Social Anxiety: Often Created Through Trauma
Social Anxiety Often Has a Trauma Root — Understanding the Connection Can Help You Heal
Social anxiety often has a trauma root. Understanding this connection is incredibly valuable, whether you're exploring this issue for yourself in a self-help capacity or you're a therapist working with people who experience social anxiety.
In my experience over 20 years as a psychotherapist, almost everybody with social anxiety had a root trauma, an early trauma that sparked the social anxiety. These traumas sometimes happened in childhood. It could be a very critical caregiver, or a family and sibling structure that utilized humiliation as a tool for socialization. Using humiliation to make kids behave when they don't comply is not something I recommend, as it can create major problems — but unfortunately, it is used by cultures across the world and has been practiced for centuries.
That kind of humiliation can make somebody feel fundamentally defective and believe they are severely at risk if they're judged harshly by others.
Middle School as Another Critical Wounding Zone
The other trauma route involves events in middle school in particular — situations with groups of friends where the person felt humiliated, or perhaps they were bullied extensively, picked on relentlessly. The more dangerous the bullying, the more threatening to the person's sense of survival, the more deeply that gets ingrained as a traumatic memory.
Traumatic memories get lodged in our body in a distinct way. They settle into some of the older parts of our brain, and they're stored in a manner where they carry all of the physiological sensations of the original moment, linked to a particular trigger pattern.
Let me illustrate this with an example. Imagine a middle school student giving a presentation who flubs it, as many middle school students do. But if they were in an environment where they were regularly picked on, teased, or simply weren't surrounded by psychological safety, that could have become a profoundly humiliating experience.
It's completely understandable how an 11-, 12-, or 13-year-old would be devastated by humiliation in that situation. And that memory then gets lodged so that whenever that person gives a presentation thereafter, all the physiological feelings of panic, anxiety, being judged, excluded from the group — every emotional and physical sensation they experienced at the time of that event — flood back in every time they face a similar situation.
This can persist well into old age if the person doesn't receive treatment.
"Big T" Versus "little t" Traumas
I want to add an important distinction here regarding "Big T" versus "little t" traumas. Giving a presentation, obviously, isn't a big T trauma. It's not witnessing someone die. It's not witnessing a horrific event. It's not going to war or enduring major abuse.
However, what trauma therapists have learned over the last couple of decades is that little T traumas have long-lasting effects. Little T traumas, particularly when they're repeated and develop into negative core beliefs, and then there are repeated experiences confirming that negative belief over and over — those accumulated little T traumas create a major impact that's actually best treated almost the same way you treat big T traumas.
I wanted to give you this framework because I know many of my clients used to really minimize what had happened to them. They would tell me, "No, I haven't really experienced any trauma," or "Oh, that was just middle school bullying."
Middle school is a uniquely vulnerable time in our lives. It's when we shift our focus away from our parents as our primary source of sense of self, and we begin shifting toward our peers. Nobody knows what they're doing at that stage. Everybody's insecure. The development of empathy starts young, but it definitely takes time to mature. So you have a whole cohort of insecure middle schoolers, and the behavior can be quite cruel. Each individual middle schooler is at a developmental stage where learning to relate to peers is critically important.
The example I gave of feeling embarrassed and humiliated by a presentation you deliver — the fact that it happened during that pivotal period in life, when peer acceptance was the most important thing to you, contributes significantly to the impact it carries forward.
Why This Framework Matters for Treatment
One reason this discussion is really important is that the main treatment for social anxiety is cognitive behavioral therapy. The research supporting CBT for social anxiety is very strong. Cognitive behavioral therapy definitely helps people with social anxiety, particularly when it includes a focus on exposure techniques or reducing avoidance.
People with social anxiety tend to avoid events that make them anxious, and then the anxiety gets progressively worse. They get temporary relief from avoiding the event, but long-term, you're essentially signaling to your primitive brain — which isn't highly sophisticated — that this was something to be avoided, that it's a very scary situation. And now that I decided not to go, I feel better. So you reinforce the avoidance, but then you isolate more and more.
Generally, you end up in a place where you don't feel good about yourself because you're avoiding everything. This can really impede your progress moving forward in life — your ability to secure meaningful work, your ability to form meaningful relationships.
Exposure-type techniques really help retrain that older brain to understand, "Yes, now you're an adult. You can give a presentation. Maybe it goes well, maybe it doesn't go so well — probably it falls somewhere in the middle. Most of us, when we give presentations, land in that middle range. But you're not in danger." Actually engaging in behaviors that make you anxious and having an okay result at the end is one of the most helpful things for retraining your brain.
Processing the Underlying Trauma
However, if there's a significant trauma root to the social anxiety, I've always found that the person really needed to process that traumatic event. I'll point you toward a video at the end of this that explains traumatic memory processing, so you can understand a bit more about what that means.
But to truly feel better, someone with a trauma root for their social anxiety needs to resolve that trauma to the extent they can, and genuinely change those negative core beliefs about themselves — or at least crack open a window. Crack open a window so they can take the risks that will enable them to change behavior, which will enable them to heal.
In working with clients as a therapist, I found that EMDR was the most effective means of helping somebody process a traumatic memory to the point where it would no longer trigger all the bells and whistles of emotional and physiological distress. EMDR brings you to a place where you might say, "Yeah, I remember that happened. It really was bad, but I'm not feeling it now when I'm remembering it."
EMDR works with this concept of the negative core belief because trauma leads us to believe things like "I'm damaged," but it can also lead us to believe "I'm stupid," "I can't trust others," "I'm defective" — some type of feeling that I'm not good enough, and I'm in danger because of it.
Important Resources for Self-Help
I know not everybody has access to therapy, which is one reason I make these videos. I also created a free PDF called Transform Your Negative Core Belief. It helps you identify what that real core, deep-down belief is that's keeping you stuck, and it gives you three ways to overturn that belief. Many people have found that really helpful.
There's also online software called Virtual EMDR. I've used it myself, and I've spoken to numerous people who've used it. It's self-help, but it guides you through reviewing these memories with the eye movement component of EMDR, identifying those negative core beliefs, and determining what the alternate positive core belief would be.
I am an affiliate of Virtual EMDR. If you use my link, you'll get some time free and can try it out to see if it's helpful.
Now, I want to mention another video called Is It a Good Idea for Me to Do Self-Help EMDR or Not? If you tend to become very dysregulated, self-help EMDR can definitely be dysregulating. So learning diaphragmatic breathing and other ways to calm your physiology while remembering these events is super important. Developing those abilities, techniques, and skills before jumping into it is crucial.
Practice Self-Compassion
If you have social anxiety, please be easy on yourself. Don't criticize yourself for it. I know it's really hard not to, but if you can extend the same kind of compassionate understanding toward yourself that you would offer a friend who said, "Look, I had these horrible experiences, and now every time I'm in a social situation, this is how I feel" — you would probably be incredibly empathetic and compassionate toward that person.
I'm encouraging you to be that compassionate with yourself.
I'd love to hear from you. Comment below and let me know what you think. Share any questions you have. If you found value in this, please share it with someone who might benefit. Hit the like button and subscribe to my channel for future material — all of that really helps me continue bringing this information worldwide.
See you next week.
Blog Author: Barbara Heffernan, LCSW, MBA. Barbara is a licensed psychotherapist and specialist in anxiety, trauma, and healthy boundaries. She had a private practice in Connecticut for twenty years before starting her popular YouTube channel designed to help people around the world live a more joyful life. Barbara has a BA from Yale University, an MBA from Columbia University and an MSW from SCSU. More info on Barbara can be found on her bio page.
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