Social phobia is an anxiety disorder that involves the client's fear of being negatively evaluated in social situations. Social phobia can be quite debilitating in that people will avoid certain social situations and may become severe to the point where a person isolates most of the time. Social phobia is often the underlying issue when a person is shy.
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) is an empirically supported psychotherapy approach in treating social phobia. Different types of psychotherapy have been practiced, including Albert Ellis's Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy and Aaron Beck's Cognitive Therapy. Cognitive behavioral therapists focus on changing the client's maladaptive beliefs about the social situation, common thoughts include “What if they don't like me,” “What if they think I'm stupid,” “What if they think I'm boring?” This type of thought, per Beck's cognitive therapy, is called “fortunetelling,” a distorted automatic thought. The therapist works with the client to weigh evidence for and against the thought, and to notice that as a more rational thought is formed, belief in, and anxiety from, the original thought decreases. Clients are assigned thought logs as homework to track thoughts associated with social anxiety.
Cognitive Behavioral Therapists Help
Therapists help clients learn coping statements (“The last time I thought no one liked me I wound up making friends,” “While I prefer that people like me it is not the end of the world if they don't”) and help clients stop “catastrophizing”, taking small trivial situations and perceiving them as catastrophic. A technique from Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy is the “shame attack,” in which a client puts himself in numerous awkward social situations to realize rejection is not the end of the world, especially useful for dating-related social anxiety.
For an updated, more in-depth look at this topic, see Strategies to Overcome Social Anxiety in NYC.