‘Flooding is a form of behavior therapy based on the principles of respondent conditioning. It is sometimes referred to as exposure therapy or prolonged exposure therapy. As a psychotherapeutic technique, it is used to treat phobia and anxiety disorders including post-traumatic stress disorder. It works by exposing the patient to their painful memories, with the goal of reintegrating their repressed emotions with their current awareness’ *

For example, supposing a patient has a fear of spiders. Flooding, in this instance, would take the form of making them sit in a bath full of them. After this experience even if the patient were to come across a foot long tarantula chewing a brick it would, by comparison, be a mere walk in the park.

I am aware I didn’t do justice to the Christmas shopping experience in my photographs yesterday, so I though maybe I’d try some self-prescribed flooding today. I therefore spent a bit of time taking pictures in the middle of Churchill Square, Brighton’s mega-shopping Mall. True, if I’d wanted to go the whole way I would have gone and stood in the center of Topshop with my camera, but I think that might have led to some nasty additional contraindications like a night in a police cell. Anyway, I managed about twenty minutes and feel quite pleased with myself for doing so. The results are appended.

Did it work? I’ll tell you once I’ve had a nice relaxing bath of hot spiders.

*Full article: ‘Flooding (psychology), Wikipedia’ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flooding_(psychology)