KEY TAKEAWAYS:

• The way to overcome your fears is to face them. During exposure therapy, the fear gets worse, then gets better as your your body learns how to self-sooth). Exposure teaches the mind, “wait, this memory isn’t dangerous”

• It takes ~20 minutes of exposure to the trauma (with nothing bad happening) for your brain to calm down and self-soothe. 20 minutes is the minimum, but if you stay in the situation for 90 minutes, that is when most of the anxiety dissipates.

• Through exposure your brain realizes that the memory itself is not dangerous → after a while in an exposure setting, your brain’s sympathetic nervous system is firing and firing… but it can only do this for so long, it realizes it’s not in danger and calms down. You learn to self sooth rather than depend on avoidance to reduce the anxiety, you develop internal mechanisms to calm yourself.

• The goal is to create new tracks, not really erasing the old tracks (memories), but making new parallel tracks that are deeper, more reinforced, so we can get the cart out of the old them and get it running smoothly in the new healthier tracks.

Click here to learn more about my online program Overcoming Trauma & PTSD With Exposure Therapy.