Exposure Treatment For Anxiety
Anxiety is a natural reaction to a situation we find stressful. This is why you might feel nervous before an exam or have butterflies before a job interview.
Most of us will feel our anxiety levels reduce once the stressful event is over, but people with anxiety disorders can experience ongoing overwhelming worry, regular panic attacks or debilitating phobias.
How therapy can help
It’s important to realise that help is available, and for many anxiety issues cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) is the most effective option for treating the condition. CBT can help a person to work through and identify the underlying causes of their troublesome thoughts or fears and give them the tools to look at stressful events in more helpful, positive ways.
Exposure therapy
Feeling anxious is not a pleasurable sensation, especially if it is ongoing and prolonged. One way that anxiety sufferers try to make themselves feel better is to avoid the situation that causes their stress levels to rise.
For example, a person with a fear of dogs may avoid going for walks in case they encounter a dog. They may visualise being bitten if a dog bounds up to them and these unhelpful thoughts can cause them to stop visiting parks or taking exercise, which reduces their quality of life.
This not only causes inconvenience for the person, but by avoiding the object of their anxiety, there is no opportunity to overcome them and move on from the issue.
Exposure therapy is a form of CBT that gradually exposes a person to the event or object that causes them anxiety. An experienced CBT practitioner will guide their client through repeated exposures, to give them a growing sense of confidence and control over the situation. As their confidence increases, their anxiety levels will decrease.
To avoid causing the client to feel additional trauma, they may initially be asked to imagine the situation that causes them fear, or look at images of the object of their phobia, before slowly building up to confronting the issue in a real-life situation.
This approach is known as systematic desensitisation, which allows a person to confront their fears, improve their confidence levels and learn new skills to cope and control their anxiety levels more productively.
Speak with a trained counsellor
Jamie Dempsey is a qualified and accredited Cognitive Behavioural Psychotherapists with the British Association for Behavioural & Cognitive Psychologies (BABCP), who specialises in anxiety, phobia and trauma. Contact Jamie to book an appointment and learn how to move beyond your anxiety.
