Georgia Is Terrified of the Titanic - Proxy With Yowei Shaw [CROSSPOST]

0:11Georgia Hampton Hello, everyone. Producer Georgia here

0:14 with a little Halloweeny treat for all you ghouls, goblins, and ghosts out there in Never Post Land. Last week, I was on a very special, very spooky, very sub mechanical episode of another amazing Radiotopia show, Proxy. Proxy is all about dealing with emotional conundrums. And the one that I brought Yowei, let's just say it's very appropriate for the season we are currently in.

0:45 So it seemed only fitting that we drop it in our feed too. Now, it is the week before Halloween as I record this. So before you jump in, you will have to indulge me in setting the scene. It's a dark cold night, nearly 400 nautical miles away from the shore. Salty winds whipping against your face. The only thing you can see around you is the dark black marble surface of the sea. It's completely opaque, giving away nothing. But you know that something is down there. Nearly three miles down from the exact spot where you're floating, so deep that sunlight never reaches it. It's down there right now.

1:41 It'll be down there when you go to bed and when you wake up in the morning. It is always there sitting on the ocean floor silence, in complete darkness, waiting.

2:28Yowei Shaw Hello, discerning listeners. Fun fact about me.

2:32 Sometimes I'm too scared to go into my own basement, which is a problem because that's where we keep the food. It started a few years ago. My husband, Kyle, is a great cook. He does most of the cooking in our house. And one day, he called me while he was at work to get some fish out of the freezer to thaw for dinner. So I go downstairs to the unfinished part of our basement where the freezer is. It's got cold concrete floors, random boxes everywhere, power tools. And the annoying thing about this room is that to turn on the light, you have to walk into the middle of the darkness and reach up for this little string hanging from the ceiling, something I've done a thousand times.

3:19 But this time, as I'm reaching around in the dark, I start thinking about a horror movie I'd watched the night before, Suspiria. Specifically, the scene where a bunch of people's heads explode in an underground chamber. And suddenly, my body goes cold. My heart starts seizing up. It's like I'm getting the jump scare all over again, and I have to get the fuck out of there.

3:45 So I run upstairs, no fish. And I remember thinking, this is so dumb. I know scary movies scare me. I know I shouldn't watch them alone, but I love scary movies, so I watch Suspiria anyway. And now, I can't even get fish out of my own basement. And years later, I'm still afraid of that room. Sometimes when Kyle calls me to get something out of the freezer, I can make myself do it. I'll hold my breath, run-in, and grab whatever he needs. Other times, I'll conveniently forget. Why am I such a baby?

4:26 Why can't I talk myself out of this irrational fear? And why are so many of us like this? Afraid of things we know intellectually shouldn't scare us. I've always thought, I get how irrational fears work, where they come from, how to treat them. I listen to NPR. I'm up to date. But in reporting this episode, I discovered there's a lot I didn't know. Like, how the very things we do to make ourselves feel less afraid can actually make our fears worse. That's what today's case is about. After the break, Georgia is terrified of the Titanic.

5:17 Back in June, I was having lunch in New York with some podcast people. And afterwards, a colleague approached me eyes wide open. She said she had a conundrum for me, a very specific conundrum.

5:30Georgia Hampton I'm terrified of the Titanic wreck. I can't

5:37 look at it. It feels to me like I am looking at a dead body. Woah. And I can't do it.

5:47Yowei Shaw Can I just say, I respect you as a journalist, as

5:51 a podcast maker, but, like, are you for real?

5:55Georgia Hampton I'm for real. I'm too for real.

5:59Yowei Shaw This is Georgia Hampton, the colleague. Now I

6:03 try not to litigate people's feelings on Proxy because I don't think it's productive. But I admit, when Georgia first told me about her problem, I was like, what's the problem? A shipwreck at the bottom of the North Atlantic Ocean seems easy enough to avoid. But Georgia said, actually, she can't escape the Titanic shipwreck.

6:24 It follows her around, especially with the work she does as a producer and reporter for the Never Post podcast.

6:30Georgia Hampton I am a culture journalist whose beat is the

6:34 Internet. And the Titanic is just one of those things that is so embedded in our culture and in our Internet culture and our culture of memes and our culture of references, and something that has been undeniable to me in my work is that inevitably, at some point, I never know when it is, I am going to see an image of the Titanic wreck.

