Stop Agonizing About Presenting Yourself to Others
                                And ... Speak Without Fear NOW!

  
   Dr. Signe A. Dayhoff
Social Effectiveness Guru   

INTRODUCTION - New & Improved
"Diagonally-Parked in a Parallel Universe:
Working Through Social Anxiety" - 2nd Ed.

Dear Social Anxiety Sufferers (Your Friends and Family),

Everyone has experienced fleeting moments of anxiety in social situations. But sometimes this social anxiety happens more frequently. Sometimes it’s severe and debilitating because it insinuates itself into one or more important aspects of your life.

You may suffer from the agonizing pangs of self-consciousness about being on public view or the center of attention … making a mistake, leaving you humiliated. You may dread meeting people, making small talk, giving a speech, using a public restroom, or eating in public. You may quake when talking to your boss or when your social skills and/or work are being observed … or your competence  assessed. You may feel threatened in a new social situation where you don’t know the ”rules.”

In general, when you have social anxiety, you avoid such situations altogether or just want to escape. However you experience this anxiety, you need to know you are not alone. While each sufferer experiences social anxiety a little differently, you’re all riding the same fearful, skittish horse.

When your social fears are intense and persistent, you have what’s called Social Anxiety Disorder/Social Phobia (SA/SP - “sasp” for short). This means every day you’re forced to confront the pain of being in the spotlight, being evaluated, and being embarrassed by the very social situations you long to embrace.

Socially you find yourself on the periphery of life’s dance, trying to follow the choreographed patterns and rhythm. But, usually you seem to be one beat out of synch, zigging when you should zag. Often you feel like the butt of a cosmic joke. You see yourself as the ball in a pinball machine, bouncing from bumper to bumper, missing targets, and always on the verge of “tilt.” This is the essence of being diagonally-parked in a parallel universe.

Clinically too, having SA/SP puts you in another dimension. SA/SP is the most common anxiety disorder and the third most common psychiatric disorder after depression and alcoholism. Yet, until the late 1990s, it was the least-diagnosed, least-widely understood, and most under-treated disorder. Still, few mental health professionals are fully appreciative of the broad range of the condition or are fully experienced in the different approaches to its treatment … even as the number of sufferers continues to increase.

Making your situation worse, many of you with SA/SP don’t know you have a treatable disorder. But even when you understand this, you’re often reluctant to seek professional help.

 You’re ashamed of the fear and worried that your complaints won’t be taken seriously. And, when you finally do muster the courage to seek help, you’re often hobbled by the very anxiety for which you seek help: Your fear of talking with and being evaluated by others. Together, these factors help keep this major health problem less visible… but no less painful.

This book was written to comprehensively show you how you can

· Significantly and effectively alleviate your SA/SP pain;

· Significantly improve your daily functioning; and

· Effectively work toward your social effectiveness and other potential.

You benefit from the uniqueness of my perspective. I’m a clinically-trained social psychologist working in the areas of social confidence, competence, and effectiveness. I am someone who struggled for 22 years to successfully overcome SA/SP.

I used to worry  endlessly about what others might think about me and whether I was meeting their expectations. As a result, I understand how it feels to be living- and working through this often-incapacitating disorder. I also know where you need to specifically concentrate your efforts to improve your lives multi-dimensionally.

You benefit from my knowledge of SA/SPers’ concerns, issues, and desires that results from nearly 10 years of coaching SA/SPers, as well as talking with and listening to them online and offline.

You benefit from my research, teaching, consulting, training, and coaching experience, as well as my association with professionals in the SA/SP therapy and clinical research trenches.

To make your SA/SP more understandable and amenable to change , this book provides you with everything you need: theories and salient research on its origin and development, its anxiety triggers and anxiety maintaining mechanisms, and a broad range of standard and alternative clinical approaches (including medications and therapies), life strategies, interpersonal, communication, and motivational exercises, and empathy.

 To help you empower yourself and succeed, this book takes you back to square one. It gives you the psychological preparation you need to jump-start, enable, and maintain your recovery process.

Because SA/SPers tend to have difficulties with clinicians, this book takes the mystery and risk out of locating and talking to them. Moreover, it guides you through the process. It shows you how to initiate your search and survive your first appointment. It tells you what to expect and how to prepare for it.

Because SA/SPers struggle with presenting themselves socially (just communicating, socializing, dating , or finding a job), this book addresses each significant life activity. It breaks each of them into digestible, sequential, chunks so you can absorb, assimilate, and achieve each chunk (and the whole) more easily.

