Social Anxiety therapists in Swanage, England
Browse Social Anxiety therapists in Swanage, England, United Kingdom. Compare credentials, specialties and therapeutic approach. Contact a therapist to learn more.
Social Anxiety
Saffron Marriner
Counsellor/Therapist, MBACP (Accred)
An integrative humanistic and trauma informed counselling approach offers a compassionate and comprehensive method to address social anxiety, fostering healing and empowerment for those affected. The roots of social anxiety can be multifaceted, involving genetic predispositions, environmental factors and post traumatic experiences. Humanistic counselling encourages you to develop self-awareness and self-compassion. Through reflective exercises and mindfulness practices, you can gain insight into your thought patterns and emotional responses. This self understanding fosters a more compassionate relationship with yourself, reducing self criticism and enhancing self esteem. An integrative approach will equip you with practical coping strategies to manage social anxiety. Techniques such as progressive muscle relaxation and grounding exercises can help clients regulate their physiological responses to anxiety. Cognitive restructuring and exposure therapy can also be employed to challenge and reframe negative thought patterns and gradually desensitise you to feared social situations. We will collaborate to set achievable goals and celebrate progress. By fostering a sense of agency and self-efficacy, you are encouraged to take an active role in your healing journey. By combining the principles of empathy, validation and empowerment, the approach that I use can help you navigate your anxieties.
22 Years Experience
In-Person Near Swanage, ENG
Online in Swanage, England
Social Anxiety
Jimi Katsis
Registered Psychotherapist, MA psych, Dip SW
Social anxiety isn't shyness. It's the terror that people are watching you, judging you, seeing through you. It's scanning every conversation for proof that you said something wrong. It's replaying interactions for days, convinced you embarrassed yourself. It's exhausting.
You might avoid social situations entirely, or you go but spend the whole time performing—saying what you think people want to hear, monitoring every word, never relaxing. Either way, you're not actually present. You're too busy managing the anxiety to connect with anyone.
This usually comes from somewhere. Maybe you were criticized, shamed, or made to feel like who you naturally are wasn't acceptable. Your nervous system learned that being seen is dangerous, so now it tries to protect you by making you hypervigilant in social situations.
We work to understand where that fear got installed and what it's protecting you from. Not by forcing you into social situations before you're ready, but by helping your nervous system learn that being yourself doesn't actually equal danger. Then social situations stop feeling like performance reviews and start feeling like... just talking to people.
27 Years Experience
Online in Swanage, England (Online Only)
Social Anxiety
Emma Dean
Therapist, MA Hons, DipCaH, PNLP
I'm Emma, an integrative transpersonal practitioner dedicated to guiding you on a journey of self-discovery and healing. Through a blend of hypnotherapy, breathwork, meditation, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), Neurolinguistic Programming (NLP), Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT), and spiritual coaching, I create a compassionate safe space for you to connect with the deepest levels of yourself. Social situations don’t have to feel overwhelming or unsafe. Together, we explore the deeper causes of your anxiety and gently shift how you relate to yourself and others. Using evidence-based tools and compassionate inquiry, I help you feel more confident and at ease in connection. The goal isn’t perfection—it’s freedom to show up as your authentic self.
4 Years Experience
Online in Swanage, England
Social Anxiety
Sara Aicart-Pendlebury
Art Therapist, Human Givens Practitioner (HG.Dip.P), Member of Human Givens Institute, IFS therapist Levels 1&2, Narm Practitioner
We all need to experience some degree of anxiety at times – it would be unnatural not to feel any of its symptoms, such as racing pulse, dry mouth, sweatiness and shallow breathing, just before a big speech or exam, for instance – as it helps get us motivated to act. But excessive anxiety causes problems. Excessive anxiety may develop gradually, starting, perhaps, with loneliness after the loss of a loved one; being too shy to make new friends when moving somewhere new; experiencing unwelcome life changes because of chronic illness and pain; or feeling loaded down with too much responsibility – all cases of unmet emotional needs.
When people worry excessively, it is in essence because important emotional needs, such as for safety, connection or status, are not being met. That’s why the human givens approach, which focuses on helping people in distress find healthy ways to meet their emotional needs, is so effective.
For some people, anxiety can develop suddenly, after they are caught up in some tragic disaster, such as a fire or a crash, or are the victims of violence, and their lives become ruled by fear. (This is known as post-traumatic stress.) Anxiety may also take the form of obsessions, compulsions, phobias or a nagging feeling of foreboding – all of which are attempts to ward off a sense of threat.
