A Certain Awesome Experience With Exposure Therapy

In this blog post I will be telling you about my first-hand experience with the use of exposure therapy for the treatment of phobias. I am a firm believer that the best way to get over your fears is to tackle them head on and this is basically the way exposure therapy works: by making the patients confront their fears directly.

Now let me set a bit of context for this post. I know someone who used to have insectophobia (the fear of insects). He would still have insectophobia if I hadn't helped him cure it with exposure therapy. Curing that phobia was no easy task. My “patient” was so scared of insects that between being locked in a cage with a psycho killer riding on top of a carnivorous, fire-breathing dragon or a ladybug, he would have picked the former. Seriously, even seeing something as small as an ant on the floor would have sent shivers down his spine.

After finding this out, I decided to do my part in “helping” him get over his fear. I put the word “helping” in quotations because truth be told, my original intent was not to help my patient at all but to have fun exploiting his fear and laughing at him panicking over these harmless creatures  (well, most of them are harmless anyway). I probably have a cruel, sordid sense of humour because of this.

So how did I go about executing my masterful plan of instilling fear into my patient? Well, one day we were just sitting around in the library, not doing anything, when I came up with the brilliant idea which I will now be describing. Basically, I told my patient that I would show him a series of insect images to help him get over his fear. He was against this at first but I reassured him by telling him that I would progress slowly, showing innocent looking pictures at first and then gradually work my way up. Even then he was still against the whole idea but went along with it since I let him cover his face up with his hands and slowly move his fingers out of the way to reveal the image bit by bit. Now my trap had been set. 

I first showed him a series of cartoon insect pictures, trying to find the cutest possible ones that I could from Google images and for each one he would follow his procedure of having his hands covering his face and slowly moving them to reveal the images little by little. Somehow, he still found them to be scary. With that in mind, I could only imagine what sort of reaction he’d get if I had shown him something worse. After a few pictures I showed my patient a picture of a snail from the online game Maple Story. This is a game that he had played quite extensively in the past so when he saw the picture he pretty much scoffed at it as he had seen quite a few of those in his career. Now his defense was down. The next picture I showed was this:

And let me tell you, his reaction to this was not pretty. I can’t even find words to adequately describe it. It was just really bad; he actually started hyperventilating from the image. After seeing his reaction I actually had a sense of guilt and was feeling remorse for my actions – that is until he tried to break my laptop (I might have deserved this), the display of which I was showing him the images with. From that point on, I decided to try showing him insect images whenever possible, to try to invoke the same sort of reaction. I proceeded to show him insect pictures at every opportunity that I saw fit, doing so when he would least expect it. 

To make a long story short, I never did get a reaction as grand as that again. After a while he simply stopped caring and somehow came to the conclusion that insects aren’t scary anymore due to my childish antics. I tried showing him all of the most disgusting insects that I could possibly find but he would look at them all willingly, seemingly unfazed by all of them. Alas, it was no longer any fun to do so anymore. While my intention was to scare him, I inadvertently cured him after exposing him to so many insect pictures. 

So what is the moral of my story? Well, to quote Shakespeare: “I must be cruel, only to be kind.” Yes, my actions can be thought of as cruel but in the end it was all to the benefit of my patient as I helped rid him of a phobia that had plagued him since the beginning of his life. Also, exposure therapy actually works. If you know someone who is scared of something then try stuffing their fear down their throat and they may eventually get over it.