You usually can’t get someone with a spider phobia to drop his phobia by trying to convince them with logic or evidence. On the other hand there are psychological strategies to help them to get rid of the phobia.
I think cognitive behavioural therapy for phobias, which seems to work pretty well in a large number of cases, actually relies on helping people see that their fear is irrational.
As someone with a phobia, I can tell you from experience that realizing your fear is irrational doesn’t actually make the fear go away. Sometimes it even makes you feel more guilty for having it in the first place. Realizing it’s irrational just helps you develop coping strategies for acting normal when you’re freaking out in public.
Oh sure, I can definitely believe that. Maybe a better choice of wording above would have been “internalise” rather than “see”, which would rather negate my point, I guess. Or maybe it works differently for some people. I don’t have any experience with phobias or CBT myself.
It’s alief vs. belief. It’s one thing to see that, in theory, almost all spiders are harmless. It’s another to remain calm in the presence of a spider if you’ve had a history of being terrified of them.
Desensitization is a process of teaching a person how to calm themselves, and then exposing them to things which are just a little like spiders (a picture of a cartoon spider, perhaps, or the word spider). When they can calm themselves around that, they’re exposed to something a little more like a spider, and learn to be calm around that.
The alief system can learn, but it’s not necessarily a verbal process.
Even when it is verbal, as when someone learns to identify various sorts of irrational thoughts, it’s much slower than understanding an argument.
And in some instances that would likely be what we call logic or evidence.
You usually can’t get someone with a spider phobia to drop his phobia by trying to convince them with logic or evidence. On the other hand there are psychological strategies to help them to get rid of the phobia.
I think cognitive behavioural therapy for phobias, which seems to work pretty well in a large number of cases, actually relies on helping people see that their fear is irrational.
As someone with a phobia, I can tell you from experience that realizing your fear is irrational doesn’t actually make the fear go away. Sometimes it even makes you feel more guilty for having it in the first place. Realizing it’s irrational just helps you develop coping strategies for acting normal when you’re freaking out in public.
Oh sure, I can definitely believe that. Maybe a better choice of wording above would have been “internalise” rather than “see”, which would rather negate my point, I guess. Or maybe it works differently for some people. I don’t have any experience with phobias or CBT myself.
It’s alief vs. belief. It’s one thing to see that, in theory, almost all spiders are harmless. It’s another to remain calm in the presence of a spider if you’ve had a history of being terrified of them.
Desensitization is a process of teaching a person how to calm themselves, and then exposing them to things which are just a little like spiders (a picture of a cartoon spider, perhaps, or the word spider). When they can calm themselves around that, they’re exposed to something a little more like a spider, and learn to be calm around that.
The alief system can learn, but it’s not necessarily a verbal process.
Even when it is verbal, as when someone learns to identify various sorts of irrational thoughts, it’s much slower than understanding an argument.
Right; that’s the “behavioural” part of cognitive behavioural therapy, right? But the “cognitive” part is an explicit, verbal process.