Social Anxiety Disorders – Change Your Life Using Metaphors

Whether you're looking for Social Anxiety treatment or some other fear and anxiety pattern, in order to change your life it helps to understand why you are resistant to that change. As a hypnotist, rather than go into it using a lot of medical terms and psychology which is a dry read, I prefer to help you do this using your imagination by doing it using metaphor.

Metaphor is a technique that I use with my clients in hypnosis in West Sussex. In hypnosis I can change the way you perceive the world, change the way you experience it and help you along on that journey so that you can develop those capabilities and find your own way into the unknown with confidence.

Social Anxiety and all other fear patterns can be explained using my Village Metaphor, and I saw another perfect example of this on the big screen this week as I watched another 'small of stature large of feet' character leave his own Village, The Shire, in search of adventure.

In terms of Social Anxiety Disorder, you have built your own shire around you – you have the places that you feel comfortable in, you have the activities you feel comfortable doing and I hope you have at least one other person that you feel comfortable with. If you could just be left alone doing those things you would be perfectly happy as Bilbo was. The anxiety you get trying to do anything else would not matter a tot if no part of you wanted to do anything else.

However, there are parts of you that are not happy with that – you want more, you want adventure. The scene where Bilbo's house is being invaded by dwarves is a metaphor for your life with that kind of conflict which you know as Social Anxiety – part of you wants more but part of you wants to stay exactly where you are. Without that conflict, you would not experience anxiety. The dwarves are metaphors for the parts of you that want more out of life, that are trying to talk the rest of you into leaving your shire. You would like nothing more than for those parts to shut up and go away and leave you in peace....however, you also kinda want to go with them into the unknown and have an adventure, but that scares you and that fear makes a prisoner out of you.

The fact is you will never be ready to leave the shire until you have left it and faced what lies beyond and developed the capabilities to deal with it. These are capabilities that you cannot develop if you remain in your comfort zone.