Looking for places to be alone: Lived space in social anxiety disorder

Cognition, consciousness, and lived space

The research on SAD is dominated by a cognitive–behavioral framework that conceptualizes anxiety as a phenomenon that takes place inside the patient’s psyche. The fundamental assumption here is that their anxiety is an effect of intrapsychic mechanisms such as biases in attention and interpretation. On this view, to understand these mechanisms is to explain the patient’s psychopathology. Approaching suffering in this way effectively means losing sight of how the patient’s experience is situated out there in their world. A brief look at one of the most widely cited CBT models of SAD (Rapee & Heimberg, 1997) illustrates this point. The central concept in this model is a hypothesized attentional hypervigilance to the presence of an evaluative audience. According to the model, the intrapsychic makeup of patients with SAD is dysfunctional such that their perception is biased toward cues indicating the possibility of negative social judgment. The model claims that this biased cognition causes the patient to experience a wide variety of situations as anxiety-provoking. Explaining the presence of this bias in the first place, Heimberg et al. (2010) refer to a superficially irrational, but evolutionarily sensible drive to remain part of the flock. Essentially, then, the contention is that social situations are frightening to the patient because genetically inherited mechanisms in their heads are running on overdrive, making nonthreatening social situations appear as threats to their continued social survival.

In the endeavor to examine and correct these biased attentional processes in research and psychotherapy, the CBT approach gives little import to the experiences of the socially threatening world itself. The most widely employed research paradigms, in fact, reduce the patient’s experiential world to singular stimulus material, namely evaluative faces. Even here, the experimental interest is not the stimuli, but the extent to which they activate the hypothesized bias toward social threat in patients with SAD (e.g., Gilboa-Schechtman et al., 1999). Although some reviews of the field lament the lack of ecological validity in these experiments (e.g., Staugaard, 2010), the consensus is an affirmation of a cognitive bias responsible for making harmless social situations appear to be threatening (Schultz & Heimberg, 2008). Cues of social threat more easily capture the attention of patients with SAD than others. Thus, on the CBT view, the threat is in the head, so to speak. This conclusion has been taken to an extreme with the development of a computerized treatment program aimed exclusively at reducing the supposed bias through implicit learning programs inspired by the aforementioned experimental paradigms (E. H. W. Koster & Bernstein, 2015). With this radicalization of the CBT line of thought, the experiential world of the patient falls entirely out of view.

Phenomenological psychopathology opposes this disposing of experience. Instead, it concerns itself with the phenomena in the world in which they take place (Aho, 2019). The patient experiences their distress in the world, so it must be examined there. The depressed, for instance, talks of the things they were once drawn to and the activities that used to engage them having ceased speaking to them (Ratcliffe & Broome, 2012); the grieving describes the shadowy presence of the lost loved one appearing in all the places that used to be familiar (A. Køster, 2021); and the person with agoraphobia complains of an outside world looming with unknown dangers (Jacobson, 2004). Suffering in all these cases manifests itself as a transformation of their experiential world. Things have lost their significance, places their familiarity, and the world its sense of safety. More precisely, these accounts elucidate the lived space of depression, grief, and agoraphobic fear. Lived space is the meaningful world we inhabit. Fuchs (2007) briefly defines it as “characterized by qualities such as vicinity or distance, wideness or narrowness, connection or separation, attainability or unattainability, and structured by physical or symbolic boundaries that put up a rigid or elastic resistance to movement” (p. 426). The door is too narrow when moving the bed through it, the previously inconspicuous stain on the tablecloth suddenly stands out when preparing for the dinner party, and the restaurant is very far away when late for the reservation, to give a few examples.

The above examples allude to some of the ways lived space is interwoven with consciousness by showing how our projects, concerns, and suffering are reflected in our world. Lived space is a central arena in which our consciousness unfolds itself. Sartre (1943/1993) speaks of consciousness as an autogenerative process—rather than a thinglike mind contained within the head as is the implicit assumption in the CBT view—that lets a dynamic world come to the fore by constantly bringing its possibilities into view in addition to its facticity. We experience not just what is but are called into pursuit of what could be. As such, consciousness is that process which establishes the bond between us and the world. Consciousness recedes into the background of experiences—constantly “annihilating itself” in Sartre’s (1943/1993) terminology—and leaves us with a meaningful world in thematic awareness. Thus, consciousness only reveals itself indirectly in concrete experience. To return to the example of depression, the patient’s sense of being painfully unaffectable by what happens around them reveals something like an impoverished consciousness deprived of its openness to the vitality of the world (Ratcliffe, 2014). Perhaps the most basic trace of consciousness in concrete experience is the “mineness” with which experience is imbued (Zahavi, 2008). Fundamentally, all our thematic experiences come with a tacit sense of ourselves having them. Extending this sense of ownership, we tend to take for granted that it is our world we inhabit at every moment. The distances of lived space relate to my means of movement, its possibilities call me to action, and its boundaries pose limits to my freedom. Consciousness, in short, tends to place us in the center of a world that is “for-me.”

