Areas › Worry and anxiety › The cost of avoiding
When the fear is about being seen, being asked, being judged, you can build the steps out of real moments: the doorway, the corridor, the dining hall, answering once in a lesson.
Fear of a whole building cannot be practised. Fear of walking into the dining hall at half past twelve can. Make each step small enough to be boring and specific enough to be put in a diary, and notice what quietly comes along as a prop: the friend who always walks with them, the phone in the hand, the seat nearest the door. Those helps are fine early and need dropping later, or the step never quite counts.
Qur’an and Sunnah
Yet he has not attempted the steep path (Quran 90:11). The climb is left standing in front of the person, and a path is something taken in steps.
فَلَا ٱقۡتَحَمَ ٱلۡعَقَبَةَ
Yet he has not attempted the steep path
Qur’an 90:11read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
A critical review of safety behaviours during exposure examined genuinely mixed evidence and argued, from inhibitory learning theory, that dropping the props is usually needed for change that lasts. The review is open about the conflict in the findings, since some studies suggest early props do no harm. The sensible reading is not to ban them but to plan their removal rather than let them stay by default.
Blakey SM, Abramowitz JS. (2016). The effects of safety behaviors during exposure therapy for anxiety: Critical analysis from an inhibitory learning perspective.. Clinical psychology review doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
You learn a place is survivable by being in it without the props, not by getting through it protected.
This one is still a draft. It is waiting on a scholar and a clinician to read it before it is published.
Near this one
A plan followed on some days and not others can be worse than no plan at all. Choose the smallest version you are sure you can keep to, and keep to that.
Most of these stories begin with one of four things: a change, a person, an assessment, or a loss. Working out which one tells you what the fear is really about.
The target is getting through the door, not feeling calm about it. Calm tends to arrive afterwards, and mostly for people who went.