Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
For people with social anxiety, dating is often one of the
biggest areas of challenge and difficulty. Either it's something that's avoided entirely
or they suffer through it. So when someone comes to me and they have social anxiety
and we address the the dating-related questions,
a few basic recommendations I'll make:
one of them is to reduce their expectations that they place on themselves.
A big part social anxiety is to say
I need to be perfect, I need to say just the right things,
I need to do just the right things. Then we'll encourage them to not necessarily
think other person as being such a critic.
People with social anxiety problems are thinking that
whoever they are with, that person is ready and poised to spring and criticize them
when they do anything imperfect. And so if they're able to say
you know I'm not gonna expect that that person is going to be quite so critical
as I anticipate they will be.
But nevertheless, the third thing being
if they can also tell themselves, even if I do
do something imperfect and even frankly if the other person does criticize me
or think less of me because what I did or didn't do,
and this probably won't happen, but even if they did,
I can bounce back from that - that isn't the end of the world.
I don't have to treat this situation like if it doesn't go well
then it's game over. So we really encourage people
to look at the big picture and put a little less pressure on themselves.