No point triggering for the sake of it.
You need to bring the socially anxious person in a very easy enviornment.
A scenario in which they can easily "win" the social setting.
Like a pre-season friendly game against a minor league team. You put 30 runs on them, and of course you'll start the season full of swagger.
It's called the "winner effect"
Social anxiety is essentially triggered by not being in control of social outcomes.
Repeated winning outcomes do lower the need to be in control and thus should reduce anxiety
Actually there is, if it's contextualized correctly. It's called Exposure Therapy [0] and it's scientifically proven to help phobias/anxiety/fears. Avoiding the anxiety-provoking situations makes things worse.
[0] https://www.apa.org/ptsd-guideline/patients-and-families/exp...
It might work for fear of flying or heights
But being in a social setting and trying to penetrate into the "in crowd" and being rejected would only make things worse.
You need a controlled environment to exogenously make the socially anxious person "in" so that they then have enough momentum and confidence to go out in the real world and go through an X amount of rejections on their way to thier first real win.
If they lose confidence before achieving a real win because the X amount of rejections is too high , then you gotta go back to the controlled environment.
It's basically like baseball with Major and Minor leagues.
Minor league aces are way more confident than sluggish Major league players.
In short it spurs from not being a winner.
The socially anxious person maybe knows at the intellectual level that social wins can be achieved by working the numbers game, but they are too apathetic or nihlistic or scared that their first attempt is going to be a loss which will further depress them.
When you immerse the socially anxious person in a controlled environment you make sure that his first attempt is a Win, and the second and the third and the fourth etc.
And you make them win enough times that they maybe venture into hubris, so that they have a full tank to go into the real world and face the natural X amount of rejections and losses which comes before a win.
I disagree about the win/loss theory in general though. I think it is really a dissonance about what people expect and value in in or out groups.
Someone afraid to speak up in certain groups might be quite outgoing in another. So there isn't really an absolute level of success. There are also very successful people that are anxious. Expectations towards yourself play a large role though.
Everybody curates their environment, people just do so unconsciously and without realizing it. An American movie star might dominate the room in Los Angeles...but they'd find a hard time even speaking to people in Iran, and if they are recognized people would be hostile towards them.
And there is effect of becoming oversensitive when encountering strong stressor randomly and often. I stead of getting less sensitive people can start reacting more aggressively at smaller threat.
Your train of thought here reflects classic avoidant behavior -- it's not therapeutic unless I'm in control of all the variables. Certainly you're correct depending on the type of fear being extinguished -- dropping buckets of spiders randomly on someone afraid of spiders isn't likely to help things at all, nor is dropping someone with GAD in the middle of a crowded concert -- but for the particular phobia (social anxiety) and exposure (small talk with strangers in public) we're talking about in this thread, it's definitely the low-stakes kind of exposure exposure therapy aims to provide.
That people suffer from it is no wonder when you go from one purity spiral to the next one but that is certainly something large social media companies reproduce at least involuntarily.
I am sympathetic, I have it too. Hell, ever male in my dad's family line seems to have it.
But its a problem that needs to be treated and not a character trait that needs to be respected. The WORST thing you can do for social anxiety (or any anxiety) is to avoid trigger it. You'll become a depressed shut in.