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Comment by fnord77

3 days ago

> Exposure therapy is the cure for anxiety.

Except when it is not. Exposure can make an autistic person's anxiety worse.

5 comments

fnord77

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galleywest200  3 days ago

Pretty sure the exposure makes _everyone's_ anxiety worse at the start, that is part of the point.

  • bradlys  3 days ago

    Nah, it’s actually a studied thing. Exposure therapy can work for some subjects but it’s quite controversial due to it quickly becoming “trauma therapy”. It can easily reinforce someone’s existing beliefs and make someone actually weaker and traumatized. Happens a lot. Imagine an ugly kid asking every girl out at school, you think maybe he just needs to get a single success but it’s possible he gets completely rejected and/or the rejections are so immense that it overpowers any single acceptance. He won’t be resilient from this - it will haunt him for the rest of his life. Plus, there can be social consequences (and consequences with other exposure therapies) that will be lasting from making such a brute force strategy.

    Exposure therapy can make sense if it always resorts in good outcomes but that’s the issue - bad things do happen. And sometimes bad things happen more often to those who are “needing” exposure therapy.

    • munificent  3 days ago

      > Imagine an ugly kid asking every girl out at school, you think maybe he just needs to get a single success but it’s possible he gets completely rejected and/or the rejections are so immense that it overpowers any single acceptance.

      Just randomly doing shit that causes you stress isn't exposure therapy. It's just hazing yourself and rolling the dice as to the outcome.

      > Exposure therapy can make sense if it always resorts in good outcomes but that’s the issue

      I think you have an over-simplified notion of "good outcome" here.

      It's not necessarily about achieving the goal of the action, it's about seeing that the catastrophizing scenarios in your head aren't based in reality. In the example with the ugly kid, if he's afraid that asking a girl out will lead to her laughing in his face and publicly humiliating him, then even simply being rejected with compassion is enough to thwart that catastrophizing.

      But, of course, having him ask out every girl at the school is a terrible example of "exposure therapy". Strangers should not be used as unconsenting test subjects in one's personal therapy.

munificent  3 days ago

I didn't say "exposure", I said "exposure therapy". A good therapy is designed with the patient in mind.