[bsenftner]

I learned about Cognitive Distortions: the $400 word phrase for "playing yourself", also called "lying to yourself in your self conversation."

There is this list of questions, 10-20 questions depending upon where you get them, the Cognitive Distortion Checklist. These simple questions you ask yourself, and if you answer 'yes' to any of them then you are lying to yourself in your self conversation. And the amazing part about deception, once aware of it that method of deception no longer deceives!

Now, social anxiety is a form of self deception. Your self conversation is exaggerating negative potential outcomes of a social situation while simultaneously minimizing potential positive outcomes of that same social situation. While in truth the negatives are nowhere as strong as your self conversation indicates and the positives are significantly higher.

And this does not just work for social anxiety. This idea, this concept of self auditing one's self conversation is extremely powerful and is how one prepares and manages stressful and critically important activities and decisions. It's a personal revolution everyone needs to have.

[TomaszZielinski]

For me the hard part was to convince myself that the distortions were actually real. I mean, on paper I could see there were distortions in my thinking, but my guts were still telling me that "those people are out there to get me".

In other words, (c)ognitive and (b)ehavioral components of CBT were contradicting each other. And that's where exposure was helpful--it allowed me to behaviorally validate that my cognitive distortions were real.

By which I mean that exposing myself to social interactions when all cells of my body wanted to escape, gradually convinced me about the things you mentioned: that the negatives are nowhere as strong and the positives are much, much higher.