Case Study: How I Help Someone With Social Anxiety

Welcome to Shrink for the Shy Guy. This is the show for you. If you are sick and tired of being held back by fear, self doubt, social anxiety, shyness, anything that's stopping you from you being you. I'm going to share the most powerful tools and resources that I've been discovering over the last 15 years on my journey to eradicate social anxiety and instill confidence first in myself and then in every single person that I meet on my journey. You're going to learn these tools and how to apply them in your life now so that you can become the most free, powerful, bold, authentic version of you. Hey, welcome to today's episode of the show. Today we're going to be talking about a case study. How I help someone overcome social anxiety. Someone who's lived with it for, whether it's three years, five years, 30 years, 50 years, it really is the same in a lot of ways. The process of liberation is the same no matter where you are. So that's what we're going to be talking about today. I'm excited to be with you, hope you're doing well. And if you want to go further, find out more about this show, this, me or anything like that. Go to shrink for the shy guy.com, shrinkforthy guy.com youm can also get an ebook there that I have called Five Steps to Unleash youh Inner Confidence For Free. That gives you a very clear step by step guide to radically increase your confidence. And of course you want to go deeper. There's all kinds of ways to do that as well. So let's talk about this. So I'm going to change some of the key details just to preserve confidentiality. So I'm really going to be stripping away names, locations, that sort of thing and really focusing on the core psychology, which it's kind of funny because that's something that everyone can identify with. You could probably identify with it, I could identify with it. So when you hear it, there's no identifying information. It's just like, oh crap, is he talking about me? So that's the goal here. So let's give you a little bit of background. He's a young guy, he's in school and he was confident when he was young. And then he hit a sort of a turning point in his life when he was in middle school. And you end up going to a different school. And that was kind of a toxic environment in that new school. Now a lot of people can have a hard time or a turning point in middle school. That's when my social anxiety began. And you don't necessarily have to have been in a toxic environment where that turning point for you might not have been middle school, it might have been high school or college or after you divorced or whatever it is. So there's something that happens, or you just go to a new school. It's not even like a bad place, whatever it was for you. There's usually some sort of place where we start to notice our social anxiety. And this happened for this client when he was in middle school and progressed from there where he started to develop social anxiety. And what's really interesting is, and this is how I think, so this is a case study, this is how I think about when I'm helping someone. And I've helped many, many people liberate themselves from social anxiety. Not just manage social anxiety, not just like, yeah, you're kind of effed for life, but you know, you can kind of get through it with medication and knowing you're effed for life. No, no. Liberation, man, that's what I want. Total liberation. Freedom from social anxiety, Unstoppable deep core confidence. That's what I want for myself and anyone who wants to work with me. That's the game we're playing for. We're not playing for management of social anxiety. We're talking about creating an extraordinary life. So here's some of the thinking that I have for that sort of thing. One is, I start to the first question I'm curious about is what is this person's identity? What is this person's identity? And so for him, there was an identity of quiet, I'm shy, I'm awkward, I'm not good at talking to people. This is how he saw himself. Now why do you think I'm curious about his identity? Because how he sees himself is how he's going to show up. And it's also how he imagines other people are going to see him. It's important. So I'm going to repeat some of this stuff and think about yourself, your identity, who you think you are. I am this, I am not that, I am like this. I tend to behave like that. That's our identity. And when you have that, and usually it's kind of subconscious, you're not walking around thinking to yourself, I am this, I am not that. It's just there. It just guides you. It guides your behavior, guides how you act, it guides what you wear, it guides what you say or don't say. And I want to kind of flush that out and make it conscious. Make them aware of their identity. And so we talk about it. And the reason it's so important to talk about it, this is the part where I'm repeating myself, is because your identity and my identity and his identity and everyone's identity controls us in a couple of ways. One, we conform to that identity. This is okay, this is who I am, alright? That's how I'm gonna behave. I don't know how to behave in this new setting. So I'll just behave how my identity tells me to behave. My identity says, I'm quiet, I'm awkward, I'm socially anxious, I'm not good at talking to people. I avoid talking to people, especially people I don't know or that I'm attracted to. Okay, I'll do that in this environment too. We stay consistent with it. And then we also imagine that other people see us that way. So it's another force kind of keeping us in line with that. I think I'm this way, other people think I'm this way. And a common thing that I often hear when I start to work with people about changing their behavior, changing their identity, how they show up in the world, one of the fears is, but the people that know me, know me as this old way. And it'll be just, there