The Theory Of The Final Behaviourist Therapy

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.

The symptom is merely a front for the family’s larger stress. And we do not determine who the family consists of – the family does.

Ricciardi, Luiselli, and Camar studied contact desensitization (reinforcing approach responses) as intervention for specific phobia with a child diagnosed with autism. During hospital-based intervention, the boy was able to encounter previously avoided stimuli. Parental report suggested that findings were preserved post discharge. When determining which phobia treatment best suits a patient, many important factors must be considered. First, the root cause of the phobia must be recognised. If the patient does not find when or how the phobia initiated, cognitive-behavioral Exposure Therapy would be recommended as it has been shown to be the most successful, well investigated treatment. In some case like flying fear when phobia is difficult to meet with the therapist, then hypnosis, Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP), and virtual reality exposure therapy would be most suitable. If the client does tie to the phobia to a particular traumatic event, Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) might be a more fit

You may be aware that your personal issues are getting in the way of living the kind of life you want. Counselling can help you discover better ways to cope.

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.

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:

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.

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

This article is discussing the impact that Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (DBT) group counseling can have on adolescents in Disciplinary Alternative Education Program (DAEP). The results show an overall reduction of student behavioral distress. As school counselors can only notice the augmentation of troubled students on campus, it is important to find school-based interventions, theoretically grounded, with a demonstrate efficacy to help them manage this issue.

One of the greatest appeals to behavior therapy is its efficacy in treating a wide array of disorders and its innovative applications outside of individual psychotherapy. In the past century, behavior therapy has made increasingly effective and creative therapies to treat patients with maladaptive behaviors which were previously, in some cases, untreatable. With such developments, patients were able to not only treat pathologies, but also improve functioning in a variety of aspects of their lives as well as the lives of those close to them. Amongst the most widely implemented treatments in behavior therapy are token economies, contingency contracts, and behavioral parent training. These therapies proved to be greatly useful when they were

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

"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

The key concepts of behavior therapy are that it “is grounded on a scientific view of human behavior that accommodates a systematic and structured approach to counseling” (Corey, 2013, p. 250). The attention is focused on the behavior of the person. Behavior therapy is about giving control to the client to expand their freedom. “People have the capacity to choose how they will respond to external events in their environment” (Corey, 2013, p. 250).

“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.

The third wave of behavioral therapy includes acceptance and commitment therapy, dialectical behavior therapy, and mindfulness-based cognitive therapy. These types of therapies are designed to help people accept difficult life experiences and to persuade individuals to act on their core values. An evolution of cognitive-behavioral therapy, ACT, MBCT, and DBT not only include the thought process within the behavioral network, but mindfulness and acceptance as well. Instead of teaching people to control their thoughts and feelings in the case of CBT, ACT & DBT draws from far eastern philosophies of noticing and accepting the things in life that you cannot change.