Desensitization is the queen of psychotherapy!
Film "Mary Poppins, Goodbye!"
A song about how a lion ate a man. It is performed cheerfully and cheerfully, so no one is horrified.
Desensitization is a technique for reducing negative tension, anxiety and fears towards stressful images, frightening objects or situations.
For example, fear of flying, heights, fear of spiders, mice, snakes. Fear of dousing yourself with cold water, fear of entering cold water. Or - memories of traumatic situations.
Variants of this technique, often without knowing about each other, were described by a variety of specialists: J. Volpe, V. Luthe, D. Wall and others. Schultz's autotraining can also be considered as the most general version of desensitization.
If some situation has caused a feeling of fear, a reaction of fear in the soul, that is, in the body, this means that muscle tension has arisen somewhere in the body. Most often, in response to fear, muscle tension occurs in the collar area (the head is pressed into the shoulders), in the diaphragm area (breathing has frozen), in the muscles around the eyes (glazed eyes) and in the hands (hands tremble). If the fear response is repeated or prolonged (sometimes it lasts for hours, days or even years), muscle tension turns into muscle tension: a reservoir of fear. If a muscle clamp based on the pattern of fear has formed in you, you begin to feel fear even when nothing terrible happens around you, simply the memory of the body is triggered in you, forming a general feeling of anxiety and an acute feeling of fear when something even slightly similar to danger appears next to you.
And where a person “with a clean body” will not be afraid (or the fear will be weak, easily overcome), a person with severe muscle tension will be seriously afraid, sometimes to the point of nausea and complete paralysis of the body.
So, it is important to know that fear is recorded in your body. Fear does not live in the soul - fear lives in your body, in the clamps of your body. And the task of desensitization is to erase these clamps that trigger your fears. The essence of the technique is to re-experience a difficult (terrible) situation against a bodily background that erases the negative experience. There are a lot of specific desensitization techniques, but most of them differ only in what kind of bodily background is proposed and how specifically it is proposed to create it.
The simplest and most common version of desensitization is relieving anxiety through relaxation. Having relaxed and immersed himself in a feeling of complete peace, a person (usually under the guidance of a psychologist) begins to imagine those situations or objects that previously caused him fear or anxiety. By alternating approaching and moving away from the source of anxiety, rolling back when tension arises and returning oneself to a state of peace, sooner or later a person acquires the ability to imagine what previously caused fear in a neutral state of mind.
If there is no time to relieve fear through relaxation, experts advise: describe in detail the scary situation and your behavior in it. It is important that you have a good idea of it: who will stand where, who will say what, what you will do, and so on. The effectiveness of this method is less than relieving fears through relaxation, but it also works quite well. Why? Because when you describe a terrible situation in detail, your attention is occupied with intellectual activity and your body is calm. While your body is calm, your story destroys your fears over and over again.
If you have a short temper, you can prevent and manage your outbursts in a simple way. Your task is to sit down, relax, close your eyes and imagine the situation where you usually break down. However, this time you must present your behavior to others: calm, reasonable - the way you would like to see yourself. That's all! Imagine your new behavior more often, and soon, where you tore and threw, you will behave quite reasonably. Check it out - this simple method really turns out to be quite effective.
One of the most effective desensitization options is breathing work. By controlling our breathing, holding a calm breath during an imaginary or real encounter with a situation of danger, we erase the old habitual clamps, regain freedom of action and inner peace. Those who have mastered the technique of calm presence, the habit of meeting any situation with a calm consideration of it, effectively carry out desensitization through the practice of calm presence.
In everyday life, brave and cheerful people have long mastered one of the most cheerful ways - relieving anxiety through an energetic positive attitude. When children sing upbeat and cheerful songs from childhood, such as about how a lion ate a man, the tone and sound of the song makes fear impossible.
We won’t continue the story, the Lion, cut like a poodle, ate the poor guy like pudding, ate him with all the equipment...
It was last summer, In mid-January, In the thirtieth kingdom, Where there is no sign of a king!
The situation is terrible - but there is no fear. The song is performed cheerfully and cheerfully, so no one is horrified.
In practical psychology, the desensitization method is used not just often, but almost everywhere. Sometimes this happens through a story about sensory images during autogenic relaxation, sometimes through control of eye movements - the desensitization technique is used much more often than even experts suspect. Not quite consciously and, apparently, even without knowing it, the desensitization technique is used in classical psychoanalysis.
An alarmed patient arrives and is placed on a couch, where he will lie for at least 10 minutes. Relaxation... On the couch, the patient is asked to begin making free associations. Free associations can only be performed in a relaxed state; accordingly, in order to cope with this task, the patient has to relax even more. Now the client is returned to a situation that could be the cause of his tension, and, returning to it over and over again, the client experiences it over and over again against the backdrop of calm relaxation. Overall, this is a classic desensitization method, a typical behavioral approach in a psychoanalytic robe.
Similarly, desensitization actually occurs during classical auditing, when, at the request of the auditor, the client re-experiences a traumatic situation over and over again, but does this in a calm state and until he calms down completely on this topic. Also in Gestalt therapy, when the client either reprimands the therapist or draws his situation, in fact there is a re-experience of the situation that worries the person against the background of muscle relaxation.