you go, period. Can't, therefore, I cannot do anything different. I love that one. I love it. I love all the defenses we have, all the ways we try to stay safe, the many workings of the safety police. And my response to that is always like, so what? Yes, first of all, people almost never comment, but secondly, even if they do, wow, you're talking to people today. You usually don't talk to people at work. Yeah, yeah, I noticed that. I thought I'd try to change that and be a little more social at work. There you go, problem done, problem solved. Now you can go on with your new behavior. So the idea that, oh my God, I can't change it, everyone's gonna notice, that's just another form of safety police. And that's an extremely important topic that I also think about when I'm working is sort of inside of my mind. When I'm working with a client is the safety police. And if you're not familiar with the safety police, let me fill you in. I talk a lot about it in Confidence Unleashed. It's a full length, kind of really in depth, complete confidence training program that I have online as well as my book, the Art of Extraordinary Confidence. So I go in depth. If you want to really flush out your understanding of it go there. But the short of it is you have a collection of thoughts in your head, kind of like voices in your head that are guiding your behavior, telling you what to do, telling you what you can do and you can't do, telling you it's a good idea or a bad idea. And then, you know, you either do it or you don't, because you can, or you can't, or you do it or you don't, because it's a good idea or a bad idea. And oftentimes we don't really slow down and question the thoughts in our head. And if all of them are true and if all of them are even who we really want to be in the world, we just sort of, oh, I had the thought, so it's got to be true. You know, that thought told me those people are going to judge me. That thought told me that that person's going to reject me. So I'm not gonna go talk to them. And we operate this, maybe even operating this way for years. I know I did. I operated like, based on that. What I thought was true for man a long time. That was one of the first really liberating insights I had, was when someone taught me about this idea of. It was called voice therapy and was basic cognitive stuff like, you know, write out the negative thought in your head and challenge it. I was like, what? What? You can do that? So the safety police is just one is my word for some of those voices in your head. And I want to help you see them. That's what I was doing with this client. So my mind starts to say, okay, are they aware of safety police? And how much control does the safety police have over them? And how aware are they of the control that the safety police has over them? So we're gonna take a quick break right now, and when we get back, I'm gonna explore this with you. Talk about exactly how I think about safety police, how you can start thinking about safety police, how you can become more aware of your safety police, which is exactly what I want every client to do. And that's how people become free. That's how we become liberated. So stay tuned. We'll be right back right after this. Have you heard about optimal self coaching? It's what Aziz teaches all of his private and group coaching clients. It helps you completely transform the way you talk to yourself in your own mind so you can instantly start feeling more confident, be more comfortable around others, and guide yourself to greater levels of career and relationship success to learn exactly how to Transform your inner Coach. Go to YourConfidenceCode.com to get your copy today. Hey, welcome back. So, safety police. So I'm exploring it with this client and the reason I want to use this example is because, man, I love working with people at all different stages, but it was fun to work with this guy because it was pretty new and hadn't done a whole lot of reading about social anxiety. So I get to take these really in depth ideas and concepts that I've been building for like a decade in my head, nerding out on these concepts and how to distill them down into really short ideas that this guy can take in instantly and then go use. Because we don't want to just talk theory for months and months and months and then not actually have any behavior change or action, right? This is about transformation. That's why I do coaching. We're not going to do some sort of really passive therapy that's meant to go for like eight years. So I want to teach them the idea of safety police. So this is gonna be helpful for you too. Basically, the safety police sole purpose is to keep you safe. Hence the name. I picked a good name, right? Its sole purpose is to keep you safe. Well, safe from what? Safe from that rejection, Safe from someone not liking you, Safe from pain, really. Now, it keeps you safe from physical pain and it also keeps you safe from emotional pain. Sort of the warning system in your mind, in your nervous system. It's the part of you that makes you, I don't know, say no to bad ideas. Like your buddy's like, hey, you want to get drunk and run across the freeway? And your safety police will be like, that's a bad idea. Don't do it, right? So you can think about it as like, you know, in life there are risks. There's always risks, right? You know, your buddy says you want to run drunk across a freeway, that's a risk. You want to go apply for that job. There's a potential risk there. Now, the risks in those two situations are very different, right? Like, one is a physical risk to your safety and one is a risk to your ego. Sort of an emotional risk. Well, I could not get it. And then feel sad or feel disappointed or tell myself in my head I'm a failure and then feel worthless, right? So not all risks are created equal. And the safety police, though, is the part of us that does not