Fear is one of humanity's primal instinct. Whether it be a natural
fear or a phobia, humans will always be afraid of something. However, it
doesn't mean that it is incurable. A friend of mine, for example, was
deathly afraid of snakes. Even a mere picture of snake would cause him
to be extremely frightened and violent attempt to get as far away from
it as possible; a classic case of a phobia.
Similar to the video as shown below.
However,
this was such an irrational fear. Sure there are some venomous snakes
that can kill you, but the majority of snakes are fairly harmless and
are actually beneficial to humans. So such a sight warranted questioning
as to why even a simple picture invokes such fears. Of course, he could
not give me a logical reason for the phobia. So I did some tests to see
what about the snake was causing it. Hopefully, I could induce some
systematic desensitization.
I
tried running a simple string across his neck from time to time. It
warranted some shivers of course, but nothing more than that so no luck
there. Then I played some hissing sounds fairly frequently from my
phone. This time, he would duck slightly as he questioned if there was a
snake nearby. But as I continued to keep playing the noise, he became
more and more desensitized to it. Now, I started to become more involved
and take it another step higher. I went out and bought multiple toy
snakes and proceeded to place it in locations where he would normally
frequent like his couch, his book bag, etc. He would be disgusted at
first, but as time went on he just began grabbing them and chucking
them. As he got used to them, luckily we had stumbled upon a live snake
one day! He jumped of course, but with his involvement of snakes for so
long, he got kind of used to it. So while he wasn't running away, he
just merely walked around it. So a kind of success I suppose.
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