Social anxiety sucks. I am a former social anxiety sufferer who has worked as a Licensed Clinical Social Worker for 10+ years. I combine my personal and professional experience to give you practical tools to help you face your fears and become a more confident and authentic you.
Email questions/topics to: info@csplcsw.com
Newsletter and Services: https://linktr.ee/calmconfidence
Disclaimer: This is NOT Therapy and is not a replacement for therapy. Listening to this podcast does not constitute a client/therapist relationship.
Obviously, we don't want to feel anxious in social situations. We want to feel relaxed, cool, calm and collected. This hope makes us despise how we feel and how we show up. We fight our feelings and our thoughts hoping to change them, but it only makes it worse. We become more self aware and self conscious. We become ashamed of our anxiety and afraid of the potential outcomes. The unpopular truth is that in order to overcome social anxiety, we must accept that it is here to stay for a while. If we can learn to embrace it, it will lose it's power and stranglehold over us. We begin to realize we can tolerate more than we thought, and that the feeling of anxiety is not a stamp on our identity.
Interested in joining the "Get Out Of Your Head" live Rumination class? Join here:
https://calm-confidence-5785.thinkific.com/products/live_events/live-event-social-anxiety
Looking to going deeper into understanding social anxiety and how to start taking your life back? Check out my full 3 hour length social anxiety course here: https://calm-confidence-5785.thinkific.com/products/courses/social-anxiety-course
Want To Work With Me? Check out my services here: https://linktr.ee/calmconfidence
Episode description
Warning: This episode explores themes of trauma and abuse.
What happens to the stories we never tell? For Bridey Thelen-Heidel, holding them in for decades took a real toll on her body. Writing them down became the way she started to heal.
Bridey has been a high school English teacher for 27 years. She’s also a TEDx speaker and the author of the award-winning memoir Bright Eyes, a story about surviving our monsters and then learning how to live without them. The book won a Zibby Award for Best Story of Overcoming, a NYC Big Book Award and a San Francisco Book Festival Award. Her advocacy for LGBT+ youth has been recognized by the California Teachers Association.
In this episode, we talk about trauma, bravery, and what it takes to finally tell the truth about your life. Bridey shares how she wrote Bright Eyes over five years without knowing where to start, but discovered her freedom and truth even when others tried to deny it.
While this conversation may not discuss social anxiety, as my episodes often do, I believe this is an incredible story of bravery and vulnerability that I hope can be inspiring to you listeners.
Connect with Bridey
Website: https://bridey-thelenheidel.com/ (https://bridey-thelenheidel.com/)
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/brighteyesauthor/ (https://www.instagram.com/brighteyesauthor/)
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/bridey.heidel (https://www.facebook.com/bridey.heidel)
TEDx Talk, “ROB the Trauma: Steal Back Your Life”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PT6rvXyjsZU (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PT6rvXyjsZU)
Bridey also offers developmental editing for memoir writers with an early draft, and she joins book clubs over Zoom to talk about Bright Eyes. You can reach her through her website.
10 Oct 2026
How To Stop Appeasing Others
Appeasing others is at the core of social anxiety. It is also short lived and never solves the deeper problem within. The very attempt to get appease and get approval reminds us we still need it, which makes us feel inferior to others. In this episode I explore how to give yourself permission to express yourself and take risks. We must learn and replace our overt and subtle attempts to get approval from others, and begin to express ourselves despite the possibility for rejection and ridicule.
Interested in going deeper into understanding social anxiety and how to start taking your life back? Check out my full 3 hour length social anxiety course here: https://calm-confidence-5785.thinkific.com/products/courses/social-anxiety-course
Want To Work With Me? Check out my services here: https://linktr.ee/calmconfidence
Reach and audience
Public platform figures. Ratings count people who left a rating, not total listeners.
Apple Podcasts (US)
5.0 / 5
14 ratings
Spotify
4.9 / 5
73 ratings
Podcast Authority Score: 35 / 100
A composite of feed quality, social presence, YouTube performance and engagement. Read the methodology.
Quality
50
Social presence
0
YouTube
0
Engagement
51
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