Recovery from social anxiety and related conditions.

Robert F. Mullen, PhD
Director/ReChanneling

The distinction between social anxiety disorder and social anxiety is a matter of severity; reference to one includes the other. The recovery tools and techniques provided apply to comorbid emotional malfunctions including depression, substance abuse, generalized anxiety, and issues of self-esteem and motivation. These malfunctions originate homogeneously, their trajectories differentiated by environment, experience, and the diversity of human thought and behavior. 

“Dr. Mullen is doing impressive work helping the world. He is the pioneer of proactive neuroplasticity utilizing DRNI – deliberate, repetitive, neural information.” – WeVoice (Madrid, Málaga)

Neuroscience and the psychological understanding of repetition in learning support neural restructuring. CBT and positive reframing help us offset our irrational thoughts and behaviors with healthy productive ones. Positive psychology’s emphasis on character strengths, virtues, and attributes spearheads the regeneration of our self-esteem and motivation.

Goal and Objectives

The primary goal of recovery from social anxiety is the mitigation of our irrational fears and anxieties. In self-empowerment, it is the rebuilding of our self-esteem and motivation. We achieve this through a three-pronged approach.

1. Offset, replace, or overwhelm our negative thoughts and behaviors with healthy, productive ones.
2. Produce rapid, concentrated neurological stimulation to offset the abundance of negative information in our brain’s metabolism.
3. Regenerate our self-esteem through mindfulness of our assets.

These comprise our overall strategy.

Recovery and Self-Empowerment

Recovery is regaining possession or control of something stolen or lost. Self-empowerment is making a conscious decision to become more confident and competent in controlling our lives. In emotional malfunction, our emotional well-being and quality of life have been stolen. In self-empowerment, it is the loss of self-esteem and motivation. Hence, both recovery and self-empowerment deal with regaining or rebuilding what has been lost. 

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“It is one of the best investments I have made in myself, and I will
continue to improve and benefit from it for the rest of my life.” – Nick P.

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Restructure Our Neural Network

All information notifies our neural network to realign, generating a correlated change in behavior and perspective. Our deliberate, repetitive neural input of information that constitutes proactive neuroplasticity compels our brain to consolidate and accelerate the restructuring of our neural circuitry. 

Replace Negative Thoughts and Behaviors

Childhood disturbance prompts our negative core and intermediate beliefs, which establish the attitudes, rules, and assumptions that compel maladaptive behavior and automatic negative thoughts of incompetency, undesirability, and other forms of negative self. We reframe and replace our negative thoughts and behaviors with healthy new mindsets, skills, and abilities through CBT, positive reframing, and other approaches.

Regenerate Our Self-Esteem

Our neural network has structured itself around negative information due to years of self-destructive appraisal and the general vicissitudes of life. Through the rediscovery and recognition (mindfulness) of our character strengths, virtues, attributes, as well as achievements, we regenerate the latent properties of our self-esteem disrupted by childhood disturbance and the onset of our emotional malfunction.

Multiple Approaches

Just as there is no absolute way to do or experience learning and unlearning, so also what helps us at one time in our life may not help us at another. Consequently, one-size-fits-all approaches to recovery and self-empowerment are exclusionary and inefficient. We are best served by integrating approaches, developed through clinical study, client targeting, cultural assimilation, and therapeutic innovation. Our environment, heritage, experiences, and associations reflect our wants, choices, and aspirations. If they are not given consideration, then we are not valued. Recovery builds upon our strengths, virtues, and achievements. We do not triumph in battle through incompetence and weakness but with skill and careful planning.

A coalescence of science and east-west psychologies is essential to capture the diversity of human thought and experience. Science gives us proactive neuroplasticity; cognitive-behavioral modification and positive psychology’s optimal functioning are Western-oriented, and Eastern practices provide the therapeutic benefits of Abhidharma psychology and the overarching truths of ethical behavior. Crucial to recovery and self-empowerment are individually targeted approaches that focus on the regeneration of our self-esteem.

Complementarity

Complementarity isa state or system of corresponding components combining in such a way as to enhance or emphasize the qualities of each other. We are concerned here with two systems: the complementarity of psychological and scientific approaches to recovery and the simultaneous mutual interaction of our mind, body, spirit, and emotions to sustain them. 

Individual Over Diagnosis

Hippocrates famously wrote, “It’s far more important to know what person the disease has than what disease the person has.” We focus on the individual over the diagnosis through personality-based solutions. Emphasis on the positive aspects of the human condition over pathographic models compensates for malfunction-induced negative self-beliefs and images. Training in prosocial behavior and emotional literacy support typical interventions.

Behavioral exercises are used to practice social skills. Data provide evidence for mindfulness and acceptance-based interventions. Motivational enhancement strategies help clients overcome their resistance to new ideas and concepts.

Discipline Collaboration

Radical behaviorism considers the diversity of human thought and experience, which is more expansive than mind and body. That calls for a collaboration of science, philosophy, and psychology. Philosophy, existentially defined, welcomes religious and spiritual insight. Gestalt theory emphasizes that the whole of anything is greater than its parts. Our mind, body, spirit, and emotions are interconnected parts of the whole that cannot exist independently of the whole or the parts. Each component overlaps, influences, and is interdependent on the others, albeit one dominates until superseded by another. They collaborate in the holism of our personality as the gestalt of our humanness.

Proactive Neuroplasticity YouTube Series

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Committing to recovery is one of the hardest things you will ever do.
It takes enormous courage and the realization that you are of value,
consequential, and deserving of happiness.