I’m a big fan of exposure therapy, having used graded exposure<\/a> <\/span>on myself to treat my anxiety-induced psychosis<\/a><\/span>. So when I heard about interoceptive exposure, I was keen to find out more, and when I did, I was keen to share what I learnt with you, my readers. Interoceptive exposure is another tool to help overcome certain anxieties<\/a><\/span> and phobias<\/a><\/span>, so I hope you enjoy learning about this method.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n\n \u00a0<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n Some of you might be familiar with exposure techniques, such as the cue exposure method of cognitive behaviour therapies (CBT) graded exposure<\/a><\/span>, but some of you might not be. A couple of years back, I created a graded exposure<\/a><\/span> workbook which you can find in my Resources<\/a><\/span> section (free version. A paid version can also be found in my shop<\/a><\/span>) of my website. For those who aren’t familiar, exposure techniques all follow a similar concept. To get used to the things you fear through incremental exposure to those fears.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n With graded exposure<\/a><\/span>, you’d work out what your fears are and then work out a step-by-step plan to tackle them. For example, if you had a fear of spiders, you would create a spider exposure list, with the worst fear being the last step. This could look something like this:<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n You’d go through each step one at a time, only moving on when the fear caused by each step lessons so that you become comfortable at that step. Then, when that happens, you move to the next step and so on, until the graded exposure<\/a><\/span> plan has been completed.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n However, not all irrational fears can be tackled with a cue exposure method, such as graded exposure<\/a><\/span>. For conditions such as emetophobia<\/a><\/span> (a fear of vomiting, seeing vomit, seeing or hearing other people vomit, or even just feeling sick), you may find the problematic symptoms are internal body sensations, rather than anything external.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n If you’re familiar with my anxiety disorders<\/a><\/span> and how they cause me to have psychosis<\/a><\/span>, then you’d also be familiar with the strange bodily sensations and the fear they cause that I have to deal with. My fear is centred around a fear of embarrassing myself by losing bladder or bowel control. Because of this, I became hypersensitive to my bodily sensations, and this is where interoceptive exposure can be useful.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\nGraded Exposure<\/h2>\n
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