Question for sage

[sweetfreak]

How would exposure therapy for someone like me work? Pictures and movies of vomit do not make me anxious. The only things that do are hearing that someone I was near might be sick and I only feel slight anxiety from that. It doesn't last for long and I don't dwell on it. What does make me very anxious is someone coughing, and it has to be a nasty cough for me to be scared, and being near someone I know is vomiting or about to.

[sage]

if you were to structure a hierarchy of fears, you would be able to create a program for treatment (or your therapist would). First of all, even though videos of others does not make you anxious, believe it or not you can try to get anxious when you watch the video...I would only recommend doing this in the care of a trusted professional. EMDR can help - it gets the client back into the feelings of anxiety only in their imagination where they can handle it, and control it. Also, a tape of sounds seems like it would be difficult for you to handle...(in which case some movie scenes would theoretically be tough to take...) Sounds on a tape can be played in EMDR sessions to add to the anxiety, if the anxiety isn't high enough for resolution.


The trick with exposure therapy is toplot the Subjective Units of Disturbance (SUDs), on a scale of 0[no disturbance] to 10 [too much to tolerate].... in order to treat phobia, you have to be able to get the SUDs up to around 7, but not 8 or 9 because that's too high and it makes the phobia worse. But if you can't get aroused at all, you need some help in getting the numbers higher.


Information about therapists, treatment programs and EMDR can be found on the Treatments thread in this discussion forum.