All therapy is exposure therapy

Key points

• Therapy is harder at first because it’s hard to expose ourselves to feelings we’ve avoided.
• Just like exposure therapy for a spider phobia, talk therapy teaches us that emotions are not dangerous.
• Therapy changes your relationship with your own emotions to reduce fear and avoidance.

Let’s say you get on my couch.

“So what brings you in?” I ask.

You begin with a sigh and at first speak in short, vague statements.

“I’ve been feeling bad,” you say. Or “I’m having problems in my relationship.”

“Tell me more,” I say.

As I begin to get curious, you begin to recognize that you are accepted in this space. You start to feel a little more comfortable. Your sentences get longer. the words begin to flow. Your story unfolds.

You open up about how difficult things were. It’s hard to talk about it and you still feel nervous about “going there”. Part of you wants to change the subject or leave my office altogether. But you stay here, with me, and you feel all the emotions that come with talking about this fight, right here in this room. As the tears flow from your eyes, I inform you that there is no need to hold them back. So you let them come, despite your fear that if you cry, you’ll never stop.

At the end of the session, you feel relief. You felt your feelings-you went there and nothing terrible happened. Instead, you were treated with empathy and care.

However, you are still afraid to come to your second session. You think about how you have to talk about everything again, and it sounds tiring and exhausting. You think about calling to cancel but don’t. Here you are again on my couch and I ask, “Tell me more.”

There is a reason treatment it’s hard at first. All therapy is exposure therapy.

In traditional exposure therapy, patients face their fears so that they can become desensitized to their fears worry triggers. In the first session, a client with a spider phobia you may feel intense fear just looking at a picture of a spider. The client is exposed to the image until desensitized to it, then graduates to a real spider in a cage and repeats the process. The client, over time, learns that he can share space with the spider and not be harmed. the client’s fear system learns that the spider is not dangerous and the phobia goes away.

As humans, we’re not just afraid of snakes and spiders—we’re also afraid of our emotions. Just like anything that causes fear, we avoid our emotions. It may seem like it will ease the pain to keep the abandoned feelings at bay, but in reality, it only makes them stronger. What we resist persists. Healing is exposure to hard feelings, exposure to problems that need to be resolved, exposure to things we avoid because they are painful and hard. In the therapy room, we face our emotions. Instead of avoiding them, we feel our emotions to learn how capable we are of feeling them, of overcoming them. We learn that we don’t need to avoid the subjects we fear or our painful feelings about them. And along the way, we learn that they’re not so scary after all and don’t need to be avoided. Hard feelings are just a part of life, for everyone.

Treatment gets easier over time. While in the beginning each session may feel like you are opening a portal of things left unsaid and feelings unspoken, as you progress through the healing process you begin to create a new relationship with your feelings. You learn how strong you are and how you can handle difficult emotions and do difficult things. You learn that your emotions are not dangerous and you can share space with them without them hurting you.

To find a therapist near you, visit Psychology Today Therapy Directory.

Originally published on https://www.psychologytoday.com.