ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses social anxiety utilizing the cognitive experiential group therapy (CEGT) model. Social anxiety disorder (SAD) can often contribute to people feeling like they are alone. Automatic thoughts such as “I’m too awkward,” “I can’t make friends,” and “Everyone thinks I’m weird” are hallmarks of social anxiety. When this anxiety becomes extreme and disrupts how we present or deliver important ideas, it cripples our presentation skills and is referred to as performance/social anxiety.
Psychotherapy in a group format is an available and effective intervention for patients with SAD. Group treatment provides a ready-made audience available for practicing social interactions. Group feedback can be an effective way to challenge the patient’s distorted self-perception.
This group action psychotherapy model has several advantages. In the course of CEGT, patients with SAD can re-enact their social trauma, emotional abuse, and adverse life events from childhood and re-experience a negative social interaction from the past by role-playing, which provides a facility to change the patient’s beliefs, feelings, and attitudes about the traumatizing situation.
The treatment structure for this model incorporates 12 sessions, outlining the components for each session. An example CEGT of each session is recorded, showing the warm-up, action, and sharing stages of the model. CEGT enriches traditional group-based CBT for SAD interventions by allowing experiential techniques to enhance the change process. The use of CBT techniques allied with psychodrama/experiential-action helps provide a balance between exploration of emotionally laden situations and a more concrete, data-based, problem-solving process.