And, because the Internet has great importance and value for SA/SPers as one of the few means of establishing relationships and comfortable communication you have, the book pinpoints services and resources available for those with SA/SP.

How you think, believe, feel, and behave determines how you interact with your environment (and how your environments perceive and respond to you). Consequently, this book focuses on your perceptions, emotions, attitudes, beliefs, and self-
presentation.

Using real-life stories, typical problems, and their solutions, its user-friendly format takes you logically, incrementally, step-by-baby-step through your recovery process. It takes you from foundation-building basics to advanced applications.

Through concise explanations, thought questions, self-quizzes, and exercises, you systematically develop and apply your cognitive and behavioral strategies to achieve your recovery goals.

In this process you’ll assess your social anxiety, determine where you’re headed, how to get there, and how you’ll know when you’ve arrived. You’ll act as a scientist doing experiments. You’ll learn by trial and error what works best for you as a unique individual.

You’ll discover, learn, practice, and apply new skills. You’ll constructively change  the way you think about and cope with your SA/SP and the world outside yourself. You’ll monitor your progress as you make positive changes and reward yourself for them.

However, it’s important to note, just reading this book isn’t likely to ameliorate your SA/SP. Not any more than just watching others exercise will cause you to lose weight and tone your body.

The book’s recovery program is action-oriented. It requires your active, committed, persistent participation. This is necessary if you are to alter all those factors that contribute to your SA/SP. These factors include your automatic fear arousal, negative thoughts, mistaken beliefs and assumptions, unrealistic expectations, and counter-
productive behaviors.

Note: As much as you may wish it, there is no finger-snapping, lamp-rubbing, “Shazaam!” magical solution to SA/SP. It took many factors interacting over many years to bring you to your present state. So recovery will not be instantaneous. But if you take the time to make the necessary structured effort toward recovery, you will quickly begin to experience small but significant changes in your thoughts, feelings, and behavior. You’ll glimpse what it’ll be like “without SA/SP.” You’ll feel the freedom to be the real you!

Essential to your SA/SP recovery will be empathy, patience, and your acceptance of yourself as you are. You must feel and believe that you’re worthy of becoming better. You must believe that you’re not to blame  for this problem … but that you are responsible for its solution.

The goal of this book is not to make you wildly extroverted or a party animal. Unless you’re an extrovert lurking under the heavy cloak of SA/SP, that’s not likely to happen. What is likely is when that leaden SA/SP mantle is slipped from your shoulders, your submerged personality, whatever that may be, will be liberated to fly and soar.

The goal of this book is not to make you a “success” at everything you try. It’s not to get you everything you want. It’s not to make your life totally perfect and totally satisfying. That’s unrealistic.

The goal is to substitute functional habits for dysfunctional habits. It’s to give you the knowledge, skills, insights, and tools you need to succeed interpersonally and socially.

The goal is to help you significantly and effectively alleviate your SA/SP pain, significantly improve your daily functioning, and effectively and successfully work toward meeting your potential. It will help effect your recovery.

Your purposeful actions toward recovery will give you the necessary success experience, confidence, and solution-finding strategies you’ll need for your new life. They’ll give you coping and social effectiveness skills. They will give you a new perspective on yourself, others, and social interaction.

Important: The first four chapters of this book are educational, providing you with a comprehensive, in-depth understanding of the many aspects of SA/SP: its origins, triggers, maintainers, and its clinical and social manifestations. Chapter 5 then takes you through, and prepares you for, the process of recovery. The treatment section begins with Chapter 6.

 Because you are understandably eager to start working directly on your SA/SP, you might possibly consider skipping the first five chapters. I strongly urge you not to do so. The more informed you are about the making of SA/SP and how it affects people generally and you particularly, the better able you’ll be to determine your unique SA/SP goals, make your plan to achieve them, and then do whatever is necessary to accomplish it.

Whether you use this book as a guide to work on your SA/SP on your own or as an adjunct to therapy, the thirteen chapters will provide you with everything you need to spark your action and relieve your anxiety.

I want you to always remember: Your social anxiety is merely a dysfunctional over-expression of your highly-tuned sensitivity, empathy, and imagination. These are special gifts. They are to be valued, cultivated, and nurtured. Yes, you CAN discover how to delight in these gifts … and share them with others.

I invite you to join me and enjoy finally being parallel-parked in a parallel universe.

Yours in social confidence, competence, and effectiveness,

Signe A. Dayhoff, Ph.D. (“Dr. Signe”)

Placitas, New Mexico

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