Flooding Therapy 滿(mǎn)灌療法

Phobias, extreme and irrational fears, can cause much anxiety and pain. But never fear; anxiety caused by spiders, dogs, and even elevators can all be alleviated through flooding, an intense form of exposure therapy that requires patients to face their fears.

Irrational fears are cured by exposing the patient to the fear-inducing object over a long period of time. For example, a person looking to get rid of his fear of dogs may start by just looking at photos of dogs under the supervision of a trained professional. Therapy continues with an “exposure” to dogs in person and eventually working up the courage to pet actual puppies . The slow pace of learning to manage fear has proven to have high success rates in gently treating anxiety, phobias, and post-traumatic stress disorder.

Flooding therapy works just like exposure therapy, except there is nothing slow about it. Patients will be asked to face full-on fear in the first visit. There is no gradual introduction to the feared object, and flooding can be quite intense. Dog-phobic individuals will be asked to play with puppies right away and elevator-hating people will spend their first flooding session riding the lift without breaks. Flooding therapy evokes a strong anxiety response that in theory, will exhaust the patient into letting go of the irrational fear.

However, critics say that intense exposures may not be therapeutic but instead traumatic to people already struggling with extreme fear. In some cases, flooding actually makes the phobia worse. There is no way to know if a patient will respond well to flooding therapy, so the general consensus is that slow and steady wins the race.