This article has some interesting points on social anxiety. I’m particularly pleased to see mention of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) as I recently underwent some training on this.
Even though I am a person centred counsellor and ACT is a variant of CBT I found some elements of the training really useful.
Firstly, as the article say “The fundamental premise of ACT, then, is that you don’t try to squash your feelings but are able to notice and accept them while committing yourself to a pathway toward change.” Acceptance of ones feelings is very compatible with the Person Centred Approach (PCA). The more aware we are of them the more we can accept them and ACT has a strong element of mindfulness and self-awareness.
The other part of the training I had that I found very useful was to focus on what our values are. For each of us as individuals, we have the values we are expected to have but don’t always focus on what is truly most important to us. For an individual with social anxiety, they may realise that it isn’t interfering in what they hold most dear, only with what they think they “should” hold most dear.
Noticing our true feelings and accepting them can be hard, yet it can also be liberating if we can avoid the “should’s” that we tend to carry with us.