see that its job is not to. Well, ultimately, when you really do a lot of this work, which I've done for a long Time on myself. Your safety police becomes a more functional part of you. When we have social anxiety, our safety police is kind of dysfunctional. It's not operating properly or optimally. It is firing off all over the place. So it starts to see every risk as running across the freeway. It starts to see social risks, risks to your ego, to your pride. You know, what if someone doesn't like me? Yeah. It starts to see that as, like, intolerably dangerous. That's where you're in the realm of social anxiety. Because then you're operating as if someone not liking you or someone judging what you post on social media or not wanting to have a conversation with you, your nervous system responds to that as if you're in real danger, you're gonna die or something. So your safety police is not calibrated right. Firing off all over the place. And not only that, this is what I found with social anxiety. Not only is it firing off all over the place, it also is usually in complete control of the person in the core areas that they want my help with. So, you know, maybe this guy has got confidence in his physical abilities and fitness and athletics and stuff. So safety police doesn't control him much there. Maybe not at all. But when it comes to social interactions, social confidence, talking confidently with other men, approaching women he's attracted to, speaking up in groups, raising his hand in the classroom setting, you know, bringing attention to himself in that way, all of that is very uncomfortable with a lot of social anxiety. That's what we're working on. So in that area, the area that the person's struggling with, my question is inside of my own head. How much is the safety police controlling them? And the way I assess that is by looking at their behavior. Well, how many risks do they take? How many risks are they taking? How capable are they of taking a risk? And for a lot of people, if you've been stuck in social anxiety, there's strong patterns of avoidance. And so it's minimal risk, no risk, only do it when pushed to and forced to once in a blue moon, once a month, once a year, once every six months, whatever it is. And also the safety police usually has them so under control that they don't even consider taking the risks. That's where it gets really interesting. So, for example, with this client, he's not considering, should I go talk to that group of people? Should I go approach that woman? Should I? You know, he's not considering that on a daily basis. He just doesn't do it. And his safety police tells him, I Can't do that. It's just not going to work out. It's not worth it. Just can't do it. And that's really interesting. So when I hear that, I'm like, oh, okay. There's a pretty strong level of control here because the safety police is, you got to think about it like a propaganda machine in a government or something like that. If the population is all riled up and like, we're going to go do this, we're going to go do that, that's a lot of effort to sort of maintain control. So if he is, like seeing every day that he sees a woman that he's drawn to or a group of people he wants to interact with, he's like, I'm gonna do it, I'm gonna do it. And the safety police has to kind of beat him back down. That's a lot of energy. It's a lot of effort. It's much more efficient for the safety police to just keep, you know, keep him in total submission and just be like, yeah, no, I can't. No, I can't. And not even considering it. And that's how he'd been for years when I met him. So I'm curious for you, what's going on with you and your safety police? How much control does it have of you? How much is that mechanism firing off on every single threat? Potential danger, social failure, social embarrassment? These are intolerable things. And how often do you take risks? Because this is what I was telling him, and this is pretty early on, this is maybe our second or third session. I said, like, at its most simple, to distill it down. Most simply the path to liberating yourself from freeing yourself from social anxiety, building strong, solid confidence in yourself that you really want. In its simplest form, it's going to require consistently taking risks. That's the core of it. All the other stuff we're doing is going to be to help you be able to do that and refine that and build on that. But that's like one of the core engines of your transformation, of your liberation. Take risks. And so, I mean, sometimes we don't like it, put that simply. Because then we're like, gotta be another way, right? And then it's like, whoa, whoa. Okay, okay, fine, fine, fine, fine. I get it. I'll take a risk, I guess. But when I'm more comfortable, when it's easier, it's too scary right now. And here's the thing about that, that's fine. You can scale back, take a smaller risk. But usually we use that as an excuse to not take any risk. But the thing is, the confidence that you seek is a byproduct of. Of taking those risks. It's the outcome of taking those risks. It's not the prerequisite. It's not like you get the confidence or the comfort first and then go take the risk when you feel good. It's. You take the risk. And no matter how it goes, you're building confidence points. Might not seem that way, especially if you. This is the other key piece. Because there's a risk, but then there's also how you treat yourself. Because if you take a risk and then it doesn't go the way you want, and then you spend 17 hours beating the shit out of yourself in your own head, ooh. It's gonna make this process a lot longer. So those are the two core things I'm working on with anyone at any given time. How do we help you take more risks? And how do we help you treat yourself no matter what? With compassion, love, acceptance, patience, empathy, always treating yourself with