If you have tried exposure practices in the past, there may be a couple reasons why it hasn’t worked.
1 – You weren’t armed with the knowledge of how anxiety works/ or you didn’t understand the 3 components of anxiety/ or how to use cognitive therapy to change your anxious thinking patterns.
2 – The exposures weren’t frequent, intense, or long enough.
3 – The exposures weren’t planned in advance (uncontrolled and unpredictable).
Our exposure practices will be well planned, predictable, empowering (you’re making the decision to do this), prolonged, and frequent. You will also now know how to identify, challenge, and change anxious thoughts.
Steps to conducting exposure based treatments
- Initial assessment – what kind of situations and sensations do you fear (covered in self assessment).
- Planning appropriate practices – develop hierarchy
- Carrying out the practices – structured, planned out, frequent, and start with something small. If you go in too fast, you can increase your fear, so there is a balance there.
Next: We will cover these steps in much more depth here – How to conduct exposure practices