates a bundle of similar baggage in one session.

Using this simple but effective Technique, helps you clear out the old negative emotions/feelings, as well as the negative core beliefs. Having done this in combination with step 4# will generally help a client get quite some relief. It also increases the efficiency of all upcoming tapping.

6. Set an exciting goal

You now set a goal of what it is that you want. For my clients this is almost always something along the lines of “to feel confident, calm and at ease in all social situations and interacting with people”.

Once you have this basic statement, ask yourself:

Maybe you will now have deeper and more meaningful relationships, maybe you will now be able to go out and have fun, hang out with friends, try new hobbies/interests, start the career you desire etc.

Really paint a vivid picture of what your life will look like asking what you will see, hear, and most importantly, what positive emotions you will feel once you have your goal? The possibilities are endless, included but not limited to joy, freedom, excitement, gratitude, peace of mind etc. Be very specific; this is an exciting step!

From all this information you create a little story, your new story, your new reality. Once this is clearly formulated, address any possible subconscious resistance you might have to owning this goal.

On the Karate Chop:

Take a breath and shake out your hands.

Once you have dissolved any resistance to this, you will have ‘opened the door’ to getting rid of the remaining blocks that have kept you from achieving your goals.

7. Deal with all the blocks that keep you from achieving your goal

Now that you’ve set an exciting goal, ask yourself what’s in the way of having that right now?
What is that exactly? When in a social situation, what fears, worries, doubts and limiting/negative beliefs do you have?

Examples here are:

Once you have all of it written down (or the bulk of it, you don‘t need to write down every single fear of belief) imagine putting everything into one big pile. This includes, but is not limited to, all of the fears, all the beliefs and everything else that is in the way of your having that exciting goal right now. So imagine putting all of that into one big pile.

And then (after having done some tapping on the subconscious resistance to letting go of these blocks to the goal) tap on this using again the Bundling Baggage Technique.

There might be some S.E.E.’s that need resolution before the big pile of blocks to achieving your goal will completely disappear. Tap on each of these separately.

Once you have cleared them, go back to the pile and tap it away.

CONGRATULATE YOURSELF!! You have now gotten rid of your blocks to social confidence. You are almost completely done and you now probably feel amazing. Hang in there – we don’t want to leave any room for a relapse of negativity, or allow anything to undo all the hard work you’ve put into building your new life, there is just a little more to clean up..

When all the blocks are at a 0 out of 10 in emotional intensity, test them. Try to get upset by imagining various social situations. If when you do that you remain emotionally unaffected, check if there is any fear or anxiety about the social anxiety returning. If so, simply tap on it, remembering that it’s just another aspect that can easily be tapped down.

Make sure you also tap on all the new confidence you now have, confidence that this works, that it will hold, that you are free and clear now and will remain so. And then once you are there, refer to the previous newsletter for Step #8 on changing thought patterns.

One Final Note

If you are suffering from SAD, take heart. You are not alone. You are not destined to feel this way. There is hope.

I strongly recommend that you find someone to work with. Even though I am happy to assist you in this, I understand that working with a practitioner is not affordable for everyone.

Don’t worry! I’ve created my EFT-based Social Confidence System for that very purpose. It actually guides you step by step through a detailed and more elaborate version of the above protocol. You will get audio tap-alongs for common blocks and a Workbook in which I guide you through uncovering your personal issues.

More importantly, you will also get a series of video tap-alongs which have been created specifically so that you can enter your own personal issues, the ones you have uncovered in the Basic 8 Step Process, after which you simply tap on them and change them.

As an ex- sufferer of this disorder, I’ve made it my life mission to completely solve social anxiety. EFT is the most powerful and amazing technique I’ve found to cure my own SAD, and that of others. I have been able to bring my own personal contribution to this valuable work, but much of what I use comes straight from the Masters and specialists, and for those techniques, I am very grateful.

That having been said, I realize that there is always room for improvement and I welcome insight as to how to further improve this already powerful and effective process. I would love to hear from you.

Once you successfully go from social anxiety disorder to social confidence your life changes dramatically. I’ve experienced this shift myself and have had the pleasure of having guided many clients through the same process. As you begin to experience the transformation from a very dark and challenging place to immense levels of gratitude and happiness you can not only socialize with others, you can deepen your relationships. Feeling finally free to be yourself, other areas such as dating, career and adventure open up as well. All this will allow you to finally be able to live your life to the fullest!

This journey is not only possible, you now have the power to make it your reality. I encourage and support your spirit of courage and commitment.

Sebastiaan van der Schrier Bio

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