Other people pose a potential threat to the fundamental sense of mineness of lived space. Sartre (1943/1993) illustrates this in his analysis of our confrontation with the Other, which forms the basis of his conflictual social ontology. Briefly, the Other is another consciousness unfolding and inhabiting a lived world. The Other, in Sartre’s (1943/1993) view, is given to us as a radical alterity with their own intentions, concerns, and desires. It is a locus of experience determining and inhabiting a world that we cannot fully know but which we recognize as possessing the same unequivocal taken-for-grantedness as our own. Thus, the Other contests our experience with theirs, pressing themselves and their differently meaningful world against our own lived space.

The most severe threat to our lived space is occasioned by the gaze of the Other. Here, lived space ceases to be a place for me to unfold my projects as it becomes structured by the possibilities the Other allows me. I am subsumed into the space of the Other in whose world I become an object. An actual encounter with somebody is not necessary for this estrangement of lived space. Their mere felt presence is enough for lived space to change character. For instance, to the thief in the store, the moment they notice the unaware guard, the room transforms into spots of hiding and zones of inaccessibility. The thief finds themselves in the guard’s world, their project of hiding entirely hinging on the direction of the guard’s gaze and every movement. Put differently, other people may come to over-determine lived space by constricting and estranging it. Indeed, on Sartre’s (1943/1993) view, our only defense against this attack on our lived space is a similar objectification of the Other by which we strip them of their power to unfold a world opposite ours. As such, consciousness eternally unfolds itself against that of the Other in the world.

While theoretically sound as a phenomenology of conflictual relationships, Sartre’s (1943/1993) social ontology does not capture something like a primordial intersubjective experience (Zahavi, 2008). ² We often partake in shared experiences with others in which our individual consciousnesses somewhat disappear from view. At other times, we co-inhabit the world with others, leaving them their space while claiming our own among them. Minkowski (1933/1979) exemplifies this well: “I go into the street and meet a number of people, but each of them, while forming a part of a whole, follows [their] own path, and [their] own thoughts” (p. 407). There is an adequate felt distance between others and ourselves which allows each of us to pursue our own possibilities amidst the crowd. Even when having to pass each other, we accomplish this encounter as an effortless dance through the mutual incorporation of each other’s bodies (Schmitz, 2007). In these and many other ways, we coexist or share equally in intersubjective space. Rather than inhabit the world as a being-for-others as Sartre (1943/1993) would have it, we tend to live in it as a being-with-others.

I will show that this intersubjectively shared sense of lived space is impossible for patients with SAD. Instead, lived space has become like that of Sartre’s (1943/1993) thief, characterized by estrangement and constriction. ³ The single previous empirical exploration on this topic (Boyle, 2019) hints at this idea. According to this analysis, no matter where the patient finds themselves, they feel challenged by the presence of other people in making everyday life work. At home, they perceive the doorbell, the phone, and the windows as ways for others to enter the one place they generally feel safe. Moving about in public is a thoroughly planned activity for them. There, the spaces are divided into those places where others will and will not be present. Busy streets become a zone of avoidance and restaurant bathrooms become lifesaving breaks from the gaze of others. In the coming sections, I deepen this first glance at the lived space of the patient and argue that their way of being in space can be conceptualized as over-determined by the Other. With this, I carve out a phenomenology of socially anxious spatiality.

Empirical grounding

The first-person descriptions that ground the present account of socially anxious lived space come from a larger qualitative study exploring the phenomenology of SAD for which ethical approval had been previously confirmed. I recruited 10 informants suffering from social anxiety who provided informed consent of participation in the study. To confirm the diagnosis, I employed a semistructured interview practice, eliciting detailed descriptions of their experiences with social anxiety presently and autobiographically (see Henriksen et al., 2022). Then, I held these descriptions against DSM-5 criteria for the disorder. Eight informants fulfilled the diagnostic criteria. Further, I obtained the full psychiatric journals of two informants to assess the presence of relevant comorbidity and conducted a posthoc comparison between their descriptions and the remainder of the sample without finding significant differences.

