Responding To Netizen's Comment

Question: I read your post on facing your fear yesterday and I wonder if there are techniques used in psychology or psychiatry where the person is exposed to his feared situation or objects (phobias) until fear responses to that stimulus is extinguished?

Answer: There are techniques used where a person is being given the chance to have gradual exposure to a feared stimulus. Although the post yesterday was meant to touch on minor fears only (e.g. fear of approaching the woman of your dreams, fear of going to her house and meeting her parents OR fear of public speaking which can happen to normal people ... just like fear of reciting inside the class or fear of sharing an opinion in public) not necessarily irrational fears bordering on the abnormal like phobias.

Anyway while we are at it ... let me mention these techniques in passing ...

1. exposure therapy - techniques used by therapists to help a person overcome his fears by breaking the pattern of fear and avoidance. A person is made to have contact with the feared stimuli and this contact is maintained until the anxiety associated with the contact subsides. This process is also termed habituation and it can only occur if the person is prevented from using his usual escape or avoidance behavior.

It is also called the Pavlovian extinction (also known as respondent conditioning) where the exposure therapists identify the feared object, the emotions, and the psychological reactions the person is experiencing ... and the physiological changes observed in the person as a result of the exposure ... and then try to break the pattern of escape that maintain that fear.

2. Systematic desensitization. First, let us define desensitization which means anesthetize, benumb, or deaden. It means to make someone emotionally insensitive and callous. For instance, if we see a lot of mayhem or violence on television it can desensitize us to it ... like violence is just a normal occurrence leaving us unmoved and unperturbed. Same thing with X-rated movies ... generous exposure to it at times can be tiring and monotonous ... making the images look like just one of those random things ... and the scenes you saw did not affect or appeal to you at all. Surprised?

The goal of desensitization is to inhibit or interrupt the body's interpretation of stimuli as painful or fearful. If somebody has a fear of injections it does not mean to assure somebody that getting poked with a needle will become pleasant or enjoyable, but it will no longer provoke an extreme pain response or become a feared stimulus.

In systematic desensitization, people learn relaxation techniques and then, while they are relaxed, they are gradually exposed to the stimulus they fear.SD is used to treat extreme aversions through a combination of graded exposure and relaxation. It is an evidence-based behavioral intervention that is focused on helping clients overcome common fears or phobias.

3. Flooding - in this technique, a person is exposed to a harmless stimulus until fear responses to that stimulus are extinguished.  In order to demonstrate the irrationality of the fear, a psychologist would put a person in a situation where they would face their phobia. Using psychologically-proven relaxation techniques, the subject attempts to replace their fear with relaxation. 

According to Pavlov, people can learn through associations, so if one has a phobia, it is because one associates the feared stimulus with a negative outcome (e.g. riding a plane  - and the plane crashing). The theory also teaches us that fear response has a short shelf-life and an expiry limit. Flooding uses actual exposure to the feared stimuli. If a person has acrophobia or fear of heights, by using flooding as a technique ... a person can be placed in an elevator or ride a plane.  Having irrational fear we expect a roller-coaster of reactions from her ... but rest assured she will calm down and be cool and collected later on ... when she realizes her fear of heights is unjustified and unnecessary. When she realizes her irrational fear of high places is not something to fear ... in the first place.

As we said before ... fear has a deadline or an expiratory date. Once the person has been gradually given a dose of exposure to the feared object ... it will dawn on her how foolish of her to behave that way.