Desensitization is the queen of psychotherapy!

Desensitization is a technique to reduce negative stress, anxiety and fears for straining images, frightening objects or situations.

For example, fear of flying, heights, fear of spiders, mice, snakes. Fear of splashing with cold water, fear of entering cold water. Or — memories of traumatic situations.

Variants of this technique, often not knowing about each other, were described by a variety of specialists: J. Wolpe, V. Lute, D. Wall and others. Schultz auto-training can also be considered as the most common desensitization option.

If some situation caused in the soul, that is, in the body, a feeling of fear, a reaction of fear, this means that muscle tension has arisen somewhere in the body. Most often, in response to fear, muscle tension occurs in the collar zone (the head is pressed into the shoulders), in the area of ​​​​the diaphragm (breathing stops), in the muscles around the eyes (glazed eyes) and in the hands (hands tremble). If the fear reaction is repeated or lasts (sometimes it stretches for hours, days and even years), muscle tension turns into a muscle clamp: a storehouse of fear. If a muscle clamp has formed in you according to the pattern of fear, you begin to feel fear even when nothing terrible is happening around you, it’s just the memory of the body that works in you, forming a general feeling of anxiety and an acute feeling of fear when something even a little like danger appears near you.

And where a person with a «clean body» will not be scared (or the fear will be weak, easily overcome), a person with heavy muscle clamps will be seriously scared, sometimes to the point of nausea and complete paralysis of the body.

So, it is important to know that fear is written into your body. Fear does not live in the soul — fear lives in your body, in the clamps of your body. And the task of desensitization is to erase these clamps that trigger your fears. The essence of the technique is the re-experiencing of a difficult (terrible) situation against a bodily background that erases the negative experience. There are a lot of specific desensitization techniques, but most of them differ only in what kind of bodily background is offered and how specifically it is proposed to create it.

The simplest and most familiar version of desensitization is the removal of anxiety through relaxation. Having relaxed and immersed himself in a feeling of complete peace, a person (usually under the guidance of a psychologist) begins to imagine those situations or objects that previously caused him fear or anxiety. Alternating approaching and moving away from the source of anxiety, making a rollback when tension arises and returning oneself to a state of rest, sooner or later a person acquires the ability to imagine what previously caused fear, already in a neutral state of mind.

If there is no time to relieve fear through relaxation, experts advise: describe in detail the terrible situation and your behavior in it. It is important that you have a good idea of ​​it: who will stand where, who will say what, what you will do, and so on. The effectiveness of this method is less than the removal of fears through relaxation, but it is also quite working. Why? Because when you describe a terrible situation in detail, your attention is occupied with intellectual activity and the body is calm. As long as your body is calm, your story over and over again destroys your fears.

If you have a temper, you can prevent and manage your outbursts of anger in a simple way. Your task is to sit down, relax, close your eyes and imagine the situation where you usually break down. However, this time you must present your behavior to others: calm, reasonable — the way you would like to see yourself. And that’s it! Imagine this new behavior of yours more often, and soon, where you tore and threw, you will behave quite reasonably. Check — such a simple method really turns out to be quite effective.

One of the most effective desensitization options is breathwork. Controlling our breathing, holding a calm breath during an imaginary or real encounter with a situation of danger, we erase the old habitual clamps, regain freedom of action and inner peace. Those who have mastered the technique of calm presence, the habit of meeting any situation with a calm examination of it, desensitization is effectively carried out through the practice of calm presence.

In everyday life, courageous and cheerful people have long mastered one of the most cheerful ways — relieving anxiety through an energetic positive attitude. When children sing cheerful and cheerful songs from childhood, for example, about how a lion ate a man, the tone and sound of the song make fear impossible.

Let’s not continue the story.

Lion cut like a poodle

Ate the poor man like a pudding

Ate with all inventory…

It was last summer,

In the middle of January

In the thirtieth kingdom

Where there is no trace of the king!

The situation is terrible — but there is no fear. The song is performed cheerfully and cheerfully, so no one is horrified.

In practical psychology, the desensitization method is used not just often, but almost everywhere. Sometime it happens through the story of sensory images during autogenic relaxation, sometime through the control of eye movements — the desensitization technique is used much more often than even experts suspect. Not quite consciously and, apparently, not even suspecting it, the desensitization technique is used in classical psychoanalysis.

An alarmed patient arrives, he is laid on the couch, where he will lie for at least 10 minutes. Relaxation… On the couch, the patient is asked to start free association. Free associations can only be given out in a relaxed state; accordingly, in order to cope with this task, the patient has to relax even more. Now the client is brought back to the situation that might have been the cause of his tension, and, returning to it over and over again, the client lives it over and over again against the backdrop of an already calm relaxation. The result is a classic method of desensitization, a typical behavioral approach in a psychoanalytic robe.

Similarly, desensitization in fact occurs during classical auditing, when, at the request of the auditor, the client relives the traumatic situation over and over again, but does so in a calm state and until he is completely calm about the subject. Also in Gestalt therapy, when the client either speaks out to the therapist, or draws his situation, in fact, the situation that disturbs the person is re-experienced against the background of muscle relaxation.

Truly, desensitization is the queen of psychotherapy!

Desensitization effect according to Westermarck

The downside of sexual imprinting is the desensitization effect discovered by anthropologist Edward Westermarck: people of different sexes brought up together in the first years of life (normally) most often do not experience sexual attraction to each other in the future. See Westermarck’s desensitization effect.

Exposure/response prevention confrontation technique

The development of a systematic desensitization technique is a confrontation technique with the suppression of an anxious reaction (exposure/response prevention).