In this article, 'What causes social phobia? Can social phobia be treated? How long does the counseling process take? I will try to answer curious questions such as.
Social phobia can be summarized as a situation in which people feel excessive anxiety when meeting a new person, talking or entering a new environment that you do not know, in short, in most of the daily social situations. . If you have social phobia, you probably think that you are being watched by others, that you may be judged, that you may be ashamed or humiliated for your own actions in the situations I mentioned above, and you experience this fear intensely and chronically. In fact, you may find that the anxiety or fear you experience may be excessive or irrational, but you generally have great difficulty overcoming it. If you have a negative experience that you consider terrifying, it may often take days or weeks for you to recover from it. In addition, because of this intense anxiety and fear you experience, you may often experience other problems that accompany your illness, such as a decrease in self-esteem and depression.
Symptoms:
Those who suffer from social phobia Individuals tend to avoid environments where they may be criticized or situations where they will be evaluated. The main reason for this is; They have an intense fear of acting in an environment that could cause them to be humiliated, embarrassed or ridiculed. There are also physical symptoms that accompany this intense stress:
- Acceleration of heartbeat
- Breathlessness and shortness of breath
- Sweating
- Abdominal pain and nausea
- Tremors
- Face flush
- Difficulty speaking or speaking very quietly
- Muscle tension
- Stiff body posture
- Dry Mouth
These visible physical symptoms further increase the fear of 'disapproval'. With this intense fear they experience, they actually make themselves the focal point, and a vicious circle occurs. At the same time, these symptoms The intense anxiety they feel due to overcoming this situation also reduces their ability to cope with this situation and triggers anxiety.
Disorders Accompanying Social Phobia:
Frequently accompanying social phobia; Apart from panic disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder and depression, unfortunately, some social phobics' thoughts of self-medicating by turning to alcohol or other drugs in order to reduce the level of anxiety they experience can also lead them to experience addiction problems.
Causes:
While research continues to better understand the causes of social anxiety disorder, some studies point to a small structure in the brain called the amygdala in social phobia symptoms. It has been determined that the amygdala is a central region in the brain that controls fear reactions and works more actively in people with social phobia.
Another study found that having social phobia disorder in first-degree relatives makes the risk of developing this disorder twice as high as in other people. showed a sixfold increase in In other words, if your mother, father or one of your siblings is socially phobic, your risk of being socially phobic increases two to six times compared to other people.
Maltreatment and stressful life during childhood are also among the risk factors in the development of social phobia.
At What Age Does It Start
Social phobia usually begins in childhood or early adolescence, before adulthood, and rarely develops after the age of 25.
Counseling Process
The most frequently applied therapy types in the counseling process of Social Phobia are; Cognitive and Behavioral Therapyand EMDRTherapy models, which are recently used to improve post-traumatic symptoms all over the world and in our country, have been applied.
With Cognitive therapy, individuals are questioned about the physical reactions that occur in individuals and the negative thoughts of the person that cause anxiety, and support is given to develop coping skills for these.
EMDR therapy, on the other hand, is a method in which individuals eliminate their emotional, physical and negative beliefs about themselves, caused by negative life experiences they have had in the past. With EMDR, that is, eye movement desensitization and reprocessing model, the individual is desensitized to these negative life experiences in the past and is also supported to become more functional now and in the future.
According to research, social phobia occurs in every eight people. It is a very common health problem that one person encounters at a certain period of his life. If the person believes that his/her quality of life has decreased due to these problems, he/she should definitely seek professional support because unless support is received, the problem may last for many years.
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