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Areas › Worry and anxiety › Being seen and judged
Those rungs might run from voice notes, to a phone call, to a video call with the camera on, to meeting one person you already know somewhere quiet, well before anything resembling a room of strangers. If your whole social life has happened through text, being in a body in front of someone is genuinely new, and new things get learned slowly on purpose.
so that they may understand my words (Quran 20:28). The aim Moses names is being understood, and every rung between a screen and a room exists only to serve that.
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
There is a related finding worth knowing. Where the amount of exposure was matched, exposure carried out in virtual reality was not inferior to real world exposure for social phobia and other phobias, and a trial in ninety seven adults who mainly feared public speaking found eight virtual sessions worked about as well as real ones. Fear does update in simulated settings, which supports having intermediate rungs, though those studies used structured virtual programmes rather than everyday screen contact.
Wechsler TF, Kümpers F, Mühlberger A. (2019). Inferiority or Even Superiority of Virtual Reality Exposure Therapy in Phobias?-A Systematic Review and Quantitative Meta-Analysis on Randomized Controlled Trials Specifically Comparing the Efficacy of Virtual Reality Exposure to Gold Standard in vivo Exposure in Agoraphobia, Specific Phobia, and Social Phobia.. Frontiers in psychology doi
Anderson PL, Price M, Edwards SM, Obasaju MA, Schmertz SK, Zimand E, Calamaras MR. (2013). Virtual reality exposure therapy for social anxiety disorder: a randomized controlled trial.. Journal of consulting and clinical psychology doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
A situation your body has never practised does not become familiar by practising a different one.
If most of your talking happens somewhere everything gets counted, likes, views, replies, then of course a room full of people feels like a scoreboard too. The habit was learned somewhere real.
Build the ladder from what you do now, not from what you think you should be managing. If phone calls are currently impossible, the first rung sits somewhere below a phone call.
Friends who know what this feels like are worth a great deal. Leaning on them as your therapy is a different thing, and it tends to go badly for everyone.