Safety Behaviors in Social Anxiety: What Therapists Often Miss

A Practical, Shame-Informed Guide for Clinicians

If you’ve worked with social anxiety for any length of time, you start seeing patterns that don’t fit neatly into the exposure worksheets.

Clients do the exposure.
They show up to the party.
They speak in the meeting.
They practice the feared social moment.

And yet…
nothing changes.

They walk away feeling:

• “I sounded stupid.”

• “I talked too much.”

• “I wasn’t interesting.”

• “They could tell I was anxious.”

• “I made it weird.”

It feels like all the effort goes in, and none of the learning comes out.

When this happens, therapists often assume:

• “Maybe the exposure wasn’t long enough.”

• “Maybe they need more repetitions.”

• “Maybe avoidance is still happening.”

• “Maybe we should restructure the thought again.”

Yet, most of the time, the real issue is something deeper:

Safety behaviors are running the show.

And when safety behaviors remain active, exposure stops being corrective.
It becomes another performance.

Let’s walk through what therapists often miss, and how to intervene effectively.

What Safety Behaviors Actually Are (and Aren’t)

In social anxiety, safety behaviors are not just “avoidance tactics.”
They’re often automatic identity protection strategies rooted in shame.

Clients do them because they fear:

• being seen as inadequate

• losing status, belonging, or connection

• confirming the core shame belief: “I’m not enough.”

Research consistently shows that people with social anxiety rely heavily on both overt behaviors and covert, impression-management strategies, and these are highly related to social anxiety severity (Gray et al., 2019).

1. Overt Safety Behaviors

These are the visible, tangible strategies:

• rehearsing sentences

• over-preparing

• checking phones for distraction

• sticking close to safe people

• avoiding eye contact

• scripting conversations

• asking excessive reassurance

These are the ones therapists tend to catch.

Yet, the real disruption often comes from the second category.

2. Covert Safety Behaviors (The Invisible Ones)

These are subtle, internal, and often go undetected, even by the client:

• mentally monitoring facial expressions for approval

• trying to “sound normal”

• suppressing natural gestures

• analyzing how every word landed

• trying to “make the right impression”

• self-criticizing in real time

• scanning for signs they’re boring or annoying

• staying hyperaware of their voice, posture, or breathing

These covert strategies completely block exposure learning because the client never actually lets go.

They don’t experience the feared situation vulnerably enough to learn they can survive it.

They’re busy trying to perform safety.

Then, they believe they made it through the event because of the safety behavior, not because they can do hard things.

Why Safety Behaviors Make Therapy Stall

Safety behaviors maintain social anxiety by blocking corrective learning.
If clients never allow themselves to be vulnerable, their nervous system never receives new data.

A central review found that safety behaviors keep social anxiety intact by reinforcing perceived threat and preventing disconfirmation of feared outcomes (Piccirillo et al., 2016).

When safety behaviors remain active:

Exposure becomes a performance, not an updating experience.

The nervous system never receives new data because fear isn’t the only driver; shame is.

Clients walk away interpreting the event through their shame lens.

They reinforce:
“See? I had to manage how I sounded the whole time. I’m clearly not good enough.”

Learning is blocked.

The client doesn’t experience authenticity, only impression-management.

“I need to prepare more next time,” not out of updating, out of shame, they weren’t good enough during the exposure.

Therapists misinterpret compliance as progress.

The client “does the assignment,” but nothing internal shifts.

This is why you can have two clients doing the same exposure with entirely different outcomes.

It’s not the situation.
It’s the shame-driven safety strategy happening inside it.

And it’s also why therapists start wondering:

• “Why isn’t exposure helping?”

• “Why is this client getting worse, not better?”

The research is clear:

If safety behaviors remain active, exposure becomes a performance rather than an updating experience (Blakey & Abramowitz, 2016).

Why Traditional ERP Alone Often Fails Here

Exposure alone assumes:

• fear is the main problem

• avoidance is behavioral

• reducing fear will lead to new learning

• “just do the thing” will reduce distress

But in shame-based social anxiety:

• the problem is identity threat, not fear

• avoidance is emotional (experiential), not just behavioral

• the client fears being “found out,” not just being judged

• exposure becomes a way to avoid shame, not face it

This is why many clients:

• get through exposures

• but still avoid authenticity

• and still feel fundamentally “not good enough”

The body did the thing.
The identity stayed hidden.

How ACT Helps Us Work With Safety Behaviors Differently

ACT targets the function of a behavior, not just the behavior itself.

