[netsharc]

I wonder if it's the mind having lifelong expectations of social interactions going bad (why did it learn that?), and dismissing the plenty of events where "See, it didn't blow up in your face!".

I also wonder if the programming could be changed by some sort of conscious learning...

[vidarh]

One thing I picked up somewhere, is that some people remember social situations with a far more negative spin than others and/or simply remember more of the negative interactions, and a way to counter that is to make notes while it's fresh in your mind. At least for a while.

It was really eye-opening for me to do this for a while, as even just writing down social interactions both led to discovering while writing it down that I'd probably misread situations as less positive than they were and forced me to pay closer attention to things I didn't use to during interactions.

But the biggest help was really just driving home how rare negative interactions were, and how little they mattered, relative to the rest, and also how much less they matter when you actually notice more of the good ones.

[Ensorceled]

That's what CBT tries to do. Treatment for social anxiety typically uses a CBT process of both exposure therapy and cognitive restructuring: where you learn to replace negative thoughts, especially dysfunctional ones like "this person will hate me", with neutral "this person might hate me, but so what" or positive ones.

I'm over simplifying, CBT has a bunch of other techniques as well.