Dr. Grisel Lopez-Escobar, PhD, LMHC, NCC
Licensed Mental Health Counselor Providing Virtual Therapy to Adult Clients
in the States of AK, CA, CO, FL, ID, IN, LA, MA, ME, OR, SC, TX, UT, VT & WI, USA
Specializing in Supporting Clients who are Newly Secular / Deconstructing / Have Experienced Religious Trauma or Shunning / Wish to Heal from Purity Culture
Your list of nightmare social scenarios is just too exhausting to tally. You're so used to spending time worrying about social situations before they happen, that you cannot imagine a world in which you don't. That's without counting what goes through your mind after the fact, whereby you dissect each interaction and come up with all the ways in which you screwed up by saying or doing the wrong thing. Yikes, just thinking about what you put yourself through after going to a party makes you want to never, ever attend another one. Ever.
Workplace & Social Anxiety
You've been thinking about finding a therapist to work on your social anxiety for quite some time, and you keep on putting it off. Most days your brain tells you that it's not fixable, and then when it does tell you that it's fixable it also tells you that you don't have the time, you don't have the energy, and well, it's just going to be too hard.
Deep down you get that your social anxiety is slowing you down, preventing you from living life to the fullest and perhaps even hindering your professionally. And yet, gosh, that pit in your stomach sure feels so familiar (ok, painfully familiar, but still). What would you even replace it with? How on Earth do other people navigate this stuff? Sometimes it feels like other people got the handbook on social interactions and you definitely did not. You smile inside when people talk about how isolated they felt during the Pandemic, and you remember how delicious it felt to only have to deal with people sporadically. Man, that was bliss...
Well, the good news is that sometimes our brains are just plain WRONG. Change is difficult. Scratch that: change can feel downright impossible. What I would like for you to remind your beautiful brain is that it's been able to adapt to a whole myriad of situations throughout your life, and that you've overcome more change than you could have ever fathomed possible.
So, let's tackle this together. Let me help you create a world in which invitations to workplace get-togethers and parties don't sent fear shooting down your spine, and you not only tolerate but (gasp) look forward to social situations.
Imagine that!