So instead of asking:

• “Did you talk in the meeting?”

We ask from an always curious view, not critical or fact-finding, often starting with “I’m wondering…”:

• “How did you talk in the meeting?”

• “Were you trying to protect yourself?”

• “Were you performing?”

• “What was shame telling you during the exposure?”

• “What internal experiences were you avoiding?”

• “How did you embrace those experiences and persist on?”

• “What are your thoughts on how you noticed those sensations and kept trying?”

This shift reframes exposure from fact (did or did not talk) to process (how did you navigate that experience in a new way):

performance → willingness

success → values

safety → self-compassion

Clients can stop performing safety long enough to experience something new.

Using the Flexible Exposure Method™ to Address Safety Behaviors

The Flexible Exposure Method™ is uniquely positioned to address this problem because it targets intent, not outcome.

You teach clients to approach exposure from:

• willingness instead of perfection

• values instead of “getting it right”

• curiosity instead of performance

• vulnerability instead of impression-management

And most importantly:

You help clients reflect on their capacity after doing the hard thing, building resilience through compassionate integration, not judgment.

This is the missing link in traditional exposure work.

Five Safety Behaviors Therapists Often Overlook (and What to Do Instead)

1. Over-monitoring their voice or appearance

Intervention: Ask,
“I’m curious what you imagine would happen if you stopped managing your voice or posture and let yourself show up as you are?”

2. Rehearsing everything internally

Intervention: Use a values frame:
“You’ve mentioned wanting to value connection. In this moment, how do we pursue connection instead of protection?”

3. Checking others’ reactions constantly

Intervention: Try a “gaze willingness” exposure:
“Can you allow yourself to be seen without analyzing it in real time? Getting outside of your mind to view the room as observations instead of critical confirmations? Try finding three things you notice other people doing.”

4. Self-criticizing during the exposure

Intervention: Pause the exposure to practice defusion:
“I’m wondering if you notice the shame pattern here? Can we let it be there without it being factual?”

5. Avoiding authenticity

Intervention: Encourage a micro-act of vulnerability:
“If you could , in this moment, say something slightly more honest or natural than you normally would, what would that sound like?”

These tiny shifts, repeated gently, break the shame → avoidance → anxiety loop.

Case Vignette: The Subtle Safety Behavior That Blocks Learning

(Not a real client, this is a pattern I often notice in my office applied to a specific example).

A client attends a networking event as part of exposure.

Afterward, they say:

“It didn’t help. I still feel like everyone could tell I was awkward.”

You dig deeper.

They reveal:

• They rehearsed every line.

• They monitored their smile.

• They kept checking body posture.

• They evaluated every reaction.

• They avoided honest statements.

So they attended the event —
yet they never actually entered the moment.

Intervention:
Shift the next exposure from:

• “Attend the event and talk to 3 people”
  to

• “Let yourself be seen by listening to understand 3 people, even if your anxiety shows.”

This is exposure in the shame-informed ACT lane.

And this is where transformation happens.

So What Does This Mean for Treatment?

It means:

If you are not addressing safety behaviors, especially the covert ones, exposure will likely plateau.

If you are not addressing shame, safety behaviors will likely remain active.

If you shift intent from performance to values, exposure may become healing instead of re-humiliating.

When clients stop performing safety and start practicing willingness, they finally experience:

• authenticity

• presence

• connection

• social permission

• genuine belonging

And that’s when social anxiety begins to loosen its grip.

Want to Go Deeper?

If this blog resonates, my 2-hour CEU Master the Shame Lens gives you:

• a complete shame-informed ACT framework

• specific techniques to identify covert safety behaviors

• how to intervene without triggering collapse

• how to shift clients from performance to willingness

• how to run shame-informed exposures

References

Blakey, S. M., & Abramowitz, J. S. (2016). The effects of safety behaviors during exposure therapy for anxiety: Critical analysis from an inhibitory learning perspective. Clinical Psychology Review, 45, 1–15. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cpr.2016.07.002

Gray, E., Beierl, E. T., & Clark, D. M. (2019). Sub-types of safety behaviours and their effects on social anxiety disorder. PLoS ONE, 14(10), e0223165. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0223165

Piccirillo, M. L., Taylor Dryman, M., & Heimberg, R. G. (2016). Safety behaviors in adults with social anxiety: Review and future directions. Behavior Therapy, 47(5), 675–687. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.beth.2015.11.005