Helping Your Shy and Socially Anxious Client: A Social Fitness Training Protocol Using CBT

Helping Your Shy And Socially Anxious Client presents a breakthrough therapeutic approach to treating social anxiety.

In a world dominated by extroverts, being shy or socially anxious can make life especially challenging. And while there is nothing wrong with being naturally introverted, avoiding social contact due to extreme fear and anxiety can be very damaging both mentally and physically.

As a therapist, you understand that avoidance can often make a client's anxiety worse. But many clients with shyness and social anxiety believe they can never change. In fact, they may strategically adjust their lives to avoid social activities or situations that make them uncomfortable. In a sense, they allow their social "muscles" to atrophy, and in the end may become even more alienated and despondent. There is hope.

Just as physical fitness strengthens the body, "social fitness" can be developed through habit and action. In Helping Your Shy and Socially Anxious Client, shyness expert Lynne Henderson presents the Social Fitness program-a twelve session cognitive behavioural model for clients with shyness and social anxiety. Inside, mental health professionals will learn powerful tools for helping clients strengthen their social skills, track their successes, and learn to cope with setbacks or hurdles.

The techniques described in this manual were developed for the Stanford Shyness Clinic by Philip Zimbardo, and are currently being used by the Shyness Institute in Berkeley to educate therapists and other counsellors.

"Readers of this volume are fortunate to get the benefit of Lynne Henderson's deep understanding of social anxiety-understanding based both on her attention to the latest science and on her many years of clinical experience treating individuals who struggle with this problem. An outstanding contribution."
- Jacqueline B. Persons, PhD, director at the San Francisco Bay Area Center for Cognitive Therapy and clinical professor in the department of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley

"In her social fitness model of extreme shyness and social phobia, Lynne Henderson provides a thoughtful and measured road map to guide therapists through the twists and turns of treating a problem that is often underdiagnosed and undertreated. Of particular importance, Helping Your Shy and Socially Anxious Client describes the role of high self-criticism in the cycle of social anxiety and avoidance, a cycle that traps socially anxious clients in a toxic emotional mix of fear, shame, and anger. Henderson then describes strategies to help free clients from this emotional quicksand so that that they can live fuller and more meaningful lives."
- Michael A. Tompkins, PhD, author of Anxiety and Avoidance