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Sunday, March 26, 2006

Book : Coping With Anxiety.

This book by Edmund Bourne and Laura Garano has a chapter on Phobia's (Chapter 4, Face your fears). This is a great chapter on Exposure therapy. Among the highlights :



* You need between 8 and 20 steps in your plan.

* You will have up and down days, hit plateau's, jump forward and fall backward. This is normal! They write about people with a social phobia of going to the supermarket :

On a given Monday you might spend five minutes alone in the grocery store for the first time in years. On Tuesday you can endure five minutes again but no more. On Wednesday you are unable to go into the store at all. Thursday or Friday you discover that you can last ten minutes in the store. This up-and-down, two-steps-forward-one-step-back phenomenon is typical of exposure therapy. Don't let it discourage you!


* You just practice regularly 3-5 times per week. Generally longer sessions of exposure are better than shorter sessions.

* It can take between a month and a year to fully recover.

* You have to trust your own pace.

* You can use Imagery desensitization to help "practice" situations in which you suffer Shy Bladder.

* If you want to really get cured you have to progress through all steps, stopping at some level of comfort short of cured will not do it.

It's just one chapter of the whole book but I found it very helpful.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

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