Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy for Overcoming Social Phobia

SOCIAL ANXIETY DISORDER | SOCIAL PHOBIA | ANXIETY

The Anxiety Network International

Social Anxiety CBT Therapy Tape Series

Are You Interested in Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy for Social Anxiety Disorder/Social Phobia?

November 21, 1999 Message: This page was originally intended to find out if there was enough interest in an audio tape series directed at social anxiety therapy. We have received more interest than expected...thank you all. I apologize for the time this is taking, but the new machinery is now in our possession, and we are slowly proceeding. This therapy series will be comprehensive in nature. We want to cover everything that relates to social anxiety and provide multiple methods, solutions, and practical ways to overcome it. Please bookmark and check back with this page for updates. NOTE: This is first priority as of October 1999. I will be moving as fast as I possibly can. Again, thank you all for your great patience -- Dr. Richards

As some of you know, we receive hundreds of e-mails every week, dozens of telephone calls, and quite a few letters to boot. What are most of them about?

I understand these feelings only too well. As you know, I had social phobia for twenty plus years myself, and only now am I able to work and help other people out of this vicious cycle.

We try to answer all the correspondence we can (please e-mail; it is a lot easier). However, these answers are just band-aids. What most people are asking is if we have something they can use to help them overcome social phobia/social anxiety.

The presentation of the tapes is like this: You have just walked into your first therapy session with a specialist in CBT for social anxiety. You are going to be given the same information, handouts, and tapes that everyone else gets. We are not going to attempt to put testimonials on the tape, duplicate group or individual sessions, or do anything that is fancy-schmantzy. Your original feedback was almost unanimous: keep it simple and keep it directly related to the therapy. Your feedback was appreciated.

Secondly, as a psychologist, I cannot go on the media and claim that these tapes will cure you of cancer if you listen to them enough. Sorry. These tapes were produced in a very specific fashion, for a very specific purpose and population (people with social phobia/social anxiety), and they consist of the same material we see working for people every day of the week at the clinic.

No fallacious claims. You will not become perfect. You might even have a bad day!

But, if you follow the directions correctly, and do the therapy as research suggests, you will see slow, but gradual progress in your life. Change will come more quickly than you might imagine now. When you are in the middle of your therapy, it will seem the opposite....but if you just stay with it, you will move forward and you will gradually improve.

In order to reach the most people in the quickest time, we decided to produce an audiotape series on overcoming social phobia that would be as close as we could get to real visits at the clinic.

The advantages of this are we expect people, who follow the program as it is set up, to be able to improve significantly. In some cases, people will be able to get rid of the automatic negative thoughts and feelings that have persisted throughout their lifetimes. In other cases, the tapes may enable people to seek out help more aggressively where they live. We DO expect there to be significant help and progress, if a person follows the directions on the tape and is consistent with using them.

On the realistic side, we do not feel that a series of audiotapes will accomplish the same thing as actually being here at the clinic, or going to individual and group cognitive-behavioral sessions. We expect the tapes to be a great help to people, but we do not think they will, by themselves, be able to help everyone overcome social anxiety.

The tapes will come with a workbook that goes hand-in-hand with the audio, so that you will have audio instructions as well as written instructions on what to do to get better. As mentioned, the tapes will follow very closely the way we work at the clinic in helping people with social anxiety.

We will try to keep the costs down, but, given the estimates we have received, we expect the entire package (tape series, workbook, other reinforcements) to cost in the neighborhood of $350.00. At this point, this is NOT a set figure. It all depends on what happens in the next few months.

External Links to Social Phobia/Social Anxiety: