HomePsychologySocial skills and social anxiety
You cannot tell any more whether it is shyness or the Spanish.
Plans you turn down, the conversation you replay for hours, and no way of telling whether it is you or the language.
What we work on
- Telling the language apart from the fear. Some of this is a genuine vocabulary problem and some of it would have happened in English too. Separating them matters, because one needs practice and the other needs something else entirely.
- The map of situations. What gets complicated for you, what you steer around or where you rush ahead, and what goes through your head just before.
- Practising small. Real situations from your own week rather than exercises out of a book: the boundary, the request, the sentence you keep not saying.
- After the event. The mental replay of what you said. It feels like preparation and works like punishment, and it can be interrupted.
Socialising in a second language costs more than anyone admits
Everything that made you easy company at home — timing, irony, the joke that lands, knowing when to interrupt — now runs through a language you are still building, and arrives late or flat. People meet a quieter version of you and treat you accordingly. After enough evenings of that, it is hard not to draw a conclusion about yourself rather than about the language.
For international students it is sharper again. The term is short, everyone appears to have arrived already knowing somebody, and saying you are lonely feels like admitting you failed at the one thing the year was meant to give you. So a room fills with people who each believe they are the only one.
This is among the things that respond best to working in steps, because every exchange that goes even slightly well is new evidence against the prediction you started with. What keeps it going is avoidance, and avoidance is something you have a say in.
What actually changes
The aim is not to make you sociable. It is to give you the choice back.
- The anticipation drops: you stop rehearsing a conversation for half an hour before having it.
- You stop auditing it afterwards for proof that you embarrassed yourself.
- You can say no, ask for something or leave, without spending the rest of the week on it.
- You accept invitations you would have found a reason to refuse, and your week stops shrinking.
Who it is for
If you avoid plans, cannot say no, replay a conversation long after it ended, or come home from an evening out exhausted by the effort of having been in it — and you no longer know how much of that is you and how much is socialising in a second language.
- Which situations you avoid, and what goes through your head in the minute before you avoid them.
- How much of this is the language and how much would have happened in any country. They are not worked on the same way.
- Practising small: a conversation, a boundary, asking for something, saying no.
- The replay afterwards, and how to stop turning every evening into an exam.
Who it is not for
It is not about becoming extroverted or getting everyone to like you, and it is not a Spanish course. It is about being with people costing you less than it is costing you now.
When it makes sense to get in touch. When avoiding is already taking things from you: invitations, opportunities, friendships you actually wanted.
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Frequently asked questions
Would this sort itself out once my Spanish improves?
Some of it will. But avoiding social situations also means far less practice at the language, so the two feed each other, and avoidance tends to grow rather than fade. Which of the two you are mostly dealing with is a good thing to bring to the free first consultation.
I am fine at work and only struggle socially. Does that make sense?
It is extremely common. Work gives you a role, a subject and a script; a dinner gives you none of those. Being competent in meetings and lost at a party is not a contradiction.
Can we practise conversations that are going to happen in Spanish?
Yes, and it works better if we keep the two jobs apart: what you want to say, worked out in English, and then the specific Spanish sentence you are actually going to use. Trying to do both at once is what makes people freeze.