Alice is a new patient at the clinic. During her first appointment, she describes her discomfort with meeting new people, her fears of embarrassing herself in public, and her tendency to spend hours replaying social interactions in her head. She says she blushes easily when she talks with friends, sweats too much in work meetings, and has difficulty falling asleep. More than anything, she feels alone. As clinicians and caregivers, our first task in working with patients is to identify the cause of their distressing experiences. What is leading Alice to experience this particular constellation of symptoms? One common approach is to assume that these symptoms are caused by an underlying disorder. For Alice, we would likely assign a diagnosis of social anxiety disorder, concluding that this disorder is the underlying cause giving rise to her symptoms. In other words, we would conclude that she fears interactions with strangers and avoids parties because she has social anxiety disorder.