Yet, as we know, some people face such circumstances without becoming overly anxious, while others end up almost crippled by anxiety. How we explain the negative events that happen to us has a considerable bearing on whether we are likely to suffer from excessive anxiety. Three particular types of thinking are especially connected with its development and its close partner, depression: how personally people take events (they think everything is their fault or that they didn’t get the job because they weren’t good enough, rather than because the competition was particularly stiff); how pervasive they think the effects will be (if they lose their job, they think everything in their world is going wrong, even though their relationship is still strong and they have their health, good friends, etc); and how permanent(they will never get another job, partner, dream house like that one, etc).
People who suffer badly from anxiety also tend to have a lot of negative thoughts running through their minds that they don’t even notice (“I’ll never cope”; “it’s going to be awful”; “no one likes me”) and commonly catastrophise (“I’m going to be late. My boss will sack me!”) Changing negative self-talk and challenging catastrophic thinking help lower stress levels.
Another major cause of troublesome anxiety is negative over-imagination. Anxious people tend to spend a lot of time worrying “What if?”, coming up with a whole variety of dreadful outcomes for themselves or their loved ones. This keeps them in a constant state of high emotional arousal and can take the extreme forms of phobias or obsessive-compulsive disorders. Learning to use the imagination positively – by calmly rehearsing mentally tried and tested techniques (such as deep breathing and distracting thoughts) for dealing with feared or worrisome situations – is very effective. Calming ourselves down, when anxious, is extremely important because high emotional arousal makes us stupid. We literally can’t think straight and that makes the situation worse.
Human givens practitioners can show people how to relax, so that they can bring their own arousal and stress levels down, and how to use their imaginations positively, to rehearse successful outcomes instead of bad ones. They can also help people overcome phobias, panic attacks and traumatic memories quickly and painlessly. And, very importantly, they will encourage people to find ways to reduce their stress and also focus outwards on fulfilling activities (maybe involving the wellbeing of others as well as themselves) – excellent ways of getting their own needs met.
17 Years Experience
Online in Swanage, England
Social Anxiety
Ruth Mark-Roland Psychotherapy
Registered Psychotherapist, Post Grad Diploma in Psychotherapy, Foundation and Diploma in Group Analysis
I offer support for social anxiety, including fear of judgment, self-consciousness, overthinking social interactions, and avoidance of situations where you feel observed or evaluated. Social anxiety can often lead to feelings of isolation, exhaustion from “masking,” and a constant concern about how you are perceived by others.
My approach is grounded in psychoanalytic and relational psychotherapy, offering a steady and non-judgemental space to explore both the present-day experience of anxiety in social situations and the deeper emotional and relational roots that may underpin it. Together, we may look at early attachment experiences, internalised beliefs, and past relational dynamics that shape how safety, visibility, and connection are experienced with others.
I work in a trauma-informed way, recognising how experiences of criticism, rejection, bullying, or emotional misattunement can contribute to ongoing social anxiety and sensitivity in relationships. Therapy provides a space to gently explore these experiences and begin to shift the internal patterns that maintain anxiety over time.
I also integrate somatic awareness to help you notice how anxiety shows up in the body, such as tension, breath restriction, or nervous system activation, supporting greater grounding and regulation in moments of stress. Psychoeducation may be used to increase understanding of anxiety processes, and where appropriate, I may incorporate EFT (Emotional Freedom Techniques / tapping) to support emotional regulation and reduce intensity in anxious states.
Therapy is collaborative and paced according to your needs, helping you develop greater confidence, ease, and self-compassion in social situations, and a more secure sense of self in relation to others.
14 Years Experience
Online in Swanage, England
Social Anxiety therapists in Swanage, England Statistics
Social Anxiety therapists in Swanage, England average 14 years of experience and charge around ¤122 per session. 100% offer online sessions. The top treatment approaches are Integrative Therapy (63%), Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) (54%), and Person-Centered Therapy (Rogerian) (50%).
Average years in practice
14 Years Experience
Average cost per session
¤122
Accept insurance
36%
Offer sliding scale
45%
Gender ID
| 70% |
Female |
|
| 28% |
Male |
|
| 1% |
Gender Fluid |
|
| 1% |
Non-Binary |
|
Session Type
| 61% |
In Person and Online |
|
| 39% |
Online Only |
|
Top Treatment Approaches
| 63% | Integrative Therapy |
| 54% | Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) |
| 50% | Person-Centered Therapy (Rogerian) |
| 34% | Solution-Focused Brief Therapy (SFBT) |
| 32% | Psychodynamic Therapy |
| 30% | Somatic Therapy |
| 28% | Behavioral Therapy |
Ages Served
| 99% | Adult |
| 63% | Young Adult |
| 55% | Senior |
| 53% | Teen |
| 20% | Children |
Client Focus
| 66% | Women |
| 50% | Men |
| 46% | LGBTQ+ |
| 33% | Christian |
| 33% | Persons with Disabilities |