Word: cbt
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...treatment for a phobia like mine is simple and routine, and I avoided it for as long as humanly possible. That's because it involves deliberately, systematically exposing yourself to the thing you fear. It's part of cognitive behavioral therapy, or CBT. It's a very practical kind of therapy - it has no truck with mystical Freudian mumbo jumbo. CBT views your symptoms not as clues to the secrets locked in your tormented unconscious but as a set of learned behaviors and bad habits that you can be trained to give up. As far as CBT is concerned...
That isn't a model of my brain that I feel especially comfortable with. I like to think of my brain as profound and mysterious, full of demons and neuroses and fascinating dreams that I can bore my co-workers with. But when you're fighting a phobia, CBT is your weapon of choice. It's reliable and well documented. Insurance companies love it. Often you can cure a phobia like mine in about 12 sessions...
Researchers at New York University have even gone beyond CBT. According to a study published in December in Nature, when a person's phobia gets activated, there's a period immediately afterward when the traumatic memory that the phobia is based on becomes vulnerable. During that time - which lasts about six hours - you can reshape the memory, rewrite it in a way that removes the fear. (See TIME's Wellness blog: "A Way to Rewrite Memories of Fear...
...session, Dr. N departed from the CBT script and suggested I try to visualize the fear as a creature. As soon as he said that, I saw it: a primitive, eyeless monster visible only to me, like the gremlin on the wing of the airplane in The Twilight Zone. When Dr. N took a sip of milk, the creature would reach out and touch the carton. When it touched the carton, I felt the fear...
...creature reach for something, making it stop, making it back away. The better I got at controlling the creature, the easier my phobia was to control. I even talked to it. I asked it what it wanted and why it wouldn't leave me alone. It wasn't CBT, but it was working. (See TIME's Wellness blog: "The Psychology of Facebook Profiles...