7:02Yowei Shaw A new scan of the Titanic just

7:04Georgia Hampton Usually, TikTok is where this happens. It's

7:07 always the same kind of video. So this is the first ever full view of It's always like a lot of people. Have an even more accurate rendering of the entire Titanic wreck. And when I tell you, I will be like, and, like, throw my phone across the room. It is so alarming to me. I hate looking at it. It makes me wanna, like, rip my skin off.

7:34Yowei Shaw Georgia can tell me exactly where it started. In

7:37 high school, she was on a trip in The Caribbean with some friends. Excursion. And at some point, the boat guide stopped in a shallow section of the ocean and said, hey. There's a shipwreck over there. If anyone wants to swim out and use your snorkel to look at it. Georgia was the only one interested in going.

7:58Georgia Hampton So I swim out there, and I'm floating on the

8:02 water looking down at it. And something just sort of happened to me.

8:09Yowei Shaw What did you see exactly?

8:12Georgia Hampton I saw a pretty run of the mill shipwreck. Like,

8:18 it was a relatively small boat that had been there for quite some time. There was algae and seaweed and stuff, like, growing on the ship from within the ship, and it was just sort of, like, spatchcocked on the ocean floor. And little fish were sort of swimming around. It was no more terrifying than, like, the shipwreck in The Little Mermaid that she, like, swims in and out of or whatever.

8:50 But something about it just profoundly unsettled me in a very existential way. I was looking at it, and it was like a little voice in my head kept being like, that's not supposed to be there. This is not supposed to be there. This is wrong. That's not supposed to be there. I don't like that that's there. That's not supposed to be there.

9:11 And it just got louder and louder and louder, and I immediately swam back. Wow. I was like, Okay. And then promptly sort of shelved that away in my mind and didn't think about it for many years.

9:28Yowei Shaw Flash forward to 2019. Georgia is hanging with

9:31 friends at someone's apartment in Chicago, and they decide to watch the Titanic, something fun that they'd all already seen. Georgia settles into the couch with popcorn.

9:41Georgia Hampton The energy is very fun. We're already joking.

9:45 And the movie starts, and I had forgotten. For the first, maybe

9:53Martin Antony 13 meters. You should see it.

9:55Georgia Hampton Ten minutes of the movie, a good chunk of it is

9:58 real footage of a little submarine pod remotely operated going down into the ocean, searching through the dark and coming across the bow of the Titanic that sort of emerges out of the darkness like this, like, cold dead hand. And I was watching it with my friends, and I had that exact feeling again, but it was so much worse.

10:29Yowei Shaw What was going on in your body?

10:32Georgia Hampton I just froze. I wanted to, like, scream as loud

10:37 as I could until I couldn't scream anymore. And I remember kind of snapping out of my stupor and being like, guys, something something's happening to me about this. I don't like this at all.

10:50Yowei Shaw Ever since then, Georgia freaks out every time

10:54 she encounters the Titanic wreck on TikTok or Instagram, which she invariably does.

10:59Georgia Hampton We're just about to head down the stairwell

11:00 now.

11:01Yowei Shaw Because there's always another anniversary of

11:03 the sinking or discovery to contend with.

11:05Georgia Hampton Capturing every angle of a steel corpse.

11:08Yowei Shaw Plus, it's just such a singular monocultural event.

11:13 So many memes. I'll never let go.

11:15Georgia Hampton I won't let go. Dad. It's like... Imagine in

11:20 your home, there is always going to be a Lego on the ground somewhere. Most of your time, you're never gonna step on it. But once in a while, you do. And you'll go like, ah, fuck. Like, I hated that. But then it sort of skitters away and you're like, whatever. I have to go to work or, like, I have to call my friend or I have to go to the store or something.

11:44 So you're like, oh, it's fine. Whatever. But then it happens again three months later and you're like, god damn it. Like, I need to do something about this. But where is it? And I don't know. And I don't know when I'm gonna see it again.

11:59Yowei Shaw Georgia wants to know what exactly is happening,

12:03 and can she make it stop? That's after the break.

12:13Georgia Hampton What's up? What's up? I have to tell you,

12:15 literally, just now, the sky has darkened, and it's like thunderstorming here.

