Like diagnosed anxiety and phobias, I’m not just talking about small stuff like asking out your crush etc.
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It doesn’t help with everything, but it can help with certain phobias. For instance, I suffer from severe health anxiety, and I’m not sure if exposure to sufferers of the diseases I fear would help me; then again, it would be sort of unethical to try.
On the other hand, I had an insane phobia of sharks until I was thirty years old. Now, that may sound like a perfectly reasonable thing to be afraid of, after all, sharks do occasionally kill people. However, I was afraid of sharks in places where there are no sharks. And not just a little bit. I could literally not be in a swimming pool alone, which was a problem, because I love to swim. And swimming in an open body of water was nerve-wracking, though I did do it when there was someone else there.
Anyway, when I had an opportunity to dive with sharks at an aquarium, I jumped at the opportunity. Spending 20 minutes with ten-plus-feet sand tigers serenely swimming past me really put things in perspective. Do they have faces only a mother could love? Yes, very much so. But I also learned that they are clumsy and weird, and not particularly interested in snacking on people. Of course, I had known that before, but there was something about being close enough to touch them and feel the rush of water as they went past that made all the difference.
I am now capable of swimming by myself without fear in pretty much any body of water, even though I will say that trying a VR cage diving simulation freaked me out to no end. However, I’m fairly certain they had the sharks in that growl, and that’s just not something real sharks do. Oh, and VR just disorients me.
By the way, I have two other completely irrational phobias, namely nuns and stairs. So far, I have not tried exposure therapy on either of those.
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