the.com/flooding
Expose yourself to the scary thing until your nervous system gets bored of it.
means A therapy technique where someone confronts a feared thing at full intensity and stays with it until the fear naturally burns itself out, rather than approaching it gradually.
from Borrowed straight from the everyday sense of 'flooding' — water overwhelming a space all at once rather than trickling in. Psychologists in the mid-20th century seized on that image to name an exposure technique that floods a person with the feared stimulus immediately and fully, in deliberate contrast to the slow, step-by-step 'drip' of systematic desensitization. The word itself has ordinary Old English roots (flod, meaning a flowing of water), with no clinical pedigree beyond the metaphor.
- vs desensitization
- skips the gentle ladder, jumps straight to top rung
- mechanism
- relies on habituation, panic physically cannot sustain itself forever
- risk
- effective but brutal, dropout rates run higher than gradual methods
- modern use
- often done virtually now, same terror, better insurance claims