12:22Yowei Shaw Oh, shit. The foreshadowing is a little

12:25 literal.

12:26Georgia Hampton I know. It's a little on the nose. Wouldn't be

12:28 my choice.

12:29Yowei Shaw The day of the Proxy conversation, Georgia tells me

12:32 she hasn't had any recent Titanic encounters. But last night, scrolling on her phone, she did see another shipwreck.

12:40Georgia Hampton I saw some video that was about a lake in

12:43 Michigan where I'm from, and it was showing what looked like maybe a big dock that you could, like, walk out to that was sort of in the middle of the lake that had a glass bottom.

12:56Yowei Shaw And

12:58Georgia Hampton through the glass bottom, you could see a

13:00 shipwreck. And I watched it and had, like, a baby version of what happens with the Titanic where I was like,

13:11Yowei Shaw This time, though, Georgia thought, why don't I try

13:14 a little exposure therapy?

13:15Georgia Hampton I had this sort of knee jerk, like, and, like,

13:19 scrolled half away. And then I was like, wait a second. Run it back. Let's go back up there. Watch it again. I watched it a couple times.

13:28Yowei Shaw But after five minutes, she couldn't take it

13:30 and had to scroll away. Okay. So the Proxy's here. Okay. Should I let them in? Yes. Let's do it.

13:39Georgia Hampton I feel like a a blushing bride.

13:41Yowei Shaw So the Proxy. Georgia's conundrum was about as

13:48 niche as you can get. There aren't support groups dedicated to conquering the fear of a shipwreck from one hundred and twelve years ago, at least that I could find. But as I read more about phobias and fears, I started to wonder why did Georgia have such an intense reaction to the shipwreck in the first place? Why did it take years for the fear to get ignited with the Titanic?

14:10 And is there a way for her to get over it without, you know, actually visiting? Now sometimes the most helpful proxy is someone who's been through the same thing. But other times, I think an expert can actually be better. Someone who studied the problem, who's seen hundreds of different versions of it, and who's learned what actually helps. And that's exactly who I found.

14:36Georgia Hampton Hello. Hello.

14:38Martin Antony Good to meet you.

14:39Georgia Hampton Good to meet you.

14:41Yowei Shaw This is Martin Anthony. He's a psychology

14:44 professor at Toronto Metropolitan University who spent his career studying anxiety related problems, including phobias, and how to treat them. And he's had to conquer some of his own fears too. Martin used to be afraid of public speaking, which is funny because he's now been interviewed, featured, or quoted in the media more than 500 times. He even wrote a book about how to get over the fear of public speaking.

15:10 He also used to be afraid of snakes, so he worked on that fear too, and wrote another book. Then a book on needles, a thing that comes up all the time in his work, which he also used to be afraid of.

15:22Martin Antony I remember as a as a... In high school, staying

15:25 home the day that we all had to test our own blood, because I I was afraid to prick my own fingers. But I had to be able to work with people with needles. I had to be able to prick my fingers, do these different things with people.

15:36Yowei Shaw What did you do to get comfortable with the

15:38 needles?

15:39Martin Antony I just started pricking my finger.

15:42Yowei Shaw Martin has helped people take on all kinds of

15:44 fears, even the really strange ones. Though, of course, this is just a proxy conversation with Georgia, not therapy.

15:52Georgia Hampton Oh my god, Marty. We have a lot to talk

15:54 about. Do you know what's happening to me?

15:58Yowei Shaw Georgia tells Martin about her fear, why it comes up

16:01 more often for her than you might expect. Like, when she's scrolling on TikTok and suddenly, boom. There it is. A new scan Another new three d rendering of the Titanic wreck.

16:12Georgia Hampton Thought we knew about the night it sank. It's

16:13 like my wrist has been grabbed by a cold wet hand. I feel, like, disgusted. I feel a little sick. I don't care what anyone's saying where they're like, oh, ah, you can see the... Where it cracked, whatever. I instantly have this reaction where I feel like I wanna throw my phone across the room. I wanna get as far away from it as possible. I want to, at the very least, scroll away from it instantly so that it disappears.

16:42 So Martin, any initial reactions?

