My two cents: You have to give consent before trying this therapy. This can be dangerous if you are not strong enough or have certain skills. After I built my focus skills with meditation, I went to my triggers on my own and sat til my nervous system calmed.
“During flooding, you’re exposed to your most feared stimuli, such as heights or spiders, in a safe and controlled environment for an extended time.
During this time, you can use calming techniques to help you through the process, but your therapist makes no particular effort to alleviate your fears.
Your therapist, however, may likely start with some psychoeducation before beginning the flooding.
They will likely explain the method of flooding therapy — that the nervous system is sending a false alarm to your brain about your phobia and that only sticking it out through the whole exposure can get rid of this false alarm.
In other words, once your body’s fight-or-flight response has exhausted itself, your brain can recognize that nothing bad has happened to you.
The goal is to positively condition your mind to stop reacting severely when presented with that trigger in the future.
Flooding session times vary but may last 2-3 hours. Very often, the goal is to complete the treatment in one session only — often lasting several hours. In some cases, the client may need to repeat the process several times.
While flooding is understandably quite stressful for the client, it can also be stressful for the therapist. In a studyTrusted Source of 25 participants with specific phobia, researchers found that clients released slightly higher levels of stress hormones during flooding than during gradual therapy.
While therapists showed no excessive release of stress hormones during gradual therapy, they did show heightened stress hormones during flooding therapy.
Flooding example
If you live with claustrophobia, a flooding session might involve sitting in an extremely small, crowded room for several hours. This might even involve an elevator or a closet.
A proper flooding session would require that you stay in the room until your panic response has fully subsided.
The therapist would make no effort to help you work through the panic, and there’s no option for avoidance..
“As we learn to abide in the heart not knowing, a different kind of knowing appears.
It speaks in a different voice, one that does not judge, assert, insist, or deny.
Amidst the cacophony of the mind’s stream of thoughts, the voice of heart-wisdom is more like a murmur — the quiet guest at the noisy dinner table of daily life.
This knowing may use words or images, or it may be immediate, direct, and unmediated by language or imagery.
It may come as a subtle feeling and sensation — a glow of recognition when the truth is spoken, an inner sense of illumination.
Or it may use all of these modes in combination like a symphony.”
“Not knowing refers not only to our inability to know what will happen; it also means that we cannot know our true nature solely by thinking about it.
Who we really are is not something we can define or confine with thought.
Who we really are is quite literally inconceivable and unimaginable.
Our true nature is not an object — it exists prior to the mind.
We can say what our true nature is not, at least initially, but we cannot definitively state what it is.
Yet we can know it directly by consciously being it.
When the mind clearly recognizes that it is not going to understand what is prior to it, a spontaneous letting go occurs, and attention quite naturally rests in the heart. . .
PTSD - A Way Out.com 