White Box, Black Box: Moving Past Social Anxiety - James Rolph

For people suffering social anxiety it can be a seriously debilitating condition that impacts heavily on their lives, while for those who don't it can be difficult to really understand.  Through my changework practice I see many people suffering various levels of social anxiety, and while debilitating it is actually a problem that responds very well to hypnosis and neuro-linguistic approaches.  I wrote the following as a reply to a recent request for advice regarding social anxiety, posted on a web forum, and have kept the format the same so as to convey the 'personality' of the original communication.  The correspondents name has been changed for reasons of anonymity:

Hi Bob

I used to suffer a great deal of social anxiety, but now I don't. Looking back it is pretty funny how much energy I was putting into that problem - it turned out that their were so many possible solutions but my pattern meant I kept on using up energy doing the same thing, in slightly different ways.

First off, you may wish to remember that you are not your behaviour! Obviously, this means that you could do or say whatever you like in a social situation, and people would be responding only to your chosen behaviours, rather than 'you'.

Do you know what is meant by the term 'Black Box'? Here is a definintion from wikipedia:

"Black box is a technical term for a device or system or object when it is viewed primarily in terms of its input and output characteristics. Almost anything might occasionally be referred to as a black box: a transistor, an algorithm, humans, the Internet.

The opposite of a black box is a system where the inner components or logic are available for inspection which is sometimes known as a white box..."

While Human beings are not white boxes - their inner components and logic are unavailable for inspection by others - we can sometimes fail to see this and attempt to inspect the uninspectable. So we make guesses about what is going on inside other peoples heads, guesses that are ultimately nothing more than unknowable hallucinations.

When you remember that other people are black boxes, you can realise that it only really makes sense (in this context) to think about them in terms of input and output. In a communications context, the input would be the communicational behaviour you feed to them, and the output would be their communicational and behavioural response.

So now you get to play - think about what kind of output you want to see/hear/feel coming from the other person. What kind of output would you enjoy? Now you can play around with supplying different inputs, and comparing the outputs you get with what you want. Enjoying playing around with "what happens when..."

Now regarding this new game (I used to hate playing games until I understood how much pleasure they can bring), you can look at others who play it well, and try out some of their inputs and outputs for yourself. Paying attention, of course, to both the verbal and non-verbal elements.

Obviously this means doing things that you haven't done before - playing around, stepping out of character etc. And enjoying yourself.

So, how much can you enjoy this new game? How much can you enjoy learning it? Getting better and better - I enjoy learning so much that every time things go 'badly' I enjoy it even more - it is exciting to be over the edge of my capability in that place where the learning is richest.

My advice to you would be to forget keeping your mind clear and allow it to become full of new ideas and possibilities - and most of all allow it to become full of pleasure and enjoyment at the stuff that you are learning as you play the input/output game.

Obviously, your old maps and logic will have some objections to playing around and fully immersing yourself in this new game and that is OK. And of course, the only real way to be sure is to go and find out!

I hope this clicks into place and makes the right kind of sense to you, because it really works - I know because it worked as well for me as it has for others to the point were I can only look at how things were and laugh with genuine amusement and pleasure.

All the very best

James

For those of you who read the second order change article Breaking Out of the Box - Shifting Persistent Problems, can you see how this approach might work?