In the early stages of an animal ph

In the early stages of an animal phobia, people sometimes try to overcome their fears by brief encounters with the dreaded creature, usually retreating instantly. This avoidance brings a reduction of the tension, and rapidly becomes a habit, so that the next attempt becomes more difficult, and so on until they stop trying to face the problem altogether. Avoiding the situations that make us feel frightened ensures that we become more sensitive to those situations, and so‘conditions’ us to fear them even more. This is why phobias can be such a big problem. Because we tend to avoid the things we fear, the fear can worsen very rapidly. To recover, we need to put that process into reverse.