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The fact that someone doesn't feel comfortable about something doesn't mean that their feelings are warranted. When dealing with anxiety disorders or phobias, t
by TheAdamAndChe 6y ago
The fact that someone doesn't feel comfortable about something doesn't mean that their feelings are warranted. When dealing with anxiety disorders or phobias, the last thing experts recommend is avoidance of that which causes anxiety. In fact, exposure therapy helps drastically with it.
- waterhouse 6y agoOk, how does exposure therapy actually work? Wiki sez: "Exposure therapy is based on the principle of respondent conditioning often termed Pavlovian extinction.[16] The exposure therapist identifies the cognitions, emotions and physiological arousal that accompany a fear-inducing stimulus and then tries to break the pattern of escape that maintains the fear. This is done by exposing the patient to progressively stronger fear-inducing stimuli.[17] Fear is minimized at each of a series of steadily escalating steps or challenges (a hierarchy), which can be explicit ("static") or implicit ("dynamic" — see Method of Factors) until the fear is finally gone.[18] The patient is able to terminate the procedure at any time." That is, to my interpretation, the idea is to expose the patient to the scary stimulus under conditions that are kept as nice, safe, and comfortable as possible, so that the Pavlovian part of their brain will learn to stop associating the stimulus with fear. This is entirely different from "keep throwing them into the feared situation, against their will and without any particular effort to make it more safe or pleasant".