Disadvantages Of Psychotherapy

In the text “Relaxing Your Fears away,” the author presents how Joseph Wolpe, a behavior therapist, used a behavioral technique called systematic desensitization to treat anxiety disorders. Systematic desensitization is a technique that is supposed to lower a person’s level of anxiety steadily. The reason he used this technique was to see if this technique actually worked using his prior ideas that two feelings or responses cannot occur at the same time. Wolpe focused on the phobias his patients had and proposed that when his patients were in a relaxed state, then they would not respond with fear when presented with something that gave them anxiety.

According to “Relaxing Your Fears Away” by Wolpe, J. (1961), which describes the systematic desensitization treatment of neuroses, people cannot experience relaxation and fear at the same time. The author stated the theoretical proposition that the reason people get phobias is that they learned a certain behavior sometime in their life and this thing became the fear in their brain.

Systematic desensitisation includes three steps. The first step is to help the person construct an anxiety hierarchy. An anxiety hierarchy is a list of stimuli related to the specific source of anxiety, in this case being in a busy public place. The stimuli are ranked from the least to the most feared or avoided. An example of an anxiety hierarchy for someone with agoraphobia might include:

Operant conditioning is when there is a added positive or removed negative stimulus. The therapist might tell the patient that by not smoking it will give him a longer life. Every time they don’t smoke they should also remember the negative feeling of smoking, making it harder to breath. Aversive therapy is the use of a unpleasant stimulus to get a desired behavior. They might give him a drug that will make him feel ill every time smoke. This way the patient would pair the two stimulus and feel sick about the thought of smoking.P

- From a cognitive behavioral approach, we will be focusing on your patterns of avoidance that are causing you distress. By uncovering what you are avoiding and why, and then voluntarily facing what you are avoiding in a stepwise progression, you will experience less anxiety and fear when faced with the stimuli or situations that you currently avoid. Do you have any questions about that?

The classical conditioning model was one of the first theories used to describe phobias. Many years ago, scientists observed that one could willingly elicit a fear response in an animal or human through systematic teaching. For example, if every time a rat is presented with a low buzzing noise, it is electrically shocked, eventually, when it hears the noise alone (with no shock), it will exhibit symptoms of fear. (3) Scientists

For some people these therapies work their best together and for others just one does the job. The first therapy is exposure therapy, “exposure therapy asks patients to confront, in a safe way, the very situations, objects, people and memories they have attached to the trauma” (Foa 2001) This therapy helps the patient confront their fears in a healthy way, to try to slay the beast and get on with their lives. The second therapy is anxiety management. Anxiety management is five techniques taught to people that help cope with the anxiety experienced from PTSD. The five techniques are,” breathing training, relaxation, assertiveness training, positive thinking and self-talk [and] thought stopping.” These techniques help people calm down enough to cope with their fears slowly, and is usually is used with the exposure therapy process. The third therapy is cognitive therapy. Cognitive therapy is positive thinking and “helps you understand how your thoughts affect your feelings.” (Foa 2001) By using these four steps the therapy helps achieve positive feelings and thoughts. Step one, “become more aware of distressing thoughts.” Step two, “pay attention to connections between your thoughts, feelings and behaviors.” Step three, “challenge (talk back to) your negative thoughts.” Last but not least step four, “substitute positive thoughts for negative ones.”(Foa, 2001)

Fear, an intensive form of anxiety, can be crippling in nature to some people. It is important that we overcome our fears to be able to grow and mature. There are three main ways in which we can manage or resolve fear: behavioral therapy, systematic desensitization, and exposure desensitization. Behavioral therapy was introduced by John B. Watson, a behavioral psychologist, and involved an individual alternating engagements in coping and relaxation techniques to help desensitize that person to the stressors (Seaward, 2015). Systematic desensitization involves the anxious person learning to de-stress from the fear in small, piecemeal increments through which they always feel in control. Exposure desensitization, on the other hand, occurs when the individual is introduced to the real stressor is brief and save encounters with the stressor. Through combinations of the three different ways to

A phobia can be acquired by a person by making the person associate one thing with something not pleasant or painful to them. The effect of this can be permanent if the extinction process on the person

In cognitive behavior therapy there are three main goals a therapist tries to achieve, “ relieve the symptoms and help clients resolve the problem, then help clients develop strategies that can be used to cope with future problems, finally help clients change the way they think from irrational, self-defeating thoughts to more rational, self-helping, positive thoughts” (Ciccarelli, White 2015). When interviewing friends the first step was to find out what their most impacting problems were. Then they talked about ways they could help relax themselves when or if the situation every happened again. Finally they came up with ways they could look at their problems in a more positive way. After the interviews

Desensitization is a predominant treatment that exceeds expectations to diminish the fear in a patient of a circumstance, by presenting them to it either in actuality or in one's imagination. In the first place, the patient should consider storms deliberately until the point when the contemplation isn't dreaded. Second, take a look at photographs of the storm until unfeared. Next, watch recordings of the storm until the point that the video is unfeared. Finally, the patient should play sounds from storms noisily for a considerable length of time until the point that the sounds are unfeared. Ensure you never proceed onward to the following stage unless you've effectively finished the past one. By finishing these means one ought to have the capacity

comparable results for depression as antidepressant medications, making it a successful treatment alternative to medication. (Thoma, Pilecki, et al., 2015, p. 433) Since this is predicted to become such a major issue, the treatment for depression has become extremely important. According to Rachman, Cognitive behavioral therapy is also successful for the uses of treating obsessive compulsive disorder and anxiety. For example, Salkovski 's analysis of OCD became an important part of the cognitive behavioral therapy model, which helped therapists focus on the client 's thoughts and feelings regarding their compulsive behaviors and urges. (Rachman, 2014, p.5) In the field of anxiety, studies also found that cognitive behavioral therapy showed favorable results in lowering symptoms for those diagnosed with generalized anxiety disorder. One of the majority methods of therapy for anxiety disorders is exposure therapy, which is the process when a client is directly confronted with the object that they fear throughout sessions. The process starts out slowly, until the last session where the client comes into direct contact with the object they fear. (Thoma, Pilecki, et al., 2015, p. 438)

"Systematic desensitization is a procedure in which the patient is exposed to the phobic object gradually, so that fear and discomfort are kept to a minimum and extinction is allowed to occur" (Mazur, 2013, p.69). When applying this to a person with an anxiety disorder the individual would need to compose a list of things that are upsetting and cause the anxiety listing them from least upsetting to most upsetting. The next part of the process would be teaching the person relaxation techniques such as deep breathing and muscle relaxation in order to empower them use these when they feel they are getting anxious. Now that the initial procedure are in place the process would begin by introducing the least upsetting and then telling them to relax, then they would repeat this process

A behavioural psychologist by the name of Joseph Wolpe helped clients in getting rid of their phobias in a process that would be much quicker than the process of psychodynamic which is the explanation that humans functioning is based on interactions of drives and forces which occur within the body such as unconsciousness and the various structures of personality. The basis of psychodynamic was introduced by an Austrian neurologist, Sigmund Freud. The reason Wolpe conducted this study was to find the most effective way in to perform systematic desensitization to eradicate people’s phobia. The hypothesis which Wolpe used was that to remove people’s phobia a fear should be combined with something that is also relaxing to the body and that eventually

“The aversion therapy is considered a type of psychological treatment, where patients will be exposed to different types of stimulus and at the same time it will experience some type of discomfort (Lieberman, 2012).”This treatment is based on the principles of classical conditioning; using classical conditioning to get rid of addictions or unwanted behaviours. Patient’s unwanted addiction is paired with a drug that makes them sick.