To build self-confidence, heal the traumas underpinning your anxiety
In Is Social Anxiety Caused By Trauma? Why Effective Social Anxiety Disorder Treatment is Trauma-Informed, I shared some of the potential causes of social anxiety.
In short, while some are born with social anxiety due to genetic factors, struggles with social anxiety typically only become lifelong after stressful events or a traumatic childhood. For that reason, addressing and resolving early traumatic experiences may be essential for building self-esteem and social confidence.
Today, we’ll explore how to go about resolving the traumatic roots of social anxiety so that you can, in turn, build self-esteem naturally.
To heal from trauma-based social anxiety, tell its origin story
The key to overcoming trauma-based social anxiety is to face, feel, and make sense of the past in a supportive environment.
Whether you are working with a social anxiety disorder therapist or recovering via self-help, one of the best ways to build confidence is to tell your social anxiety origin story.
Understanding and expressing how your past contributed to your current social struggles will give you greater agency over your anxiety.
When you look your past square in the face, feel its rough edges, and develop an understanding of how your difficulties made you who you are today, you take advantage of the brain’s innate neuroplasticity, or capacity to change. In other words, you’re actively rewiring your brain.
See, when we experience trauma, our nervous systems don’t have the resources to process the overwhelming level of stress present. As a result, our body-mind stores the experience in our implicit (i.e., unconscious) memory, hidden behind a dissociative barrier.
Put another way, our bodies remember the experience, but our minds do their best not to think about what happened. That is until we experience something that reminds us of the original trauma, at which point our nervous system goes into fight, flight, or flee to keep us safe.
Because the traumatic experience is stuck in our unconscious mind, it’s unresolved. The part of our psyche that holds implicit memory doesn’t grok time or space, so it believes that the trauma is still happening.
So, let’s return to rewiring your system by telling your social anxiety origin story.
Telling the story of how your social anxiety developed, including the impact of difficult experiences early in life, moves those traumatic memories from your unconscious mind into your prefrontal cortex.
You can think of your prefrontal cortex as your higher-thinking brain, enabling you to organize, plan, and think ahead.
When you tell a coherent narrative about how past experiences led to your adult struggles with social anxiety, you are essentially moving unresolved trauma out of implicit memory into the part of your brain that can relate to fear rather than being controlled by it.
Is that necessary? Isn’t it better to leave the past in the past?
You may feel hesitant to revisit painful experiences. That’s completely understandable. For many, “moving on” feels like the best approach – why wallow in the past?
“What you resist not only persists, but will grow in size.”
Jung, a contemporary and student of Freud, said what you resist not only persists but will grow in size. And modern neuroscience confirms this – traumatic experiences can remain in the central nervous system until we fully process them, tingeing every new relationship with terror. In other words, if you’ve been hurt, you must make peace with the painful past to move on in a healthy and engaged way.
Again, it’s normal to avoid thinking about traumatic experiences. The number one symptom of all anxiety disorders, including social anxiety disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), is avoidance.
If you struggle with either or both conditions, you may avoid thinking about or engaging with people, situations, thoughts, or memories that spike your anxiety.
Unfortunately, this strategy sacrifices long-term health for short-term comfort. When you avoid socializing or examining the roots of your social anxiety, your system will remain anxious and perhaps only become more sensitized over time. This is why exposure therapy is a key ingredient of effective social anxiety disorder and trauma treatment.
But wait, I heard that talking about the past doesn’t help social anxiety!
A quick online search will surface countless articles and forum postings lamenting the ineffectiveness of traditional talk therapy when treating social anxiety.
As a social anxiety specialist, I can attest to the limitations of psychodynamic, talk-oriented therapies. The gold standard treatment for social anxiety disorder is cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), which emphasizes cognitive restructuring (i.e., correcting distorted thought patterns that cause anxiety) and exposure therapy and generally avoids exploring past experiences.
Cognitive behavioral therapy is essential for many individuals’ recovery from social anxiety disorder. That said, my clinical experience indicates that CBT has limits, especially if an individual’s social anxiety is more trauma-based than genetic or environmental (i.e., learned via an anxious family system).
Cognitive behavioral therapy is a manualized, often time-limited treatment; as such, it is easy to research and favored by managed healthcare companies. For that reason, more existing studies explore the effectiveness of CBT than other approaches that may be as effective but are difficult to manualize or more expensive for insurance companies to provide.
So, while cognitive behavioral therapy may be highly effective for many clients, it may not be sufficient for others. If you have tried CBT and still struggle with social anxiety, I highly recommend the approaches outlined in this article.
