Exposure therapy/ systematic desensitisation is a technique used to combat the negative associations that a person has paired with a stimulus, the concept is to expose the person to the stimulus they aviod in order to encourage them to be desentised to ("used to") the stimulus. For example the stimulus a person may be afraid of is a cat, so by firstly introducing a cat into the same house, then the same room then the same area of the room as the person they will slowly adapt to the cat. This is a very slow process that can take weeks or months. This is a technique used in behaviour therapy.

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