IMAGERY-ENHANCED CBT FOR SOCIAL ANXIETY DISORDER: MODULE 12
Past Imagery Rescripting
“It is common for people with social anxiety to report memories of early negative social experiences that impact what they expect in social situations now. When we have had some negative social experiences in our past we can get ‘stuck’ in our memories, so that they can recur as echoes of the past, haunting us and shaping the negative social images we have in the here and now.
Memories we may have of other events tend to feel like they are firmly in the past, and probably rarely rear their heads. In social anxiety, negative social memories we may intellectually know are in the past may still feel very relevant to today emotionally.
Now, we can’t change the fact that these negative experiences happened. It is awful that you had to go through them in the first place. What is also awful is that these experiences keep affecting your life, coloring and tainting what you expect in social situations now.
Using a technique we call imagery rescripting, we have the opportunity to go back in our imagination to experience the past event from a new perspective. We can do things we couldn’t do at the time but that in an ideal world with no limitations we would have liked to have done. While initially this may seem a bit like ‘make-believe’ or just a ‘fantasy,’ doing this seems to have the effect of reprocessing the event in a way that can be helpful for changing its meaning and putting the memory back in its place—as a bad thing that happened in the past with little relevance to the here and now. As we work on these past images, we can learn that these memories don’t reflect on ourselves, others, and the world today, as we previously thought, that they are outdated (specific to a past time, place, or person), and that they don’t need to dictate what we expect and how we live our lives now.”
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