respect, and always being on your own side. If I could distill down the two core teachings that I'm. And these are intellectual things you can get instantly, but these are skills, arts that you can be mastering for a lifetime. The art of seamlessly taking a risk and facing fear again and again and again and again and again. The art of loving yourself no matter what happens, no matter if it doesn't go the way you want or you slip up or anything. So we're gonna take one more quick break right now, and when we get back, I'm gonna share with you the two core assumptions of social anxiety that I was helping this client see in our early sessions. Alright, stay tuned. Does working with Dr. Aziz actually work? Can you really break free from social anxiety and live a life of confidence, success, and happiness? Here is what one client had to say about his. What would I say to somebody considering coming to see Dr. Disease for a live weekend? Do it. I mean, don't stop it. It's what you need. If you're doubting it, just do it. I would definitely recommend Dr. Aziz to anyone who wants to improve their confidence and social skills. I don't think anyone else out there is offering anything like what he does, especially something that's so geared towards people, people who, you know, who. Who kind of lack in the social confidence area. To get started on your journey towards lifelong confidence with Dr. Aziz, simply go to socialconfidencecenter.com coaching hey, welcome back. So two core assumptions of social anxiety. And this was, this was coming out in our conversation because it was like, okay, so what you really want to do is you want to be able to walk up to that group of people, approach that person you're attracted to. Standard stuff. If we would do, if we were more socially confident. So I asked him, why don't you? He said, why? I don't want them to judge me. I was like, ah. And that's the core, one of the core fears in social anxiety, right, is being judged by others. And. And I said, well, there's two assumptions that create social anxiety. Two ways that we respond to that potential that people might judge us. One is we tend to over predict the negative response. So there's a couple ways we might do that. One is, let's say you're gonna go, if you were to approach, say 10 people you were attracted to and you say, well, how many of them would be interested in you? You might say, well, only one or two, eight or nine would be like, get away from me, weirdo. Now, unless you're doing something kind of weird or extremely off putting, even if you're a little bit nervous, if you approach people and you just say, hey, how's it going? Or basic kind of approach, the likelihood of eight to nine people rejecting you is low. So there tends to be. We over predict it though, and we're pretty certain, we're pretty dang certain that most people would reject us. And sometimes it's. This is an interesting one I found. You can't convince people, maybe you can kind of work with them intellectually about, well, how many people? Are you sure? That's where the solution really is, to take a risk. Because when you take the risk, you find out what, what the fuck actually happens. You're not just living in your head and fantasies and predictions and calculations and how do I stay safe? How do I stay safe? Just like, no, here I go, I'm gonna find out what actually happens. Fuck it. See, so that's the first assumption. The second assumption is that the judgments or the negative outcomes, someone not liking you, you predict it as sort of intolerable, is terrible. It's like worse than it really is. Oh my God. If that person had a judgmental thought about me, I would just, I can't even go. And most people that I start working with, they've had that like, oh my God, I don't want to do that. Someone could judge me. And that's been like the electric fence that they've stayed behind for decades. And they never slowed down and said, how strong is the shock on that fence? What happens if I touch it? What happens if I hold it for a minute? Does the sting get less? Can I climb over it? Right. I mean, these are interesting inquiries that usually people have not done until they work with me. Right. Because it's like, we're going into it. And worse, if they go to someone who's like, yeah, yeah, that electric fence is real. You need some medication to fix that. Yeah, yeah, you need to. Yeah, you probably. That fence is going to be there forever for the rest of your life because you got to manage social anxiety disorder because you're broken. You have bad brain chemistry and your history was bad, so you're kind of screwed anyway. Take this antidepressant medication which is not actually really designed for social anxiety, but it seems to sort of help by placebo for a lot of people. So maybe you should just take it. No, no, no, no, no, no. There's a better way. You can completely and totally and fully liberate yourself if you're willing to do what it takes, which is those risks. And if you want to get like a really stripped down, focused, bare bones, like, how do you do this? And where's all this stuff I'm talking about coming from? And just get the Solution to Social Anxiety. My first full length book, the Solution to Social Anxiety. And it provides a solution for you exactly what I'm talking about here. Much more fleshed out. And most people that read that book, if they resonate with me, and if you're listening to this podcast, you probably resonate with me to some degree. So you're probably a good candidate for this. When they pick up that book, they're underlining every other sentence and saying, he's talking about me. And the reason I can do that is not from studying you socially anxious people in a laboratory, from studying myself. Holy shit. All the crazy inside of me, that's all I need to look for. And then from there, working with more and more and more and more and more people. So