Social fear usually has a first address. School corridors, a year when appearance decided everything, a group that made a project of you. Knowing where it began does not undo it, but it stops it feeling like a fact about your character.

What the research says

Clinical work on imagery rescripting starts from the observation that the negative picture people carry into social situations is often anchored to one early humiliation, and that revisiting and rewriting that memory changes the beliefs which follow from it. The controlled test was a pilot with eleven patients, where a rescripting session shifted the self image more than a control session did. Eleven people is very few, so the idea is better supported than the technique is.

Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.