Pro tips: How to heal the roots of social anxiety
1. Tell your story
As mentioned above, one fundamental approach to developing self-esteem and confidence naturally is to tell the origin story of your social anxiety, the why of how you became fearful of rejection in social settings.
The key here is to express your story, not just think about it. Chances are you’ve thought about those difficult experiences that contributed to your social anxiety ad nauseam; socially anxious folx tend to obsess and ruminate about the past.
Don’t let your painful experiences stay locked up inside.
You can externalize your story alone or in the presence of others. Here are just a few venues where you can express and make sense of your social anxiety origin story:
Journaling
12-step groups
Drama, music, art, dance, or other expressive arts
Trustworthy friends and family
Mentoring others with similar struggles
2. Share more than the facts
Those who feel secure in their relationships (i.e., they have a secure attachment style) can mentalize. That’s a fancy way of saying they can easily “think about feeling and feel about thinking.” They can generally share their origin story with a balance of emotion and reason, offering the facts of their story while staying connected to their feelings.
Your story is about so much more than the chronology of events. While expressing your account, share how your experiences impacted you emotionally, mentally, and spiritually. Notice your body while you tell your origin story and make space for tears, laughter, the warming of anger, or any other feelings connected with the difficulties of your past.
3. Let yourself be witnessed
As noted above, you can express your story independently through journaling, dancing, or making art. Such solo expression can be vital to making sense of the roots of your social anxiety, especially since you may fear judgment from others.
That said, sharing your story with others in time is equally vital. Since trauma-based social anxiety generally develops from painful social experiences, your system likely needs a corrective experience wherein you share your hurt in a safe and accepting environment.
We are wounded in relationship, and we heal in relationship.
You may be thinking, But isn’t that a Catch-22? How can I share my past hurts openly with others if I don’t trust that they will treat me kindly? Especially if I have a lived experience of being rejected, criticized, and humiliated?
Feeling hesitant to share your story with others makes perfect sense. Your system is simply trying to protect you from getting hurt again. Therefore, I recommend taking a graduated approach to sharing your story, as described in our exposure therapy article.
Identify people who you feel safe with and share as much of your story as you can tolerate, whatever amount will stretch but not strain you. Then stop. Assess, integrate, and self-soothe. If they respond well, share more. But go at the pace of your nervous system.
4. Get creative, get physical
Traumatic experiences tend to lodge in the right brain and the body. For that reason, we’re less likely to access those experiences through left-brain, verbal, and cognitive approaches.
To access and process painful memories, we must engage the right brain through creative approaches and the body through somatic practices.
So, engage your body and creativity when telling your social anxiety origin story.
In addition to telling your story verbally, express it emotionally, symbolically, and somatically (i.e., via the body) through expressive arts such as dancing, drama, and music.
If you have access to therapy, opt to work with a clinician skilled in somatic and expressive approaches such as drama therapy, expressive arts therapy, eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR), and mindfulness-based techniques.
5. Don’t hesitate to repeat yourself
Telling your story once is excellent. Telling it numerous times is even better.
The brain typically needs to process difficult experiences more than once. With each retelling, you will access another layer of feeling and insight.
Along the road to self-confidence, you’ll face challenges that awaken new aspects of your story. As you grow and gain access to more parts of yourself, revise your account as an act of evolution and integration.
Social anxiety might cause you to worry that you’ll bore people with your story if you tell it more than once. Remember:
You can tell your story in different venues or alone; you needn’t repeat it to the same individual.
Use this fear as an opportunity to dispute your automatic negative thoughts. For example: even though social anxiety makes me worry that I’ll bore others if I repeat my story, I can remember many times when I’ve happily listened to friends share difficult experiences more than once. I didn’t think they were boring, I thought they were vulnerable and brave!
Allowing yourself to tolerate this discomfort of potentially boring others can be a form of exposure therapy and thus may help you build self-confidence!
Therapy with a social anxiety disorder specialist can help you build self-confidence naturally
In summary, to overcome social anxiety, tell your story.
Perhaps counterintuitively, facing and processing painful past experiences is essential for naturally building self-esteem and confidence.
You can express your story solo or with a trusted other, be that a family member, friend, or therapist.
Let yourself take the risk of telling your story imperfectly. Then do it again. Take the risk of facing the past and perhaps fumbling or feeling along the way. When social anxiety rears up in response, congratulate yourself for taking a risk, use your tools, and reach out to compassionate support figures.
If you are eager to tell your story, build confidence, and overcome social anxiety, apply for a free 30-minute consultation. Our Care Coordinator will discuss your goals and connect you with a trauma-informed social anxiety therapist. We’re here to help!