My favorite Jane Austen quote on this subject:

Perhaps,' said Darcy, 'I should have judged better, had I sought an introduction, but I am ill qualified to recommend myself to strangers.'

'Shall we ask your cousin the reason of this?' said Elizabeth, still addressing Colonel Fitzwilliam. 'Shall we ask him why a man of sense and education, and who has lived in the world, is ill qualified to recommend himself to strangers?'

'I can answer your question,' said Fitzwilliam, 'without applying to him. It is because he will not give himself the trouble.'

'I certainly have not the talent which some people possess,' said Darcy, 'of conversing easily with those I have never seen before. I cannot catch their tone of conversation, or appear interested in their concerns, as I often see done.'

'My fingers,' said Elizabeth, 'do not move over this instrument in the masterly manner which I see so many women's do. They have not the same force or rapidity, and do not produce the same expression. But then I have always supposed it to be my own fault -- because I would not take the trouble of practising. It is not that I do not believe my fingers as capable as any other woman's of superior execution.'

Your response assumes a lot about the homogeneity of subjective human experience that the data don’t seem to support.

There is a diversity of physical attractiveness, innate and learned social grace, social environment, and phenotypic variability in psychosocial capacity that makes your comment sound extremely out of touch to some people.

I can do what you describe because I am fortunate that many of my social interactions are positive. For people I work with this is not the case and they are extremely socially isolated, and the tragedy is that every mistake they make compounds this. They are more sensitive interpersonally than I am and more socially aware in the moment, while less equipped to deal with social conventions and unattractive, becoming dramatically moreso in social situations due to their intrinsic reactions.

The points in the article can help all of us.

The kind of reaction described by the GP is probably trained by a lifetime of bad experiences. One can end up going into every interaction thinking about which parts of oneself to dial down in order to have some semblance of a normal conversation, and inevitably that over-thinking just makes it worse. Ask leading questions, smile, listen careful, don't interrupt - you know, all that sort of thing that comes more naturally to some than to others.

Have you considered that your advice might be akin to telling a diabetic to do talk therapy so they can start producing insulin again?

There are lots of things people can’t just talk themselves out of.

Single interaction? Buddy that’s my entire life.

No one can stop the replay, so there's no use in seeing anyone about it. We eventually just learn to cope, and try not to lie in bed at night replaying all the day's awkward social situations.

Matching your latter register: and what, in your mind, will 'seeing someone' do to change somebody's lack of social 'grace and ease'?

What does "being yourself" even mean? Obviously not "acting the exact same way you act when alone", since this would be impossible/weird/rude/illegal but also not "acting intuitively without overthinking", since the socially anxious person's intuition is to run away.

one interaction? some of us spent half our lives having 99% of interactions be like that - we've grown out it one way or another, but for many ppl "doing people" is HAAAAAARD ...just as for some differential equations are. we're just build veeeery differently. for many "the social world" is a hostile jungle, and we ca face it all right, but with a strong suit of mechanized armour and fully loaded weapons strapped to it.

I mean, obviously all the behaviors in the article are undesirable. The joke is in proposing other ones. Surely people are being amusingly self deprecating not precisely honest.