Areas › Worry and anxiety › Being seen and judged
Social fear usually has a first address. School corridors, a year when appearance decided everything, a group that made a project of you. Knowing where it began does not undo it, but it stops it feeling like a fact about your character.
What often keeps it alive is that the rules of that place travelled with you. The hierarchy ended at graduation and the watchfulness carried on. Naming the original setting lets you see the current fear as something learned there and carried here, which is a far smaller thing than being told this is simply who you are.
Qur’an and Sunnah
you thought it was trivial but to God it was very serious (Quran 24:15). What was said about you carried more weight than the people saying it ever realised, and that weight sits with them.
إِذۡ تَلَقَّوۡنَهُۥ بِأَلۡسِنَتِكُمۡ وَتَقُولُونَ بِأَفۡوَاهِكُم مَّا لَيۡسَ لَكُم بِهِۦ عِلۡمࣱ وَتَحۡسَبُونَهُۥ هَيِّنࣰ ا وَهُوَ عِندَ ٱللَّهِ عَظِيمࣱ
When you took it up with your tongues, and spoke with your mouths things you did not know [to be true], you thought it was trivial but to God it was very serious
Qur’an 24:15read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
Clinical work on imagery rescripting starts from the observation that the negative picture people carry into social situations is often anchored to one early humiliation, and that revisiting and rewriting that memory changes the beliefs which follow from it. The controlled test was a pilot with eleven patients, where a rescripting session shifted the self image more than a control session did. Eleven people is very few, so the idea is better supported than the technique is.
Wild J, Clark DM. (2011). Imagery Rescripting of Early Traumatic Memories in Social Phobia.. Cognitive and behavioral practice doi
Wild J, Hackmann A, Clark DM. (2008). Rescripting early memories linked to negative images in social phobia: a pilot study.. Behavior therapy doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
A fear tied to a time and a place can be questioned, while a fear that feels like your personality cannot.
When not to
Going back into a humiliating memory on purpose is work for a therapist's room, not something to open up alone late at night.
This one is still a draft. It is waiting on a scholar and a clinician to read it before it is published.
Near this one
Friends who know what this feels like are worth a great deal. Leaning on them as your therapy is a different thing, and it tends to go badly for everyone.
When you are ready, make it personal and small. Something you noticed about the person in front of you, said lightly, is the rung most people dread and most need.
When a step does not happen, cut the next one down without any speech about it. Smaller, and carry on.