I am still on my little self im posed one week vacation from all online news stories that typically try to shape our attitudes and opinions about current events ... so I am just going to continue to post information and insights ... I stumbled upon ... Here is more about anxiety and social phobia - a cognitive perspective ... This topic is safety behaviours ... ••• Discussing phobias in general ... patients often fail to benefit from the non-occurrence of a feared catastrophe when they are in a phobic situation because they engage in a variety of safety-seeking behaviours that are intended to prevent or minimize the feared catastrophe. If the catastrophe then fails to occur, patients ascribe the non-occurrence to the safety behaviour RATHER THAN inferring that the situation is less dangerous than they previously thought. Clark and Wells agree that safety behaviours operate in this fashion in social phobia and highlight several additional interesting features of social phobia-related safety behaviours: • First, although termed “behaviours”, many safety-seeking acts are internal mental processes. For example, patients with social phobia who are worried that what they say may not make sense and will sound stupid, often report memorizing what they have said and comparing it with what they are about to say, while speaking. If everything goes well, patients are likely to think, “it only went well because I did all the memorizing and checking, if I had just been myself people would have realized how stupid I was”. • Second, because there are often many levels to social phobics’ fears, it is common for patients to engage in a large number of different safety behaviours while in a feared situation. • Third, safety behaviours can create some of the symptoms that social phobics fear. For example, trying to hide underarm sweating by wearing a jacket or keeping one’s arms close to one’s sides, produces more sweating. Similarly, memorizing what one has been saying makes it difficult to keep track of a conversation, triggering the thought “other people will think I’m boring/stupid”. • Fourth, most safety behaviours have the consequence of increasing self-focused attention and self-monitoring, thus further enhancing the salience of one’s negative self-image and reducing attention to others’ behaviour. • Fifth, some safety behaviours can draw other people’s attention to the patient. For example, a secretary who covered her face with her arms whenever she felt she was blushing discovered that colleagues in her office were considerably more likely to look at her when she did this than when she simply blushed. Similarly, a patient who intensely disliked being the centre of attention would speak quietly when trying to make a point in a meeting. The consequence of this manoeuvre was that people had difficulty hearing what she was saying and therefore stared at her. • Finally, some safety behaviours influence other people in a way which partly confirms the social phobic’s fears. For example, social phobics’ tendency to continually monitor what they have said and how they think they have been received often makes them appear distant and preoccupied. Similarly, their efforts to hide signs of anxiety and not show signs of weakness can make them appear aloof and unfriendly. Other people can interpret such behaviours as a sign that the phobic does not like them and, as a consequence, they respond to the phobic in a less warm and friendly fashion. ... patients with social phobia can appear less outgoing and warm. Traditionally, this has been seen as a result of social skills deficits ... In contrast to this point of view, Clark and Wells suggest that most social phobics have an adequate social skills capacity and their apparent social performance deficits are simply the observable side of their safety-seeking behaviours. •••
Posted on: Thu, 08 Jan 2015 08:21:18 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015