You begin imagining yourself vocally greeting people, practicing deep breathing when you feel anxious, until you can remain calm. Next, you move on to greeting strangers in real life. After a week of doing this daily, you start to feel more at ease. Then, you start working on the next fear — making eye contact during conversation. You work your way through the hierarchy, eventually introducing yourself and nodding along in class.
You continue to use deep breathing and muscle relaxation to get through periods of discomfort. The final level of your fear hierarchy involves sharing in class. You take a deep breath, release the tension in your muscles, and begin to speak.
When you see a dog coming toward you in the distance, your palms sweat, your heart races, and you have trouble breathing. Your phobia relates specifically to being bitten, but being around dogs also makes you feel afraid and anxious.
The next day, you drive by a dog park several times. You feel yourself tense up every time a dog starts barking. To combat this, you concentrate on relaxing your muscles and imagining yourself on a beautiful beach — one without dogs. You open your eyes and repeat this process for the next 30 minutes. You practice relaxation exercises each time you think about the dog getting out. As you prepare to conquer your level 10 fear — walking through a dog park — you decide to spend some time in the puppy area of your local animal shelter.
Puppies are less frightening to you, but the thought of them being so close still makes you feel anxious. You have to step outside a few times to do some deep breathing and visualization exercises.
Finally, after months of work, you head back to the dog park. This time, you park your car and walk through the gates.
This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed. Related posts: What is Gestalt Therapy? Aversion Therapy What is Psychodynamic Therapy? What Are Sleep Disorders? What are Identity Disorders? Hi Manasseh, What a coincidence! I hope the contents on this website are helpful to you. Thanks for the wonderful and simple explanation of systematic desensitization. Thus, for example, a spider phobic might regard one small, stationary spider 5 meters away as only modestly threatening, but a large, rapidly moving spider 1 meter away as highly threatening.
The client reaches a state of deep relaxation, and is then asked to imagine or is confronted by the least threatening situation in the anxiety hierarchy.
Wolpe successfully used the method to treat an 18 year old male with a severe handwashing compulsion. The disorder involved a fear of contaminating others with urine. After urinating, the patient felt compelled to spend 45 minutes cleaning his genitalia, two hours washing his hands, and four hours showering. Treatment involved placing the young man in a state of relaxation and then asking him to imagine low anxiety scenes such as an unknown man touching a trough of water containing one drop of urine.
In addition, a real bottle of urine was presented at a distance and moved closer to the patient in gradual steps. A follow-up 4 years later revealed complete remission of the compulsive behaviors. The fact that the systematic desensitization technique can be applied in images means that many of the practical disadvantages involved in in vivo exposition with this type of phobia can be eliminated.
Some people cannot create a vivid image and thus systematic desensitization is not always effective there are individual differences. Systematic desensitization is a slow process, taking on average sessions.
Although, research suggests that the longer the technique takes the more effective it is. This absence of disturbing elements makes this technique less likely to provoke abandonment of the therapy.
However, systematic desensitization is not effective in treating serious mental disorders like depression and schizophrenia. Studies have shown that neither relaxation nor hierarchies are necessary, and that the important factor is just exposure to the feared object or situation.
Systematic desensitization is based on the idea that abnormal behavior is learned. The biological approach would disagree and say we are born with a behavior and therefore it must be treated medically. Treats the symptoms not the cause s of the phobia. We and our partners process data to: Actively scan device characteristics for identification.
I Accept Show Purposes. Deep Breathing Exercises to Reduce Anxiety. Using Progressive Muscle Relaxation. Visualization Techniques. Desensitization, Hierarchies and Social Anxiety. Was this page helpful? Thanks for your feedback! Sign Up. What are your concerns? Verywell Mind uses only high-quality sources, including peer-reviewed studies, to support the facts within our articles.
Read our editorial process to learn more about how we fact-check and keep our content accurate, reliable, and trustworthy. Deerfield, MA: Channing L.
Bete Co. Corey, Gerald. Theory and practice of counseling and psychotherapy.
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