Truly, desensitization is the queen of psychotherapy!
Westermarck desensitization effect
The flip side of sexual imprinting is the desensitization effect discovered by anthropologist Edward Westermarck: persons of different sexes raised together in the first years of life (normally) most often do not experience sexual attraction to each other in the future. See Desensitization effect according to Westermarck
Exposure/response prevention technique
Development of systematic desensitization techniques - confrontation techniques with suppression of anxiety reactions (exposure/response prevention).
Eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR)
Every person has heard the old proverb at least once in his life - “the morning is wiser than the evening.” And of course, any person knows that after a full sleep, all the problems and troubles that weighed heavily on the consciousness the night before are no longer perceived so dramatically in the morning.
Why is this happening? What does the human nervous system do so special during sleep that allows it to “process” numerous, including negative, impressions of the day? Neuroscientists have an answer to this question. Human sleep consists of several stages, one of which is accompanied by rapid movements of the eyeballs (by the way, it is during this phase that the sleeper dreams). And it is precisely at this stage of sleep that the processing of the information (primarily complex, negative, and sometimes traumatic) that a person received during the day occurs.
What happens if this information-processing system of the brain for some reason fails and is blocked? In these cases, negative information seems to be “frozen”, stuck in the neural networks of the brain, it is not processed and it begins to traumatize the person, causing anxiety, obsessive thoughts, unpleasant physical sensations, in a word – neuroses.
The essence of the EMDR method is precisely to activate the blocked brain system responsible for this important processing of information. In other words, with the help of a therapist, the client does in a psychotherapeutic session what his information-processing system of the brain once did not do at night. It sounds a little mysterious, but in reality it looks quite simple from the outside.
First, the client, together with the therapist, finds the earliest and most intense traumatic memory, which may well turn out to be the source, the root of the problem with which the client sought psychotherapeutic help. The therapist then asks the client to focus on this negative memory. The client remembers and at the same time follows the directions of movement of the therapist’s hand. It is clear that in this case the client’s eyeballs move, involving more and more new areas of the brain in the processing of traumatic material, which quickly “grinds”, losing its painful power. And what is important is that painful memories not only lose their emotional coloring and significance, they automatically begin to be perceived from a different angle, are sorted “on shelves” in the mind, becoming part of valuable life baggage.
The above explains the undoubted advantages of the method - high efficiency, physiology and the speed with which positive changes occur.
Popykhov Dmitry Aleksandrovich, psychotherapist, Ph.D.
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What is drug desensitization?
11.01.2021
A drug hypersensitivity reaction is an immune-mediated reaction to a drug. Hypersensitivity reactions can range in severity from mild to life-threatening. The reactions prompt discontinuation of the pathogen and replacement with alternative drugs that may be less effective, more toxic, or more expensive.
Patients receiving medications for conditions such as rheumatoid arthritis, cancer , or diabetes may become allergic to therapy after repeated exposure to the pathogen or due to cross-reactivity with various allergens . Avoiding the culprit drug can negatively impact disease management, quality of life, and life expectancy.
Drug desensitization has emerged as a therapeutic modality that allows patients with drug allergies to safely receive a sensitizing drug.
When is drug desensitization used?
There are no better alternative medications to treat a specific disease.
When the benefits of drug desensitization outweigh the risks.
Drug desensitization is used to treat both IgE-mediated and non-IgE-mediated drug hypersensitivity reactions.
How is the drug desensitized?
Drug desensitization involves introducing, usually over a period of several hours or days, a temporary state of tolerance to the drug to which the patient has developed a hypersensitivity reaction.
Various desensitization protocols allow patients to receive a full dose of medications to which they previously had a hypersensitivity reaction.
Before desensitization begins, various tests must be performed to confirm the presence of a drug allergy .
The initial stage involves administering an extremely small amount (1/10,000 of the usual dose) of the drug. The dose is gradually increased and administered at fixed intervals (eg, every 15 minutes) until the full dose is reached. To maintain a temporary non-allergic state, the drug should be taken regularly. As soon as the drug is interrupted or stopped, the patient's allergy to it returns.
Common ways of drug desensitization include:
- rapid intravenous desensitization - performed in patients with immediate hypersensitivity reactions;
- oral routes;
- subcutaneous routes.
What are the risks and benefits of desensitization?
The increased use of new anticancer drugs and monoclonal antibodies in recent years has been associated with an increase in hypersensitivity reactions. The development of desensitization protocols for these life-saving drugs should be initiated after careful evaluation of the potential risks and benefits.
Although drug desensitization is an important procedure in the treatment of allergic reactions to drugs, it should be completely avoided for some rare allergic reactions to drugs, such as Stevens-Johnson syndrome and toxic epidermal necrolysis. In such cases, the culprit drug should be avoided for life.
Drug desensitization protocols should only be performed by appropriately trained professionals. There are highly trained allergists and specialized nurses who have extensive experience in identifying desensitization-controlled reactions. They can identify high-risk patients and treat them accordingly.
Efforts should be made to increase awareness of the safety and effectiveness of drug desensitization, especially among non- allergic . The development of desensitization programs requires the coordinated work of various health professionals. Particular attention should be paid to the areas of oncology and rheumatology .
Published in Allergology Premium Clinic
