I’m sure many people have told you, “You’ll just grow out of it.” Are they right? Sort of. Think of it this way. Simply by living on this earth, you are gradually exposed to more and more situations as the years go by. And, naturally, you pick up social skills along the way. So, in a sense, they are right.
But do you really want to wait years to shed your shyness? Jump into the rest of your life today. With the help of Good-Bye to Shy, you can start your own professional program that has proven to be the most effective nonpharmacological treatment, bar none.
Mental health professionals call the process “Graduated Exposure Therapy.” We’ll call it “G.E.T” for short. Just one of the many dozens of studies proving that Graduated Exposure is the most effective cure puts it this way:
Social Anxiety Disorder subjects receiving combination treatment of Graduated Exposure to fear-provoking situations and learning social skills improved significantly more on measures of community functioning than did subjects with any other treatments.16
—JOURNAL OF CONSULTING AND CLINICAL PSYCHOLOGY
We’ve talked about the first crucial step on the path to confidence, avoiding avoidance. Now we come to the second: Graduated Exposure, gradually exposing yourself to increasingly scary situations. Pay attention! This is the biggie, the pulse of your Stamp Out Shyness campaign.
In spite of all of the psychological and sociological proof to the contrary, some Shys still think that G.E.T. isn’t really the way to get over shyness.
There are two reasons. One is that it’s only natural to rationalize yourself out of something you don’t want to do. And the second is that a few publicity-hungry, self-styled therapists have sensationalized Graduated Exposure. Here is a harmful example.
While channel surfing one day, I got caught up in an ugly wave. I happened on one of those television talk shows, or rather circuses, where people who suffer from an assortment of afflictions are on display. This particular program prefers people plagued with mental and/or physical disorders. The heartless host feigns compassion. He has an insatiable appetite for bizarre family relationships, strange sexual tastes, and other eccentric infirmities. While tearful guests bare their souls to millions of viewers, the studio audience hoots and hollers, egging them on to even more humiliation. In this particular installment, the guest had an unusual fear.
“Ralph is afraid of peaches,” the host gleefully announced.
“Ooh,” the audience chanted.
“He can’t come near them.”
“Ooh,” the audience chanted louder. A basket of peaches appeared on a big screen behind Ralph. The host pointed up at it. Ralph turned, swore (bleeped out), screamed, and jumped up. Two hundred seventy pounds of sheer terror raced down the studio hall, followed, of course, by the camera crew.
Hysterical laughter from the audience.
Ralph, covered by three cameras, cowered in the corner backstage. At the host’s goading, the audience began chanting, “Ralph, come back. Ralph, come back.” Ralph, still shaking, staggered back on the set.
The crowd applauded.
While winking at the audience, the host asked Ralph, “Why don’t you like peaches?”
“They’re fuzzy, they’re slimy.” Then almost inaudibly, he muttered something about a girlfriend who had peach shampoo.
At that moment, two voluptuous women brought in two big baskets of peaches.
The audience’s gleeful crescendo became “Uh-oh, he’s in big trouble now!” At the sight of the peaches, the spectators were treated to a repeat performance from Ralph. This time he ran through the audience. They tackled him and succeeded in pulling his pants down. The camera caught the rear view of Ralph crawling away from the taunting audience on all fours, his trousers around his knees.
Ralph once again crouched in the fetal position in a corner of the studio wings. The host followed and sneered, “Do you know what you are now? A six-foot-tall, 270-pound man cowering in the corner!”
Mercifully for me, just then my phone rang.
When I came back fifteen minutes later, Ralph was happily holding a ripe peach in his hand. With a big smile, he brought it to his lips.
The camera cut to a self-described “phobia life coach and therapist” sitting paternally beside Ralph. He explained to a gullible audience that he cured Ralph by gradual exposure and that Ralph will never fear peaches again.
Have you ever seen a nature film where a tiny flower bud bursts from the ground in a few seconds? Two seconds later, it sprouts leaves. Another five seconds and exquisite petals open to receive the sunlight. The filming itself could have taken weeks. But we view this spectacle of nature in less than thirty seconds. If Ralph’s host were an unethical horticulturalist rather than an emcee of debauched demonstrations, he would try to convince us that the flower buds actually blossomed in those few seconds.
For Ralph, it was the right idea, wrong timing. Gradually exposing someone to a feared object or situation definitely works—but not in an hour-long show.
With successful exposure, social situations no longer cue danger-based interpretation and anxiety.17
—JOURNAL OF BEHAVIORAL RESEARCH THERAPY
Dr. Bernardo Carducci, a highly respected therapist who has been researching shyness for twenty-five years, tells the story of Margaret, who was so petrified of spiders that she couldn’t walk anywhere except on a wide cement sidewalk.18 Her fear of spiders didn’t permit her to enter any building but her own.
During treatment, the therapist first asked Margaret to simply write the word spider repeatedly. Her next task, probably weeks later, was to look at pictures of spiders in a book. It was a giant step, and probably a long time later, when she was able to view a spider in a glass box across the room. Ever so gradually, Margaret could come closer and closer to the little critter in the box. As her final victory, Margaret sat comfortably in a room with a spider crawling along the arm of her chair.
