Systematic Desensitization: A Case Study

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.

A phobia is an extreme or irrational fear of something. Many phobias are in relation to one another. As people, we must realize that phobias cannot be fixed by ourselves. In order to help individuals that we may encounter, we must completely understand phobias. We cannot judge them for something they cannot help. To help an individual feel more at ease it is our job to know the causes, effects, impacts, and treatments of their phobia. This would help to completely understand the phobia and in the end, help us all to support each

Reason for the Desenstization to target behavior to which a person react with varying degrees of anxiety. so to analyze person problem by breaking it down so as to make easier for person to conditioned stimulus (e.g. a spider), that are ranked from least fearful to most fearful. Second patient can be given relaxation training like control over breathing, loosing muscle or mediation.

One who encounters phobias has to deal with a collection of uncontrollable symptoms when their

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:

Phobic disorders are objects, places, things that people develop a fear of that are not realistically dangerous. People often develop this usually from one past experience. Many people have arachnophobia, acrophobia, claustrophobia, and hydrophobia. There is some strange phobias that people develop like homophobia, fear of long words, fear of popping balloons and fear that somewhere a duck is watching you. I don’t know if it was from when I was a child but I fear that people are going to let go of their balloons or pop them, which is very strange. My friend has agoraphobia which greatly affected her social life, and only last year got over it to find a job and be able to shop by herself. I used to have to drag her into town when I needed to go and if she saw someone we knew she would hide, and would even run out of the store.

Introduction: Almost everyone has an irrational fear or two—of mice, for example, or your annual dental checkup. For most people, these fears are minor. But when fears become so severe that they cause tremendous anxiety and interfere with your normal life, they’re called phobias. A phobia is an intense fear of something that, in reality, poses little or no actual danger. Common phobias and fears include closed-in places, heights, highway driving, flying insects, snakes, and needles. However, we can develop phobias of virtually anything. Most phobias develop in childhood, but they can also develop in adults. If you

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

treating anxiety and phobias without involving sudden direct exposure like in the case of exposure therapy. I know because in an article it said " systematic desensitization is a method of therapy that is helpful in treating anxiety and phobias without involving sudden direct exposure like in the case of exposure therapy.

It is believed that as all behaviour is learned then it can also be un-learned. This can be done through behaviour therapies. Flooding is generally used for those with phobias. It involves exposing individuals to situations they are afraid of in an intense manner. There is ethical issues around this therapy as clients are subject to intense fear and anxiety. Systematic desensitisation are more effective on phobias (phobialist 1997). Some of the therapies are not effective on more severe mental illnesses such as schizophrenia and can also oversimplify illnesses by focusing on the symptoms not the cause. Most behaviourists believe that most phobias are from previous traumatic experiences.

However, although Wolpe wasn’t the first to suggest systematic desensitization as the best method to be used when treating anxiety disorders he was the first successfully apply it. With Wolpe believing phobia are learned he believed he could reduce the anxiety by a conditioning procedure. His theory of suppressing the phobias was the fundamental idea of behavioral therapy where you have learned an ineffective behavior or the phobia in this case and must now unlearn it. With this in mind, Wolpe created and used behavioral therapy as his basis and composed a three step process of desensitizing the phobia. First using relaxation training to create a personal state of relaxation Wolpe then moved to the construction of an anxiety hierarchy where he and the patient developed a list of scenes involving the phobia and finally the actual unlearning processes of desensitization was created. Repeating all three steps as one Wolpe averaged out at 12 sessions. As a result, his session results positively favored his method with a 91% success rate accompanying it and supporting his usage of correctly applying systematic desensitization to phobias or anxiety

Anxiety disorders may not seem like a problem in the world today, unfortunately, many people suffer from different types of anxiety disorders. They include, panic disorder, obsessive compulsive disorder, post traumatic stress disorder, phobias, generalized anxiety disorders, and social disorders. Everyone has experienced a type of anxiety in their lives one time or another and can be bothersome. Anxiety is described as a normal response to stress, defined as a cluster of mental illnesses that causes people to feel scared, distressed, or uneasy during certain situations that others may not experience. In America, anxiety disorders are the most common today, and they affect more than 20 percent of the population. Effective treatment

I am pleased to hear that Olwen. Yes Olwen, focusing on the WHY can be disempowering in the long term. The HOW and WHAT can in fact lead to greater insight in the long term. HOW am I responding? WHAT can I do about it?

Research has shown that exposure therapy is the one the most effective treatments for anxiety disorders (e.g., social anxiety, PTSD, Phobia’s and GAD) (Cahill & Foa, 2002). It begins by building a strong collaborative relationship, were the client is the expert, and the therapist is cast as an agent of change (http://div12.org/sites/default/files/WhatIsExposureTherapy.pdf). Exposure therapy decreases the client’s experience of anxiety through the systematic confrontation of feared stimuli, these fears may be external (e.g., feared people, places and situations), or internal (e.g., feared thoughts, physical sensations or memories). The aim of exposure therapy is to reduce the client’s reaction to the feared object, thought or memory (http://www.psychiatrictime)

However, phobia can even cause people to risk their health. For example, the fear of dentists can leave people suffering from it willing to risk the health of their teeth in order to avoid having to go through an exam or procedure ( MacKay). When one knows about an upcoming confrontation, it can be the reason why one can not sleep or finds it hard to focus on important tasks. Due the change in daily routine, this unrealistic fear can interfere with the ability to socialize, work, or go about everyday life, brought on by and object, event or situation. But even animals have anxieties and phobias just as every human being (www.phobia-help.de). A phobia is an irrational fear, one knows that the object or situation, one is scared off, can not hurt one, but one is still afraid. A reason for this is that the human mind can not distinguish what is real and imaginary. When one has uncontrollable anxiety attacks, he loses rational judgement, leading to complicated problems. However, anyone can develop a phobia, men and women, teens and young adults, and elderly lady or a one-year-old boy (MacKay).