Many people suffer from some form of social anxiety that impairs their ability to be effective in certain tasks or activities that they want to do. Should social anxiety treatment seek to reduce symptoms of anxiety or should it focus on discovering and resolving the underlying causes?
In my opinion, social anxiety treatment should always involve addressing both dimensions. Symptoms must be reduced immediately so that a person can ‘stay in the game’ of life as much as possible. Furthermore, it’s important to feel better as soon as possible!
But if the cause is not addressed, then the problem can persist much longer than it should. I have found that using a trauma model, such as EMDR (eye-movement desensitization reprocessing), allows social anxiety treatment to address both symptoms and causes.