But this was no hour-long TV show. By the end of the first hour, Margaret was probably still trying to hold her pen steady while she wrote the word spider. Film coverage of Margaret’s phobia and eventual cure would have made a rather humdrum TV show, lasting several months. But at least it would have been real.
The therapist had treated Margaret with Graduated Exposure Therapy—real Graduated Exposure Therapy, which takes a lot longer than forcing a peachaphobic to eat the fuzzy fruit in one sitting. G.E.T. is the most effective nonpharmacological treatment for shyness and other phobias that exists today.
Gradual exposure guides patients to confront feared situations and allows their fear to dissipate naturally. They interpret it accurately and gain essential skills. Patients gain a sense of safety through not prematurely escaping from or avoiding social situations.19
—SOCIAL ANXIETY DISORDER: RESEARCH AND PRACTICE
The second “must do” to shed your shyness is to create a personalized program just for you taking into account your specific challenges. In essence, it is your own Gradual Exposure Therapy for people and situations that intimidate you. The easiest and the most difficult situations vary greatly for each individual Shy. What is a big challenge for one Shy may be a no-brainer for another.
One reason some Shys fail to shed their shyness is because they think that they have to force themselves to do very scary things right away. They feel that they need to accomplish the impossible, like winking at Mr. Wonderful today or asking Ms. Drop-dead Gorgeous for a date tomorrow. Or swaggering into the boss’s office this afternoon and demanding a raise.
Therapists would call this technique “flooding.”20 But who wants to drown? Just dip your big toe in first.
• Past Jitters: First, write a list of the people and situations that have made you uncomfortable in the past. For example, were you tongue-tied when someone asked you to “say a few words” to the group? Did you make a quick U-turn the minute you entered a party because everyone looked so intimidating? Did you avoid talking to an attractive someone?
• Future Jitters: When you’ve finished your list of past jitters, list some specific future qualms. Have you been asked to make a presentation to your team at work? Is there a menacing must-attend event coming up? Is there a special someone you’d like to spend more time with but are too anxiety-ridden to even talk to?
• General Jitters: Now write some broad-spectrum, general situations that make you shudder. They don’t have to be ones you’ve confronted in the past or will have to face in the near future, just situations where even thinking about them makes your legs turn to linguine.
Incidentally, you might be interested in how your hot spots compare to other Shys. Researchers polled patients suffering from Social Anxiety Disorder on which situations they found most intimidating.21 The three most menacing were meeting and talking with:
• Strangers, 70 percent
• Individuals of the opposite sex, 64 percent
• Authorities, 48 percent
Now shuffle your list around. Put the simplest challenge at the beginning and the most terrifying at the end. If you’re somewhat comfortable talking to strangers at a cocktail party, but having a one-on-one dialogue at a dinner party makes you feel like you’re sitting on broken glass, list the casual conversation of the cocktail party first and the dialogue of the dinner party after. Or it may be the reverse for you, in which case you would put dinner conversation first, cocktail parties next.
Now you come to the inventive part. You are going to design your own G.E.T. program. It is the proven way to conquer fear and shed shyness. Take the first challenge on your list and break the activity into small steps. Think of it as climbing a staircase where each step is higher than the last. You are building your muscles so that soon no step will be too high.
Suppose, for example, talking with people in authority terrifies you. Whenever you take the elevator at work, you live in fear that the CEO will step in. Now you’re trapped. How do you act? What do you say?
Your staircase to a new comfort level might look something like this.
• First step: Chat with the supervisor of a different department. It’s less scary than talking with someone who has direct authority over you.
• Second step: Chat with your own supervisor. This will be much easier after you’ve talked to the other supervisor. They’re both on the same level.
• Third step: Chat with the department head. Sharing a few friendly words with him or her will feel more natural after conversations with the previous two authority figures.
Continue constructing your staircase until you feel that you could conversationally juggle an entire board of directors squashed together with you in the elevator.
Your success may be slower or quicker than Margaret overcoming her “spider-phobia.” But you won’t have to sit down and write the word party one hundred times. Nor will I ask you to strut into a big bash tomorrow night. You will go at your own pace. But at least you know you’re not swallowing snake oil.
Just like Snow White’s groupies sang “Whistle While You Work” to keep themselves happy on the job, you can hum the Good-Bye to Shy theme song to cheer you on to each new challenge. The lyrics are, “I’m starting with the simplest and working my way up to the scariest.” You can put the song to your favorite music—classical, C&W, acid rock—as long as the lyrics are the same. Sing the song to yourself as you do every ShyBuster in the book.
Soon it will be tough to find anyone who intimidates you. You will be looking at, smiling at, and comfortably chatting with the scariest people—new acquaintances, the big boss, the movie star you run into, even the drop-dead fantastic potential partner who used to make you forget that your mother tongue was English.
Do the thing you fear most and the death of fear is certain.
—Mark Twain