Eliminate Fear by Facing It
The idea of Exposure Therapy is that whenever people avoid confronting their fears, their fears get stronger as a consequence. As such, exposure therapy challenges a person’s fears by repeatedly exposing him to them. The person will then find that through these exposures, he gains more control over his fears and eventually, they weaken and disappear. A person may be asked to visualize his fears by a therapist, or he may encounter them in reality.
One must take note that any person is not required to confront his biggest fear immediately. This can be both inhuman and traumatizing, leading the person into a panic attack. Exposure therapy has to start with circumstances that are only slightly intimidating, and as progress is made, the situations get more and more challenging. This approach allows a person to slowly build confidence in dealing with his fears, and master the skills required in managing anxiety disorder.
Similar to Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, Exposure therapy also involves three stages. The first is learning relaxation techniques. This is necessary for a person to overcome his fears whenever a person encounters a stressful situation, relaxation techniques will inhibit his panic-induced responses and promote relief. These techniques involve muscle relaxation, steady breathing, and many others, which must be practiced with a therapist or at home.
The second stage is creating a step-by-step list. Here, a person with anxiety disorder must create a list of tasks to do in order to progress toward eliminating his fears. Each step must be as feasible and as precise as possible. For instance, if a person has a fear of heights, he can overcome this fear by looking at photos of high places for a start. In the end, he could go mountain climbing.
The last stage is performing each step in the list. After creating the list above, a person must then do everything he wrote down on the list under the supervision of a therapist. The person cannot progress onto the next item on the list until his fears subside. Through this, the person learns that although negative thoughts cause anxiety, the truth is that these thoughts do not physically harm the person and that they do regress given time. At each time the person panics intensely, he must make use of the relaxation technique he learned in the first stage. After relaxing, he goes back to the task he must do. The aim is for the person to learn how to minimize distress while completing each item on the list via controlled action.