ABSTRACT

Situational exposure occurs when clients agree to face the feared situations they usually avoid to elicit hot thoughts. In the safety of the counselling room the client may find it difficult to gain access to such thoughts because he is obviously not in the situation which triggers them, he may play down the distressing nature of the thoughts. By encouraging clients to enter feared or avoided situations, their hot thoughts activated. For example, a client who is afraid of eating in public but cannot say why accompanied to a local café by the therapist. This exposure to a previously avoided situation yielded crucial assessment data that remained untapped while the client was sitting in the therapist's office. Accompanying clients on such trips early in therapy is often necessary as they are hardly likely at this stage to carry out such feared trips alone to record their thoughts.