Exposure Therapy – A Useful Weapon Against Your Phobias

When you are very young, and a wasp flies into the room where you are sitting, you may very well jump off your seat and run away in terror. You have heard, after all, that these things sting you, and when that happens it really hurts. Knowing that you don’t want to get hurt, you duck and cover, naturally. It is usually at that point that a kindly family member tries to console you with the words “Don’t worry! It’s more scared of you than you are of it!”. Which, obviously, is completely untrue.

When you have a phobia, the slightest exposure to the object of your fears can have you reeling with terror. It is fairly common to have a fear of stinging insects because, well… they sting. Not only that, but they can fly and you often do not see them until it’s too late. As a consequence, it is very easy to get stung by an insect – although many people go through life and never have it happen to them. so when a wasp or a bee appears in the scene, the accepted wisdom for a child is to get out of the way.

What exposure therapy teaches us is that this is entirely the wrong way to go about things. Of course, when you are a child, you are not really disposed to listen to someone who tells you that you should face what you are scared of. Why would you be? the thing is trying to attack you! But as time goes on it becomes clear that in order to deal with your fears, you need to get real. You cannot live in a world without wasps, so you need to be able to live comfortably with the possibility of one coming near you.

Exposure therapy teaches us – in as much as the concept can be squeezed down into a simple phrase – that what we really fear is fear itself. We know, deep down, that a wasp is not going to do really serious harm to us, because in order to do so it would need to stay still for some time – long enough, usually, to be squashed. What we really fear is the torment, the anticipation that we are going to be stung, and we are not going to like it.

Exposure therapy teaches us that we can look at a wasp and think “it is only a wasp”. We start by simply looking at pictures, and realising that the picture cannot harm us. Then we observe their movement. Obviously, as they are flying insects, we cannot hold a wasp, but we can observe them, and read about them, to find out that as much as a wasp sting might initially hurt, they are largely harmless when compared to other things. The crux of exposure therapy is that, by being forced to observe that which scares us, we realize that on balance, it is something we do not need to be scared of.