Dear Rhiannon,

Thank you for your explanation. The matter came up between T and I in the following circumstances: I drove up to her office and, after parking in the parking lot, sat in the car for five or ten minutes reading a book that required a lot of attention to follow. Then I got out of the car, with the book, and went and sat in the waiting room. There were another five people there, none of them known to me, and when I sat down, I continued trying to read my book. After a while I realized that unlike the situation in the car, I had to read every sentence in the book over and over again to try to understand the meaning. I realized that the large majority of my attention was abstracted by the simple fact of being in a room with five other people. So, unconsciously, I was constantly scanning for danger signals, and that took up so much of my mind that I wasn't as able to comprehend what I was reading as I had been in the car.

This is standard for me, but it was the first time I'd been conscious of such a clear-cut difference. I'm really frightened of everyone except my wife and T. Even when there's no possible threat, the mere presence of others, strangers or not, is very uncomfortable and takes up most of my mind. T says that by "desensitizing" she means for me to be able, in such situations, to understand and accept that the source of the anxiety and threat was way back in my infancy and then to understand and accept that the present situation (wherever it may be) has nothing at all to do with what happened before I was three, and that in fact there is no threat to me at all in the current situation. She says that after doing this a sufficient number of times the automatic connection made by my mind between the current situation and way back at the beginning will start to loosen or (her word) "modulate." I believe this is what she means by desensitization, rather than what you and others describe as "flooding," which I've tried many times and which has never worked for me.

She further says that at my age we can't hope to entirely reconstruct my personality. That what happened when I was small just happened, that's the way it was, and the best we can do is attack the psychological link between then and now. I'm willing to do this, but I have no conviction one way or the other as to whether it will work. I feel so threatened so much of the time that I think I'll be "desensitizing" all day every day. What do you think? Can it work? Is this serious stuff? Take care!