Benefits of Group Therapy for Social Anxiety

Patricia is sitting in the passenger seat while she waits for her father to return from the pharmacy. She would have liked to go to the store on her own, but she began to feel her hands soaked and her heart racing. Again. She is a little calmer now, but her thoughts keep wandering from one side of her mind to the other: ”The cashier would have made fun of me for the clothes I'm wearing, she would knife something with another employee. At best, she would have burst out laughing in my face because when I speak she doesn't understand herself. I'm ridiculous".

The issue of getting anxious before entering a business is just the little finger of the problem. At work, Patricia makes sure to take a break in the park just when she knows her boss is coming to the office. Even though she is very good at her job and she wants with all her might to get a promotion in the company, at that moment she is invaded those physical sensations and those such unpleasant thoughts: "How is he going to want to promote me, if I can't even look him in the eye"

. The same thing happens to her at meetings with friends and on her dates: her thoughts surface, she avoids events to which she is invited at all costs, and though that eases her anxiety momentarily, she later regrets it, feeling lousy about herself.

• Related article: "Types of Anxiety Disorders and their characteristics"

Dismantling social anxiety: what happens in this disorder?

Patricia's story could represent a case of social anxiety, which is also known as social phobia. Social anxiety is characterized by the presence of a constant fear of the other's disapproval, of being evaluated and judged by others, which produces high levels of anxiety, all this over a period of time dragged on.

The physical symptoms that show anxiety could be sweating, redness, feeling palpitations, intense stomach pains, among others. The feared situations can be real or hypothetical, and the mere fact of thinking about them is distressing for the person. The way by which he manages to escape from that cloud of discomfort is avoidance of feared experiences.

The problem is that behind many social situations from which a person tends to flee, there could be a achievement that represents something highly significant for your life, as it happens with the job opportunity to which you aspire Patricia. Here's the real problem: Having social anxiety disorder can be not only painful, but also very limiting in creating the life you want to live.

Fortunately, there are many psychological therapies with strong empirical support for the treatment of social phobia. In recent decades, group treatments have been developed that have also proven to be very beneficial. For this reason, we will now develop what group therapy for social anxiety is based on and what its benefits are.

• You may be interested in: "Group therapy: history, types and phases"

Group therapy as a treatment for social anxiety

The most effective group-based treatments for social anxiety are adaptations of individual psychotherapy. Contrary to what might be believed if we refer to subjects with social anxiety, this change in modality does not pose a problem for the improvement of clinical symptoms.

One of the most widely used treatments is cognitive-behavioral group therapy in social anxiety disorder. —also known by its acronym in English, CBGT—, which was developed by Heimberg et al. in 2002. In general, this intervention promotes a context in which exposure exercises to the feared situations and sensations, while the therapeutic process of restructuring is carried out cognitive.

The latter consists of the subject being able to elucidate that the beliefs with which he interprets reality could be biased or distorted, since from cognitive-behavioral therapy it is assumed that biases are a fundamental part of maintaining disease. That is, the people who participate in the groups for social phobia they question the veracity of the thoughts that incite them to act in a certain way —Going back to Patricia's case, you could work on questioning her belief that "I'm ridiculous" and replace it with a more adaptive one. Groups will also be trained in relaxation and social skills.