Emotional Avoidance 191
It will be key that you approach your fears in a systematic way. If
you were learning how to swim for the first time, we wouldn’t throw
you into the deep end without f lotation devices and hope for the
best. Instead, you would practice at the shallow end until you built
up confidence to tread into deeper and deeper water. Eventually,
you would be able to swim laps across the whole pool from the deep
to the shallow end without a problem. You need to approach your
anxiety in a similar fashion: start with some of the less fearful situa-
tions and then work your way up to the most fearful ones.
Exercise 9.3: Exposure Without Avoidance Now we enter
the exposure itself. The principle is simple enough. A ll you really
need to do is encounter your feared situation, but this time you will
do it in a way that you have rarely done before. Let’s illustrate with
a few examples.
Example 1
Imagine that you have a fear of heights (also known as acro-
phobia). Most people who have this fear avoid looking out of win-
dows while in tall buildings, rarely use ladders, and refuse to travel
by plane. A fear hierarchy for acrophobia might have at the bottom
something like looking out of a second- story window. At the top
would be something far more frightening , such as riding a roller
coaster. Whatever the steps in your hierarchy, it will be important
to move from the bottom to the top in a systematic way so that you
complete these exercises repeatedly and without avoidance.
For instance, a first step would be to look down at the ground
from your second- story window three times a day for a week. Fur-
thermore, you should do so without looking away, strengthening
your grip on the windowsill, or distracting yourself in any way. Fully
embrace the experience. If you do this enough, you will feel much
more comfortable in this situation. A next step would be to practice