Breaking Down the Walls : They rely on ATMs, avoid meetings, work graveyard hours. But for many whose shyness has shaped them, a clinic shows them they can fit in.

As a child walking home from school, Alan would take the alleys to avoid classmates or neighbors.

As a diversion to his shyness and the omnipresent angst of viewing himself as an outsider, he would solve math problems in his head. By 13, he was a computer programmer.

His father was an astronomer, and when Alan was 14, he was allowed to drive his father’s Jeep out to the middle of the dark, silent west Texas desert.

“I would lay on the hood of the Jeep and I could feel its warmth on my back,” Alan says. “There were stars from horizon to horizon, and I would just look at them. It seemed like I could reach out and touch them.”

It was not peace that he felt, but a yearning for a place, seemingly an arm’s length away, where he would not feel like a stranger, invisible and uninvolved in life.

He received a perfect math score on his SAT and was nearly perfect in English, but he dropped out of the University of Texas after one year.

Today, at 34, he is a computer software entrepreneur. He lives alone and works with his brother, whom he describes as his “world interface.”

Like many others who come to the Shyness Clinic, located near Palo Alto (and formerly affiliated with Stanford University), it was loneliness, a longing to fit in among others, that brought Alan here. He has been meeting with psychologist Lynne Henderson, director of the clinic, for two months and soon will begin group sessions.

Already he has felt change. In the past, shyness would not allow him even to use the Internet. Now, he signs on daily.

Surveys at Stanford have shown that about 40% of us are chronically shy. A more recent survey suggests a higher figure, almost 49%.

Henderson, who also is co-director of the Shyness Institute, a nonprofit research and education organization, says nearly everyone experiences shyness. It’s only a problem when it stands in the way of something we want.

“The person who comes to us is the person who’s not dating and wants to date, the person who is refusing a promotion because he doesn’t want to give talks or he doesn’t want to interact in meetings. That’s how we define it as a problem--if there’s significant interference in your life.”

Technology has allowed us to further our estrangement, according to research done by Philip Zimbardo, a Stanford psychologist who founded the clinic in the mid-1970s. Computers allow us to work at home, avoiding colloquial encounters in the workplace. We do our banking with machines, not tellers. We use credit cards to buy from catalogs.

Meetings can be difficult for shy people for the same reason many of us wrestled for prime seats in the back of the junior high classroom. We didn’t want to be called upon, fearful of solecism or responding incorrectly. Too many eyes upon us made our blood thicken to sludge, our hearts pound, our legs anxious to carry us to the silent desert.

*

A businessman from Indonesia has flown in for a weekend crash course at the clinic, which he heard about through a book on shyness written by Zimbardo.

The man says he is shy in social situations, particularly when it comes to dating, and he is nervous about standing before members of his church and reading the liturgy.

While some research has shown there may be a genetic component and medical treatment for shyness, Henderson’s program views it as a human characteristic. She avoids the clinical term, social phobia.

“Even though a lot of the people who come here will meet criteria for social phobia, I don’t want to work with something that implies a cure,” she says. “To me, these are human problems in living, and people are more empowered by recognizing that. This is a place to build your skills.”

Treatment at the clinic is based on Henderson’s “Social Fitness Model.” Social fitness, like physical fitness, requires basic skills, which are more fully developed through exercise. The treatment, Henderson says, has proven to be as effective as treatment with medication.

“What we tell people is that we’re going to teach them a set of skills--cognitive and behavioral and communication training--that they can take with them and continue to work on. If you take a set of tennis lessons, it’s not going to make you a tournament player. You have to continue working on your own.”

After taking a battery of tests to identify needs, clients embark on a 12-week series of group sessions. Role-playing is used to simulate situations--called encounters--that cause anxiety. The setting might be a party or a college classroom, an elevator or a church.

Afterward, the encounter, which lasts 10 minutes, is analyzed and critiqued by the group.