I conducted a series of semistructured interviews with each informant grounded in phenomenological theory. I have discussed this method in detail elsewhere (Kristiansen, 2022). Briefly, I asked the informants to describe concrete situations in which they had experienced social anxiety. In thickening the description through the course of the interview, I employed key phenomenological concepts. For instance, I used the concept of lived space to formulate questions sensitizing the informants to spatial qualities of their experience; for example, perceived affordances, felt atmosphere, and experiences of distances. Further, I continually and explicitly asked the informants to turn back to previous points of their descriptions to fill in gaps and delve into the significance of certain keywords they used to describe their experiences. For instance, when one informant remarked that she felt like her friends’ “eyes were sticking to her” I asked what she meant until we arrived at the significance being something like feeling entrapped. These methods of inquiry brought about rich and nuanced descriptions and thus provided further insight into the informants’ experiences.

Following the interviews, I let the question “How does social anxiety manifest itself in a changed way of inhabiting lived space?” guide the analysis. With this question, I attempted to answer how patients with SAD characteristically experience not only concrete places but space as such. Through repeated readings of the entire data material, I tested various interpretations anchored in both classic phenomenological literature engaging with the question of lived space (e.g., Merleau-Ponty, 1945/2011; Sartre, 1943/1993) and applications of these insights in psychopathology (e.g., Davidson, 2003; Jacobson, 2004; Ratcliffe, 2014). As such, the analysis was theoretically driven but empirically grounded. I used theoretical concepts to open up the data in its complexity but subsequently evaluated those same concepts based on their ability to capture the increased complexity they brought into view. This typically led to the discovery of nuances in the data excessive of the concepts employed and accordingly to further refinement of the phenomenological conceptualization. The predominantly Sartrean framework outlined above is, in other words, not accidental, but reflects this back-and-forth process between the data and phenomenological theory.

Intersubjectively overdetermined space

In the present section, I elucidate the lived space of the socially anxious patient as a personal sphere constantly permeated and constricted by the Other. Two related types of spatial experiences attest to this: a personal space the patient feels invaded in by other people, and a public space in which they feel tolerated at best, and banished at worst. These experiential themes are something like the passive and active variants of the same basic experience of being entrapped in the world of the Other. In this mode of inhabiting lived space, the patient’s own world is decentralized and ultimately replaced by that of the Other. I term this an intersubjective over-determination of lived space, contrasting it with a space co-inhabited by oneself and others. This is a space others consistently steal away both passively through invasion and actively through banishment. It is a space that the patient is not able to share in, never mind claim even a small part of for their own. These ideas owe much to Sartre’s (1943/1993) notion of spatial estrangement, which I develop empirically by elucidating a way of being in space marked by permanently rather than situationally living under the gaze of the Other. That is, while Sartre (1943/1993) ties the Other’s dominance of space to specific situations in which the subject is engaging in morally apprehensive actions like theft or eavesdropping, I show that in the case of SAD, there is no such moral or otherwise well-demarked situational grounding of spatial estrangement. The patient’s suffering consists of this experience permeating the entirety of their lived world, estranging most of it and endangering any sense of feeling at home. Thus, the lived world comes to be threatening not simply because of hypervigilance about others’ potentially social evaluative presence, as the CBT model claims. Rather, it becomes threatening because it belongs to other people rather than to the patient themselves and because they cannot demarcate any boundaries between their own space and that of the encroaching Other.

Invaded spaces

In the informants’ descriptions, there is an almost omnipresent sense of invasion by other people. That is, they feel other people entering into their space with their eyes, ears, and thoughts, defying their sense of having somewhere and something that is only theirs. The experiential effect of the gaze of the Other is an estrangement of lived space that replaces the ordinary mineness of it. Constant victims of this transgressional experience, much of everyday life revolves around becoming imperceptible to others. The nature of the suffering in these kinds of experiences is a boundary violation and the sense of severely constricted freedom coming from living in fear of the invasive Other.

