flooding

• o   Flooding is based on classical conditioning and had two components:

  o   1) unavoidable exposure: this involves introducing you to the thing you fear in the most immediate and unavoidable way.

  o   2) extinction: learning to associate the thing you fear with something neutral.
• o   Normally, phobia-sufferers run away from the thing they fear, so they never work through the body’s “alarm phase” and end the association with fear and anxiety. If the patient can be stopped from escaping the object they fear, they can learn to stop fearing it.

  o   When the body’s “alarm phase” comes to an end, you feel emotionally drained but unafraid.

  o   If the feared object is still present, you will learn to associate it with a lack of emotion, rather than fear, this is called “extinction”.
• o   This would create a stress response from the body when the adrenaline kicks in and your body produces different hormones causing the body to over-work itself.

  o   Once this fear response washes over, the person realises that the feared object or situation is in fact harmless and therefore overcomes the fear.
• The client is thrown in the deep end for example a claustrophobic will be put into a small room for 4 hours.
• One strength is that flooding has been shown to be a much faster acting treatment than other therapies as it can be effective after a single lesson compared to systematic desensitisation which could take several months. The person is less likely to drop out of sessions as they do not need to commit to coming for multiple sessions. This is a strength although there are high levels of anxiety, the fear is very unlikely to re-emerge once the session is over.
• A weakness is that flooding may increase the strength of the phobia instead of removing it. By exposing someone to a fearful situation or object, it could easily make the phobic patient learn to associate the new feelings of intense fear with the fearful situation or object, which might make the phobia worse. Particularly if the patient stops the treatment halfway through, they will be more afraid of the object. This is a weakness because it is very difficult to determine the results of this treatment and whether it will successfully improve a client’s quality of life is questionable.