When the fear of being judged starts deciding what you will and will not do.
Social anxiety disorder is a persistent fear of being watched, evaluated or judged by other people. It is far more than shyness. It shapes career decisions, friendships, and whether you speak in a meeting, and it is frequently invisible to the people around you because the person experiencing it has become skilled at covering it.
Many adults with social anxiety have organized their lives around it so successfully that they no longer notice the cost, until a promotion, a move, a new relationship or a return to the office makes the avoidance impossible to maintain.
You do not need to meet every criterion, or to have a formal diagnosis, to benefit from treatment.
Treatment targets three things at once: the predictions you make about how others see you, the safety behaviors that prevent you from finding out otherwise, and the attention that turns inward during social situations.
A central and often surprising part of the work is shifting attention outward. In social anxiety, attention moves onto yourself, monitoring how you are coming across, which both degrades performance and gives you a distorted picture built from your own discomfort rather than from anything in the room.
We then design behavioral experiments: specific, planned situations in which you drop a safety behavior and observe what actually happens, rather than what you predicted would happen. Post-event rumination, the critical replay afterwards, is addressed directly as its own target.
Consider reaching out if fear of judgment is influencing career decisions, keeping you out of situations you would otherwise value, or leaving you drained after ordinary social contact. Social anxiety tends to be stable over time without treatment, and it responds well to treatment.
No. Shyness is a temperament. Social anxiety disorder is a clinical condition defined by the intensity of the fear and, critically, by the degree to which it restricts your life. Many people with social anxiety are not shy at all in settings where they feel safe.
Managing and being comfortable are different things. If you are performing well while rehearsing extensively, avoiding certain formats, or recovering for hours afterwards, the condition is present and it is carrying a cost.
No. Exposure work is built around your goals, not a standard list. We work on the situations that matter to your life, at a pace you agree to in advance. Nothing is sprung on you.
Yes, and for many people video sessions lower the barrier to starting. Some exposure work is usefully done in person, and where that applies it is discussed. In-person sessions are available in Newton.
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