It is in a strikingly tangible sense that the informants experience their worlds permeated by other people. One informant, Sarah, describes how the windows of the buildings seem like on-looking eyes when she walks down the street: “I couldn’t get out of the apartment, because there were two buildings who could always see me.” Generally, the informants describe feeling the presence of others long before they appear to be looking from out of the corner of their eyes when walking by the bus stop or from inside their cars when crossing the street. What might appear as spaces empty of people is a world full of holes through which others are, or could be, peaking or eavesdropping from the perspective of the informants. The neighbors are lurking behind the apartment peepholes when descending the stairs. Passersby on the street hear the sound of the radio or the phone call through the open windows, and the neighbors hear the toilet flushing or pulling back the chair through the walls, floors, and air ducts. They listen from over at the other table in the bar. Even on the seemingly empty path, they might be hiding in the hedges. Thus, in social anxiety, the gaze of the Other manifests itself everywhere, taking their lived space away from them by inhibiting their freedom of movement and silencing them in their homes.

There are very concrete ways as well in which the informant acts on this feeling, equally telling of their experience of penetrability. Another informant, Beth, remarks that, to her, certain Covid-19 regulations are a blessing: “I feel best when I am covered up in some way; I mean, medical masks are literally fantastic, like, a gift to the socially anxious!” To hide as much of her face and body as possible, she wears big sunglasses, a cap, and long sleeves when walking the dog as well. Other informants describe lifting the kitchen chair slightly when pushing it back to make it less audible to the downstairs neighbor. Putting things away after having used them is a necessity to some as well so that they are out of sight should the flatmate walk by the open room door. In struggling to hide their faces and bodies, concealing the sound of their movement and the tracks of their activities, the informants reveal an absorption with a project of becoming imperceptible to other people. But more importantly, it elucidates the kind of lived space they find themselves inhabiting. Namely, one full of cracks letting the Other into their homes and onto their bodies, marking their lived space with an invasive sense of otherness. Furthermore, rather than actively entering into this contest of subjectification, they passively fall into the position of the objectified part, thus losing ground to the Other, indeed losing the fundamental sense of ownership of the world they inhabit.

Illegitimate occupation of space

When among others, especially in public spaces like the train, the beach, or a restaurant, the informants describe feeling like there is nowhere to place themselves in the space of others. Even if whatever space there is has not already been taken, it might at any time become occupied, banishing them from the spot they suddenly find that they have been occupying illegitimately. Space is thus constricted in a different way than in invasive experiences. While an invaded space implies a sense of ownership of that space being violated, the feeling of banishment is connected with a feeling of already being out of place, infringing upon the space of others. To be clear, experiences of invasion are about a private sphere being broken through by the Other, whereas the suffering in experiences of banishment revolves around the sense of illegitimate occupation of the lived space of the Other. The difference regards the place the patient experiences taking in the Other’s world: in experiences of invasion they are a subject in the process of petrification into an object, and in experiences of banishment they are an already bothersome object merely in the way in the Other’s world. Their predicament is that in neither situation and thus almost nowhere in their everyday life are they free from the grip of the Other. That is, space is equally intersubjectively over-determined in both experiences, in that the Other reigns in the patient’s world to the exclusion of themselves.

The feeling of banishment shows itself in the informants’ descriptions as a world appearing as a minefield fraught with spots not to stand or sit in or walk through. For one informant, Claire, this expresses itself as preoccupations regarding where to sit at a dinner party: “The worst place to be would be somewhere people constantly need to get by,” she remarks, “because there I’d feel in the way all the time, and constantly be one big excuse for myself. I wouldn’t be able to uphold any conversations because I’d constantly be attentive to whether I was in the way.” For Beth, it is a constant preoccupation when biking that she stays as close as possible to the rightmost edge of the bike lane, so as not to block the way of somebody else. In the classroom, Sarah describes sitting in the back to improve her cost/benefit ratio in the eyes of her classmates: “I sit next to the wall, where nobody is sitting behind me whose view I obstruct . . . If I do that, that wouldn’t work, then my ‘cost’ to others would be really high.” She describes as well how at cafés, the moment she has finished her coffee, a feeling of illegitimately taking up a chair arises. Another informant, Olivia, describes how in the office space, the only safe place is in her office where a name tag designates some form of legitimate ownership. In all these ways, the informants experience space as belonging to others first and themselves only second—if at all.

Toward a phenomenology of social anxiety disorder

The present account of the spatial dimension of SAD adds to the growing body of literature on various psychopathological conditions manifesting themselves as a lack of being at home in the world (e.g., Jacobson, 2004; Køster, 2021; Ratcliffe, 2014). The first-person accounts of how SAD expresses itself spatially as a world where fundamental alterity replaces mineness reveal the patient’s consciousness to be intersubjectively over-determined in its process of unfolding. This brings about a kind of suffering that revolves around feelings of violated personal boundaries and of illegitimately occupying the Other’s space. The patient’s fundamental predicament is that they live in the world of the Other, unable to claim a space for themselves. This is what makes them vulnerable to other people’s claims on the spot they occupy and to their encroachment on their private sphere. Thus, their consciousness is structured somewhat like that of Sartre’s thief, however omnipresently and without ties to any moral misdoing. It is the constantly felt sense of an invasive and a banishing Other that structures the patient’s lived space in this way.