then it's like, oh, okay, here are the trends, here are the patterns, here's what works. Because if you want to know how I liberated myself, it was taking those actions consistently. And I found that I had a. I mean, I spent so many years avoiding it. And. And then when I was ready to do whatever it took, I had an incredible amount of drive to face it for liberation. And I've seen that in the clients who make massive progress, they are able to activate that. They're the ones who can take risks, even if they've avoided them for a long time, they're open to the idea of changing that and taking more risks. And the ones that progress more slowly take risks more slowly. And the ones that don't really progress much at all are unwilling to take any risks. And they're really in their head, and their safety police has just got them by the throat. And then we talk for months, and I'm like, trying to help smash in there and help them and figure out the safety police. And they're like, no, the safety police is true. Do you want to test it? No. I've had a few people like that, but who knows what their journey is? And I trust that some of the exploration we did maybe opened up a doorway later in their life. But the people that are just rock stars, I mean, they're just like, okay, shit, I'm scared. Oh, all right. That risk's too big. How about a smaller risk? Okay, great, let's talk about that. But it's not a question of if I'm going to take a risk or not. It's which one am I going to take? And frequency, man. If you could do this kind of stuff often, if you do it once every six months. Meh. If you do it once every three months. Nah, do it once a month. Eh, Think about it like working out. What if you worked out once every six months? Ridiculous. How many times do people work out? You know, if you want to be in shape, people work out four or five days a week. So. Interesting, huh? Well, that brings us to our action step. Time for action action. Our action step for today, man. We just got to go with risk, huh? Seems like a good one, right? Just got to take a risk. Just fuck it, just take a risk. And that was a fun thing. When I was working with this client, he was wanting to post something on social media. He had been pretty inactive for a number of years and had the idea of putting something up there. He's got some friends in some different cities that he just wanted to show a picture to and. But he'd been kind of holding back on it. And so he brought that up in our call. And I said, oh, why have you been holding back? Well, fear of being judged, right? That's the fear always. And so I was like, man, I'm so action oriented. I was like, well, what if you imagine just posting it right now? And of course, we worked through some of the fears, we worked through some of the imagined judgments, and then, boom, he did it. Which Was awesome. And then we worked through like, well, how does it feel afterwards? You know? And it felt like first it was scary and anxiety proking and then it was exciting. And then he just went through the whole range. He took the risk right there. So take a risk. And what I was sharing with him is in his deliberation about it. We were talking about it. It was fun because it was almost like real time. We were kind of watching it unfold. Almost like when I'm doing exposure work with someone out in the world. And there's a tipping point that I found always, always when it comes to when we're. We've gone from. We used to deliberate a lot about. I don't know if I should. We overanalyze situations to the, you know, just taking the risk, just doing it. And what I found is there's always a tipping point moment for people where somewhere inside and they might not use this language, but this is kind of their attitude. They just say should I, shouldn't I? I don't know, what if people judge me and they're like this ah, fuck it. And then just do it. And they might say fuck it. You might say fuck it, you might not. It might just be like ah, whatever, fine. And then you just go do it. But there's this sort of like decisive and it's like a letting go. And my friend and who's an author, John Parkin, who's awesome, wrote Fuck it the ultimate spiritual way. And that's sort of what he's, you know, encouraging people to harness is just basically ah, fuck it, whatever and just doing the thing or letting go of something. So that's what I would suggest for you. Just fuck it, take the risk, see what happens and then make it a practice, make it a habit. Awesome, thanks for being with me today. Thanks for listening and letting me share and I hope this serves you. I know that it's tremendously helped me in my life and I know it helps people when I work with them. So I trust that it will serve you. And it's one of my joys. I mean I had this session with him yesterday. It is four in the morning right now. I wake up early, usually meditate, do some self care. But I was so excited about some of the stuff I was seeing with him that I wanted to record this to share it. Because that's one of my missions is I learned something, I want to share it. I learned something, I want to share it because while I can only work with personally a small group of people at a time. Through this medium, through the podcast, through YouTube, through my programs, through my live event weekends, I can share what I'm learning with with way more thousands. And I'm so grateful that you're with me on this journey. So until we speak again, may you have the courage to be who you are, to take risks, and to know on a deep level that you're awesome. Talk to you soon. Thanks for listening to Shrink for the shy guy with Dr. Aziz. If you know anyone who can benefit from what you've just heard, please let them know and send them a link to shrinkfortheshyguy.com for free blogs, ebooks, and training videos related to overcoming shyness and increasing confidence, go to socialconfidencecenter.com.