The What Keeps Social Anxiety Going? handout presents key factors that maintain social anxiety disorder.
Offers theory, guidance, and prompts for mental health professionals. Downloads are in Fillable PDF format where appropriate.
Includes client-friendly guidance. Downloads are in Fillable PDF format where appropriate.
An editable Microsoft PowerPoint version of the resource.
The "What Keeps It Going?" series is a set of one-page diagrams explaining how common mental health conditions are maintained. Friendly and concise, they provide an easy way for clients to understand at a glance why their disorders persist, and how they might be interrupted.
What Keeps Social Anxiety Going? is designed to help clients with social anxiety understand more about their condition.
Understanding what keeps social anxiety disorder going is crucial for effective intervention. By identifying these factors, therapists can develop idiosyncratic models of clients' experiences and focus their interventions.
Designed to help clients affected by social anxiety.
Explain to the client that certain difficulties persist due to cycles that maintain them.
Use the handout to discuss what might be keeping the client's difficulties going.
Pinpoint and personalize maintaining factors that are relevant to the client.
Explore how these maintaining cycles can be interrupted.
Research studies have shown that Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) is one of the most effective treatments for social anxiety (Mayo-Wilson et al, 2014). CBT therapists work a bit like firefighters: while the fire is burning they aren’t very interested in what caused it, but are more focused on what is keeping it going. This is because if they can work out what keeps the problem going, they can treat it by ‘removing the fuel’ and interrupting this maintaining cycle.
In 1995, psychologists David Clark and Adrian Wells published an influential model of social anxiety which identified the key components that are thought to explain why some people’s social anxiety persists. The What Keeps Social Anxiety Going? information handout describes some of these key factors, which maintain social anxiety. It illustrates these maintaining factors in a vicious cycle or 'flower' format in which each ‘petal’ represents a separate maintenance cycle. Helping clients to understand more about the cognitive model is an essential part of cognitive therapy for social anxiety (Warnock-Parkes et al, 2020). Therapists can use this handout as a focus for discussion, or as a template from which to formulate an idiosyncratic model of a client’s experiences of social anxiety.
Clark, D. M., & Wells, A. (1995). A cognitive model of social phobia. In R. Heimberg, M. Liebowitz, D. A. Hope, & F. R. Schneier (Eds.), Social phobia: Diagnosis, assessment and treatment. New York: Guilford Press, pp. 69–93.
Mayo-Wilson, E., Dias, S., Mavranezouli, I., Kew, K., Clark, D. M., Ades, A. E., & Pilling, S. (2014). Psychological and pharmacological interventions for social anxiety disorder in adults: a systematic review and network meta-analysis. The Lancet Psychiatry, 1(5), 368-376.
Warnock-Parkes, E., Wild, J., Thew, G. R., Kerr, A., Grey, N., Stott, R., ... & Clark, D. M. (2020). Treating social anxiety disorder remotely with cognitive therapy. The Cognitive Behaviour Therapist, 13.