This mode of living in the world gives rise to two kinds of suffering: (a) a felt invasion of private space amounting to something like boundary violations and (b) a sensed illegitimate occupation of space among others experienced in terms of feeling banished from public spaces. Briefly, the former is the experiences of others violating the self–other boundary the patient struggles to maintain. There is not enough room both for them and the Other and so they are displaced from it as the Other penetrates it. The latter kind of suffering is what the patient experiences among others when spatial estrangement is no more an intolerable possibility but a condition of their suffering. Here, they become like objects in the Other’s world expressed in feelings of being a nuisance and in the way. Lived space in both these kinds of suffering becomes claustrophobically constricted. Nowhere is there room enough to be around others without seemingly bothering them. Nowhere is enclosed enough that others cannot get in. It is, however, exactly the drive toward this impossible nowhere that is manifest in the patient’s attempts at disappearance or social self-isolation. Anxiety and fear, understood as objectless and objectified threats, respectively, take turns being at the forefront of the patient’s experience. The gaze of the Other anguishes them, for they cannot in principle know their intentions or demands (Micali, 2022). The patient experiences the radical alterity of the Other most fundamentally through their contesting the patient’s world. This anxiety in the face of the Other demanding something from the patient that they cannot know constantly transforms itself in their experience into concrete objects. They come to see the other commuters demanding an expansive space to dwell in, for example, which they, in turn, act to grant or prevent. Fear of being in the way then replaces diffuse anxiety. However, objectless anxiety still grounds this fear, and as such, they can find no protection or relief from it through their actions. They may find a place to stand seemingly to no disturbance of anyone, but in their prevailing anxious mood, they are prone to realize that somebody might want that spot, too, thus once again turning paralyzing anxiety into actionable fear.

Certain aspects of this way of being with others resemble those found in schizophrenia (Sass & Parnas, 2003) and should thus be disentangled. This regards particularly the feeling of being invaded in private spaces, which may be compared with the weakened ego boundaries of some schizophrenic patients. These patients feel themselves to be completely transparent to others, classically manifesting itself as the sense that others can read their thoughts. There is a somewhat comparable felt transparency of self in patients with SAD, but it is firmly in contact with a commonsense reality. Whereas the schizophrenic patient experiences their consciousness itself as penetrated, the patient with SAD experiences only their private spaces as invaded through sensory means. That is, the felt invasion does not happen through mindreading, but through others hearing the actual sounds they make. This exposes who they think themselves to be—their identity—to the Other in their experience, without providing direct access to their consciousness itself. The self–other boundary, thus, is more intact in SAD. The patient is caught by others out in their world. It is the walls, not their consciousness, that are full of cracks.

Articulating experiential complexity

The phenomenological account of SAD presented here, I argue, provides a viable theoretical alternative to the currently dominant CBT model of the disorder. It does so by virtue of its ontology of consciousness, which conceptualizes human beings not as machines decoding the world in a more or less biased way but as inhabitants absorbed in a world full of other people. Further, it challenges the CBT representationalist view of intersubjectivity according to which we come to know other people by inferring their thoughts and feelings. It does so by conceptualizing the Other as an alterity in our own world that we instead know through the ways they transform our experience of ourselves and the world. As a consciousness separate from ours, they are not the thoughts contained within their head but a locus of experience with which we make first contact where our worlds meet. Consequently, the central psychopathological question changes from one about which intrapsychic dysfunction makes the patient interpret other people incorrectly to instead characterizing how the patient experiences the world and lives with others in it. This phenomenological ontology leads to at least three significant developments in the conceptualization of SAD in comparison to the CBT model.

