Understanding Social Phobia Treatment
Before looking for a social phobia treatment, you must first
understand what social phobia is. A social phobia can be
best described as a person’s fear of being embarrassed in
public whether in a social gathering or at a public event, such
as giving a speech. Often people who suffer from social phobias
cannot handle meeting strangers or talking to them. In a
worst case scenario they can end up living the life of a
recluse and will never leave their homes.
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Social phobia can be successfully treated and at least 80% of
patients find that with the use of psychotherapy and or
medications they can return to a normal life in a relatively
short period of time. The type of treatment used is dependent
on the severity of the phobia. Often a short term dose of
medication is used to help reduce the patient’s level of
anxiety before a therapy treatment such as cognitive behavior
therapy is introduced.
If you are suffering from social phobia, you should seek
medical help in the form of a psychotherapist in order to get
personalized treatment. He or she can work with you to discover
how severe your phobia is and then help you decide what type of
treatment might yield the best results for you.  One of the biggest problems is that many
patients have allowed their phobia to become so deeply
entrenched into their psyche that they believe it is a
physical rather than a learned behavior.
Cognitive behavior therapy helps the patient recognize that the
problem is not a physical handicap but that there is an
underlying cause that must first be discovered and addressed
before a cure can be found. Social phobia is often a
result of some traumatic incident that has occurred sometime in
the patients past that they have repressed for so long that
they are no longer aware of its existence. Once the therapist
has made the patient aware of the cause, they can then begin to
help them understand that it can no longer affect
them.
At this point, the therapist can then begin
to teach an alternative thinking process, whereby the patient
learns to replace the constant streams of negative thoughts
with more positive ones. The patient learns to stop
thinking “I am going to make a fool out of myself” and instead
replace this mindest with positive thoughts like “I like myself
and do not care what others think”.
Along with the cognitive behavior therapy, the patient must
also be taught mental exercises that will help them to relax
and dismiss their anxious thoughts. Many therapists turn to
some form of meditation or yoga as a way to accomplish this.
Meditation teaches the patient to focus inwards on themselves
and one single thought while at the same time dismissing
all others from the mind. By doing this, the mind can
learn to completely relax and let go of all unnecessary
stressful thoughts. Often meditation is used in
conjunction with a breathing exercise where the patient is
taught to breathe long, slow, deep breaths and count each one,
focusing only on the count. Combining the breathing exercise
with meditation allows the patient to use the breath count as
their meditative focus. This not only relaxes the mind
but also the body. Using these relaxation techniques can then
help the patient learn to stay calm and relaxed in any public
situation.
In a few cases, when a patient is experiencing extreme anxiety,
an anti anxiety medication may be prescribed for a short period
of time to help quickly reduce their anxiety levels in order
for the therapy techniques to be properly implemented.
However, since these medications can frequently become
addictive and do have side effects, their use should be only
considered in the worst cases.
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Once the patient has begun to cope with their anxiety, there
are support groups where they can find likeminded people who
can help them to learn the social skills they may be lacking in
due to their lack of social contact while suffering under their
social phobia. Once all of the treatments and techniques have
been implemented a patient should recover fully being able to
return to a full and successful life.
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