Ok, so I completely failed at maintaining what I wanted this blog to be, and that was updating throughout the process of treatment. It's just I've been completely busy. This semester my work hours got upped to 20 hours a week, and then on top of that my school work has just been a never ending flood of homework,tests, and projects. On top of that I've had to go to career fairs/interviews and hope to goodness I'll have a job by the time I graduate this semester..
Anyways, enough about me.
So, things I've noticed that work in resolving the symptoms of social anxiety disorder. First and foremost, like I said in my previous blog entry, each person with SA has slightly different "physical symptoms" or ways in which their SA shows itself. For me, it was a suffocating sensation of running out of air when I talked and in addition my mind going blank during social interactions. Why do I say this? Well, if your goal is to treat social anxiety, then most likely you want to reduce the intensity and frequency of symptoms. So in order to do that you need to know what symptoms are bothering you specifically, and be able to attach "intensity" ratings to it throughout your CBT.
So I've come to figure out that CBT is not about desensitizing you to socializing. Rather, it's about building a new way to think when confronted with social situations.
So things I've found that assist in accomplishing this. First, prolonged exposure exercises such as what I've described in the past would in fact engage the new behavioral process. I would find that the "physical" symptoms of SA were significantly lessened a few hours after exposure, and indeed up to about a day or two after my exposure session. However, the positive effects would drop off and a renewal of intensity in the physical symptoms would occur roughly 2+ days after my exposure exercise.
In order to combat this, I increased my exposure exercises to twice daily, followed by daily cognitive exercises in filling out "thought" records. I will go into detail about thought records later. This allowed me an easier time to maintain CBT effects longer, and it made it easier for me to engage my "new" way of thinking about social interactions.
The effects of this I can state mainly as follows: there were times where I was able to interact socially with minimal to no social anxiety. Such as going to the movie with friends, talking with female friends, and interacting with coworkers. This was solid evidence that my therapy was working. However, there's still a large problem of oscillation between a non-SA state and a SA state. I find that I am better after exposures but the longer I go without an exposure the more my brain degrades back to a SA state.
Speaking of being extremely busy, I don't even have time to finish this entry, I'll continue later.
