Welcome to That Anxiety Guy, everybody Drew here that anxiety guide.

Thanks as always for stopping by to listen. I do appreciate it.

Today we're going to talk about exposure therapy specifically we're going to talk about exposure therapy.

Specifically, we're going to talk about common mistakes and misconceptions surrounding exposure therapy

and why for some people these can make them feel like exposure either doesn't work for them or that they have somehow failed at it.

So let's get started. Let's talk about what exposure therapy is.

Exposure therapy is pretty much what it sounds like.

Exposure is the act of putting yourself into situations that will intentionally elicit your anxiety and panic symptoms in an effort to desensitize you to them and so that you can learn through direct experience that you do not have to fear them or try to avoid them.

So exposure is extremely extremely effective when it comes to treating phobias this includes

simple phobias like the fear of heights or the fear of flying and since

agoraphobia and panic disorder and related issues are phobias they may not be simple phobias but issues are phobias, they may not be simple phobias, but they are phobias.

Exposure has also been shown by mountains of clinical evidence over many decades to be very, very, very

effective in dealing with these things.

Yet for some people, they've tried it and either decided that it just doesn't work.

It's not going to work for them, or that they somehow were failures at it

and that's why it didn't work for them.

So I want to look at why that sometimes happens

and what we could do to try and stop that from happening.

So let's take a look at maybe one little issue that we should all look at before we even get started.

And that is, because this is not just, doesn't just relate to exposure therapy, it relates to kind of the whole overall way that we approach our disorder and that is if you think

that exposure is not going to work for you and I hear this often so I'm going to throw it out there

to start if you think that exposure isn't going to work for you or can't possibly work for you because somehow your anxiety is unique, it's different or worse than anyone else's, you're probably not going to have a really good

...