Stalking the elusive contexts of a phobia with a modified symptom-context method.

Abstract

This is a narrative about the outfitting and the outcomes of an expedition aimed at tracking down the instigators of a phobia. What makes tracking this type of symptom a challenge is that it does not usually have what the other symptoms in this book have: a clearly concurrent moment of onset and an onset that always occurs within the therapy session. Instead, most of the onsets of the phobic symptoms occur outside of the session, so that the accounts of the symptom in the session do not necessarily correspond with the intensity of the symptom described in the session. This journey required field testing of these essential items of equipment: a modified version of the symptom-context method to assess the accounts in the session of the behavior outside of the session and the CCRT method to be used as a broad background context measure.The usual form of the symptom-context method is not adequate to deal with the usual form of episodes of phobic behavior because of the two related limits: the phobic states do not have clear on-off points within the sessions, and the symptom appearances in the session are almost all retrospective accounts of episodes outside the session. I dealt with these limits by devising a modified symptom-context method by which I could still be able to track down many of the essential conditions for the onset of the phobia.