The Mandelbear's Musings

I am not a psychologist, but my bet would be that the two biggest factors are low self-esteem and social phobia, which have led to chronic depression. It's a "chicken-and-egg" situation, though - did the low self-esteem cause the social phobia, or the other way around? This is stuff you're going to have to work through with both your individual therapist and your therapy group. I know that CBT (Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy). the current technique for social phobia, is pretty much like the treatment for other phobias - a combination of exposing you to minor degrees of what you fear, until you can tolerate that, and then gradually increasing it, along with demonstrating rationally that the thing(s) you fear will not actually harm you. Again, though, I am not a psychotherapist, and I don't even play one on TV...