How Noah Clyman uses Therachat to stimulate therapy clients to practice their skills in between sessions.

Therachat Helped My Client Conquer Social Anxiety

One of my clients had a social anxiety disorder, specifically a fear of people being critical of her. She would avoid social situations altogether. If she did go into them, she would do so with a great deal of distress and engages in various forms of avoidance, which created problems because her anxiety got stronger and stronger over time.

We started working on Therachat from the beginning of her therapy session. One early Therachat assignment was to list problems as she experienced them during the week that were a result of her social anxiety, and add goals she wanted to reach as a result of therapy.

I then asked her to track and do some mood monitoring to notice when she felt anxious and to determine whether it happened during a social interaction, afterwards or while she was thinking about a social situation. I also asked her to note where she was and what she was doing at that time. Therachat became a good place for her to record those prompts and create a log. After she became accustomed to tracking her anxiety, she started to get some useful information out of Therachat about when she felt most anxious, and what kinds of thoughts she tended to have at those times. She started becoming more aware of her triggers.Together we came up with assignments to help her deal with those triggers. We used Therachat to do specific thought records, for example.

Therachat was also helpful to help her plan, schedule and confront social situations that she usually avoided. Once that worked, we started to take those assignments and applied them into other parts of her life, related to talking to people at work, talking to people in her apartment building up until creating deeper connections with people.

Therachat helped her conquer her social anxiety, both in terms of her behaviors, her activities, but also her thinking style.

Therachat Activities Noah Used During Treatment

- Custom activities
- Distress level tracking
- Throught reframing