If there was a pause in the conversation, for instance, a person might fear there is nothing left to say, that the other person is bored with the conversation and wants to walk away.

Clients are taught to focus on the fact that there is, indeed, plenty more to say or ask, that in all likelihood the other person is not bored, and, if so, big deal. There are other people to enjoin in conversation.

The encounters are followed by 10 weeks of sessions focusing on communication skills, and the final four weeks are spent on assertiveness training. Homework involves practicing the skills in daily life.

To get the most out of the program, Henderson says, one must be fully involved. To merely attend the sessions for two hours a week is not enough. It is an investment of both effort and money. Cost of the program is $110 for the intake tests, $110 per individual session, $60 per group session.

It’s more expensive if you’re flying in from Indonesia.

During his weekend at the clinic, the businessman is busy taking notes and participating in group and individual sessions with Henderson and two assistants. To address his nervousness about reading the liturgy, he is asked to pretend the waiting room is his church. There is no liturgy to read from, so he sorts through magazines and settles on story about Madagascar in Atlantic Monthly.

With Henderson serving as his audience, the man stands stiffly behind a table and begins reading. There is little inflection in his voice, words flow from his mouth with no meaning. His breathing is forced.

He sprints through the final sentence like a distance runner crossing the finish line.

*

Within the sequence of sounds, pitches and tones of Mozart is an expression of the human condition, a philosophy that Sara cannot describe. She embraces the music in her soul, where it remains isolated, unshared.

Invisible to others. Invisible like Sara.

Had shyness not stood in her way, had the thought of performing on the piano alone in front of an audience not sent ice through her veins, she likely would have chosen a life of music over a Harvard biology degree.

“The pain of shyness is that you can’t connect with other people,” she says. “You want to be able to laugh with other people, you want to be able to play the piano in front of people. You want to be able to be recognized. And you just can’t.”

At 28, Sara is nearing the end of the program. She can see that for years she has avoided human interaction, tailoring her life around her infirmity.

“You get to the point where it’s shaped your life,” she says. “I just want to be able to stand up and say what I believe in, to not be afraid to do that. I want to show the world who I really am. You want to be able to go to other people and feel welcomed and loved, the way you love them.”

As she looks back on her life, there are many things she wishes she would have done or said. But as she looks forward, she sees hope.

“I feel like there’s a possibility that I can get beyond this now,” she says. “Before, it just seemed hopeless that I would ever feel any other way in life.”

Some members of the group say that they feel as though they’re just starting to live, that they have wasted precious years and finally are breaking out of their cocoons.

“I felt that my life was very contained and narrow,” says one member who asked not to be identified. “I needed stimulation. I needed to talk to people, to connect with people. I needed to use my mind. I couldn’t take the stagnation, and I guess it pushed me to the point where I had to take a stand. I couldn’t go on the way I was.”

Some of the changes have been dramatic.

Brian, a computer scientist, no longer rushes home from work to the isolation of home, where he spent hours in front of the television. He has joined a poetry group and a mentor program. He is dating and is more socially interactive with members of his bicycle club.

A 45-year-old hospital lab worker is building confidence to withstand the interview process and find a different job. She also hopes to return to the oboe, which she gave up after a year with the New Hampshire Symphony, feeling intimidated by the competition.

Rick Bright, 43, a graduate of the shyness program, relied on booze and drugs to lower his inhibitions for 23 years. When he sobered up, he discovered that the underlying problem, shyness, had not been addressed.

“I hated myself,” he says. “I didn’t like being shy. I always worked the swing shift or graveyard so I wouldn’t have to be around other people. In college, if I was late for class, rather than walk in late and make an entrance where everyone would look at me, I’d just not go.”

He went to the company Christmas party this year, he says. He laughs a lot more and has found he has much to say and share.

Those breaking away from shyness learn that there really is a lot to talk about: the beauty and grace of music or poetry, the warmth on your back beneath the glow of stars.