First, it provides important nuances to the role of other people in shaping the lived space of the patient. The CBT notion of an experienced “audience” as the locus of fear for the patient casts the Other in the role of somebody passively observing and evaluating the patient. The patient’s fear, then, on the CBT view, comes to revolve around failing to live up to the expectations of other people. The phenomenological account, instead, points to other people as a much more destructive influence on the patient’s spatial experience. They do not enter into the lived space of the patient only requiring a certain standard of performance. They demand the whole stage to the exclusion of the patient, to stay with the metaphor of the audience and the performer. Differently put, the patient experiences the Other to colonize and banish them from wherever they find themselves. Their own world and intentions in it—that is, getting to their place of study, or getting on with domestic activities—are sidelined by the Other. The demand characteristic of other people, put differently, is more complex than what the CBT notion of them as an audience denotes. Others take lived space away from the patient. This is most adequately captured by conceptualizing the Other as an invasive and banishing force. It is not merely in the face of a watching and judging Other that patients experience anxiety. Rather, their anxiety arises in the face of an oppressive and invasive Other, the intentions and desires of whom they cannot fully know, giving rise to inextinguishable fear.

Second, the phenomenological approach offers an account of the subjective background for inhabiting social space on which the patient’s fearfulness becomes sensible, which renders unnecessary the CBT appeal to speculative ideas about an evolutionarily sensible but dysfunctional attentional bias. To reiterate the CBT view, the patient’s hypervigilance to social threats is grounded in a phylogenetically developed drive to avoid exclusion from the flock. This explanation is unable to account for the fact that to the patients, remaining extraordinarily vigilant to the presence of other people is a subjectively meaningful activity at its core. The oppressive and invasive spaces they experience give themselves to the patients as such in an entirely taken-for-granted way. This shows itself clearly in their actions—avoiding being a nuisance, barricading themselves—which become sensible to them as the desperate ways available to them through which to inhabit the world of other people. Put differently, it is a felt sense of other people’s oppressive and invasive presence that occasions constantly being on the lookout for other people’s scrutinizing attention. In such experiences, lived space is not somewhere shared in or owned by the self, but a place already claimed or potentially claimable by others. Unlike the CBT notions of intrapsychic bias and evolutionary drives, this way of understanding what grounds the patient’s fear presents itself explicitly in their experience.

Third, the phenomenological framework provides a vocabulary of the patient’s experience that allows for an empathic understanding of their first-person perspective. This contrasts the mechanistic language of cognitive dysfunctions of the CBT model where the patient’s subjective suffering disappears from view. The CBT notions of hyper-vigilance toward evaluating others, self-focused attention and behavioral self-inhibition lack any attempt to clarify what it is about these ways of perceiving and acting that constitute suffering from the first-person perspective. There is merely an intrapsychic dysfunction and its consequent functional impairments. The problem with the CBT model might be that its mechanistic conceptions do not leave room for the fact that, unlike dysfunctional cogs, human beings care. It matters to the patient to be able to live a life with and among others while maintaining a sense of autonomy and integrity. Only on this basis does the patient’s suffering come into view. The concepts of boundary violation and illegitimate occupation are two such ways of accounting for what it is like to live in a world intolerably full of banishing and invasive others.

Implications

The phenomenological account has significant psychotherapeutic implications. The framework secures a vantage point from which to grasp the first-person significance of the oppressive and invasive experiences patients with SAD struggle with. For clinicians, this empathic understanding is paramount as a building block of the therapeutic alliance fundamental to positive therapeutic outcomes (e.g., Norcross & Wampold, 2011). On this view, it is concerning that the CBT model is meant to guide therapeutic intervention when it falls short in accounting for the full range of suffering of the patients its proposed treatment is supposed to target. Extending the notion of the patient’s suffering, the phenomenological account points to a reorientation of treatment goals (see also Kristiansen, 2023a, 2023b). Rather than focusing on reducing attentional biases or challenging perceptions of whether others are actually observing the patient as is the aim in CBT, the notion of lived space as intersubjectively overdetermined points to the necessity of learning to share space with other people or to claim a personal space among them. The former means going from experiencing other people as invasive and oppressive to instead living with them as equals with whom the patients shares their world. The latter means learning to de-socialize public spaces, for example shielding themselves from the potentially watching eyes and listening ears of others. Speaking to the beneficial effects of these strategies, in the present study, when informants mentioned experiences of not feeling anxious, their descriptions almost always fell into one of these two categories. That is, either they felt so well-protected from the invasive gaze of other people—that is, by the cover of darkness, or by sheer distance from others—that they felt free from them. Or they felt part of someplace—that is, like a fellow hiker in the forest, or like just another member of the circle of friends—allowing them to dwell in themselves as well as in the shared space. Future research should work out more concrete ways of transforming the spatial experiences of the patient that this study has elucidated the necessity of addressing in psychotherapeutic treatment.