Social Anxiety Hierarchy Worksheet
GinaMarie Guarino, LMHC
Social anxiety affects how people interact with others. It affects the connections people make with friends and family. Social anxiety can cause a great deal of stress for affected people, and can be really frustrating to manage every day.
Those who seek help with social anxiety aim to learn how to manage their symptoms so they can be more comfortable around others. It takes a lot of work, but with time and patience, a client can learn how to manage their symptoms. A great exercise for helping a client begin working on their social anxiety is creating a social anxiety exposure hierarchy.
About This Worksheet
Sorting feared and avoided social situations into an exposure hierarchy can help clients organize their efforts and feel less overwhelmed. The Social Anxiety Hierarchy worksheet provides a visual aid to organize feared social situations into a hierarchy. This helps the client and therapist address each situation one at a time to build tolerance and confidence for feared situations.
With the Social Anxiety Hierarchy worksheet, the client and therapist can work together to improve coping skills for managing difficult triggers for social anxiety. It is a helpful exercise for adolescents and adults participating in individual and group therapy for social anxiety.
Instructions
On the Social Anxiety Hierarchy worksheet, the client is instructed to organize a list of triggers for social anxiety from most tolerable to least tolerable. Instruct the client to review the list of social anxiety triggers and place each trigger in the appropriate level of the pyramid, with the most tolerable triggers listed at the bottom, moderately tolerable triggers in the middle, and least tolerable triggers at the top.
Instruct the client to also include their personal triggers, even if they are not listed. When they have completed the worksheet, review it with them to develop a plan to work through each level of the hierarchy pyramid. You may ask reflection questions, like:
- How are you feeling about approaching your social anxiety by focusing on one trigger at a time?
- What do we need to keep in mind for pacing in a way that is comfortable for you?
- What is your biggest goal for overcoming your social anxiety?
Use the worksheet as a guide for building tolerance and coping skills for feared social situations. You may provide a client with a copy of the worksheet as a reference.
References
de Mooij, B., Fekkes, M., Miers, A. C., & Westenberg, P. M. (2023). What works in preventing emerging social anxiety: Exposure, cognitive restructuring, or a combination? Journal of Child and Family Studies, 32, 498–515.
