My guest this week is Alison McKleroy, a psychotherapist who just wrote a book called Essential Strategies for Social Anxiety: Practical Techniques to Face Your Fears, Overcome Self-Doubt, and Thrive (affiliate link). This is episode 109 and I believe my first focusing specifically on social anxiety, so this is long overdue. Alison had a lot to share about the essentials of evidence-based cognitive behavioral therapy for social anxiety, including many of the big ideas from her book.

Toward the end we got into a really important topic of how to overcome social anxiety even when people are actually critical toward us. Most of us, myself included, deal with some degree of social anxiety, so I’m guessing you’ll find a lot of these ideas really helpful.

Topics we discussed included:

• The point at which social anxiety becomes a significant problem
• Feeling bad about avoiding, and longing to connect
• The excitement of seeing people make breakthroughs in their social anxiety
• The challenge in moving through social anxiety
• The tremendous value in being willing to feel uncomfortable when working through social anxiety
• The acceptance paradox
• Working through automatic thoughts that trigger social anxiety
• Exposure therapy and social mishap exercises
• Recognizing all the parts of ourselves that are strong
• The different ways social anxiety can show up
• The underlying fear of being judged or criticized that drives social anxiety
• The downward arrow technique in CBT
• Addressing fear of fear in social anxiety
• Changing our relationship with fear
• Leaning into fear
• The grand relief that comes from being willing to experience anxiety
• Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT)
• Going beyond “being less anxious” to being unstoppable
• The co-occurrence of social anxiety and depression
• How social anxiety treatment can also relieve depression
• The difficulty in knowing if people are being honest about how they think about us
• Caring less about others’ judgments or criticism
• Connecting to a deep sense of our own self-worth
• The likelihood vs. cost of bad social outcomes
• Learning that people aren’t judging us as harshly as we think
• Discovering that there’s more love in our social world than we assume

Alison McKleroy, MA, LMFT, is a psychotherapist, CBT therapist, and communication expert with more than 15 years of clinical experience. She aims to empower those she works with to be courageous, confident, and active, creating a life that sparks joy.

Alison specializes in helping her clients learn and master effective tools for transforming negative thinking patterns and behavior. She’s a speaker, author, and trainer, leading groups on topics related to the neuroscience of creativity, happiness, and well-being.

She is also a coach and founder of Center for Spark, which offers education and training in practices that promote joy, ease, vitality, and connection. An avid traveler, Alison has been to over 25 countries, has lived and worked on five continents, and speaks four languages. She lives in Northern California with her husband and two children.

Find Alison online at her practice website and Center for Spark.