FEAR TREATMENT

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Fear is an emotion induced by a threat perceived by living entities, which causes a change in brain and organ function and ultimately a change in behavior, such as running away, hiding or freezing from traumatic events. Fear may occur in response to a specific stimulus happening in the present, or to a future situation, which is perceived as risk to health or life, status, power, security, or in the case of human's wealth or anything held valuable.

 Regardless of therapeutic approach, psychological treatment of fear disorders is an orderly sequence of interventions designed to help terrified people realize that, though their fear is real, the danger it signals is not.

1.      External control

 The overall goal of psychotherapy is to foster internal control of fear. External control may be a necessary precursor, but it is the beginning, not the end.  Medications sometimes help, but they should be the kind that augment internal control (anti-depressants, like Prozac, Paxil, Wellbutrin) not the kind that directly alleviate the symptoms of fear ( Alcohol, Valium, Xanax, Klonopin) Avoiding the situations in which fear occurs may help in the short run, but can quickly become more dangerous than fear.

2.       Taking the measure of fear

Once people understand what fear really is, they can begin to act as if it doesn’t exist.  Real things have properties.  They take up space and have weight.  Psychological entities have properties as well.  They exist in space and time with measurable intensity and duration.  What makes them real is words. Fearful people are encouraged to examine their fear rather than merely reacting to it.

3.       Internal control

.Once people understand what fear is, the next step is showing them that, through their actions, they can exert some control over it.

 Relaxation and exercise

Though rather low-tech, relaxation training and regular exercise work wonders on two distinct levels.  They decrease generalized arousal, thereby raising the threshold for explosions, and they move fearful people from passively accepting their disorder to doing something about it.

Desensitization

The basic behavioral procedure for fear disorders involves substituting relaxation for the fight or flight response, and using the new connection to help frightened people move progressively closer to what they fear.

Cognitive Therapy

The basic idea of this approach is: What you feel is determined by what you say to yourself inside your head.  It involves extensive re-recording of the internal soundtrack of existence.

4.       Creating a new balance

Fear disorders often develop in people who have difficulty asking for what they do want and saying no to what they don’t want.  Sometimes they let their illnesses speak for them when they should be speaking for themselves.  When they do speak up, it can cause emotional explosions in the people around them, who wonder why they’re not as compliant as they used to be.  It helps to have significant others involved in this phase of treatment.