Wolpe developed a number of additional strategies for treating anxiety, one of which is systematic desensitization (also called graduated exposure therapy). He proposed that people can overcome fears by gradually increasing the amount of exposure to the feared object, overcoming the fear by degrees. To start the process, the person needs to identify what causes the anxiety, arrange those objects into a hierarchy of severity, learn relaxation and coping skills, then practice these in front of the least severe stimuli until they’re comfortable facing that object, then move on to the next step.
He proposed that a person can learn to overcome a fearful response to an anxious stimulus by gradually increasing his or her exposure to it. Wolpe’s three steps in systematic desensitization could be seen in an example of agoraphobia. First, a person identifies what causes him or her to feel frightened, such as a phobia about spiders, and then ranks these fears in order of how much anxiety they produce. For instance, someone who fears spiders might rank them as follows: looking at pictures of spiders; seeing a dead spider; seeing a live spider; touching a spider; holding a spider; and finally, encountering one in the wild. Second, the individual learns ways to relax and cope with anxiety. Finally, the person must confront the feared object in increasingly greater detail until they masters it.