16:46Martin Antony Yeah. Mostly, I have a whole bunch of questions.

16:49 First, the the boundaries of the problem. So for example, is it just the Titanic, or is it other shipwrecks? So for example, if you hear Gordon Lightfoot's The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald, is that a trigger for you?

17:01Yowei Shaw This song. I didn't know it, but it's a 1976 folk

17:09 song about a shipwreck.

17:13Georgia Hampton Well, that is the perfect thing to mention. So

17:18 I love that song. I grew up in Michigan. I have almost like a emotional nostalgic relationship with that story because I grew up, as all my friends did, learning about it. It was part of our state's history. It's part of the history of the Great Lakes. And the Great Lakes are treated in this very reverent way in Michigan. And if I hear a song or people talk about it, even pretty graphic descriptions of what happened on the Edmund Fitzgerald, which in some ways is far worse because it killed everybody. Nobody survived. And because of the way that Lake Superior is, it is so cold, it's freshwater, it's so deep that the bodies in there do not decompose in the way you'd expect them to.

18:01 Oh my god. And instead, there's something that happens to them called saponification where their skin becomes almost like soap, and it's white, like pure white. And when people used to scuba dive down there, they would see bodies floating around in there. And, like, that's Jeez. That's so fucked up. But I feel fine talking about that.

18:21Yowei Shaw Georgia explains she's never actually seen images

18:24 of this wreck or these bodies. Thank god. So it's just not present for her, not the way images of the Titanic wreck are.

18:33Georgia Hampton I think the danger and the way it's

18:35 affecting my life and the reason why I want to just be like, can we just get over this

18:41Martin Antony Yeah.

18:41Georgia Hampton Is the the sort of constant possibility of it

18:45 coming up.

18:46Martin Antony So it's unpredictable. Yeah. Yeah. And

18:48 that uncertainty is often a source of anxiety for people. We like to know what's going to happen, especially if it's around something we don't like.

18:55Georgia Hampton Big time.

18:55Martin Antony And when did this... How long has this been

18:58 an issue? Do you remember how it began or when it began?

19:00Georgia Hampton What's odd is I remember watching Titanic the

19:03 film in middle school and being like, okay. It didn't bother me.

19:08Yowei Shaw Georgia tells Martin about that Caribbean boat trip

19:10 in high school, about seeing the wreck, and then that weird moment years later, freaking out when she saw the opening scene in the Titanic.

19:18Martin Antony 13 meters. You should see it.

19:20Yowei Shaw That pod on the ocean floor

19:21Georgia Hampton coming across the bow of the ship. And the

19:24 feeling happens again, but it's so much worse.

19:27Martin Antony Yeah.

19:29Georgia Hampton And that's just been kind of what happens now

19:31 ever since.

19:33Martin Antony Do you have a sense of what aspect of the

19:37 situation bothers you, whether it's the external stimulus that is somehow threatening, whether it's the thought, whether it's the physical reaction that feels dangerous in some way.

19:46Georgia Hampton I'm not afraid of swimming. I'm not afraid of

19:48 deep water. But it being there at the bottom of the ocean, it's like I almost imagine being there. That's why I think it feels like a cold wet hand grabbing me. It really feels like I'm looking at a dead body, and I I need to get away from it.

20:07Martin Antony Do other stimuli involving dead bodies bother

20:10 you? So if you were in a cemetery walking around?

20:14Georgia Hampton No. Not at all. Okay. It feels like if the ship

20:18 is a body that it has been mutilated in a way that is violent and in a way that resulted in the case of the Titanic in just unspeakable, unimaginable ways of dying, which I think is also very upsetting. Frankly, when I've watched the Titanic that other time, I forgot that the sort of back half is a, you know, minute by minute recreation of that experience, which is just so horrifying to me.

20:44 Not in a phobia way, really, but in a, like, oh my god. Jesus, James. This is your special interest? Maybe there's just some very deep fear of death here.

20:56Yowei Shaw Georgia wonders if there's a deeper meaning here

20:58 she needs to examine. Is it about fear of death or the ambivalence of nature? But Martin says, he doesn't think that's a useful path of inquiry. They can't measure or know why Georgia sees the Titanic in this way or that way. And anyway, that's not the work he does. He tries to focus on what actually helps get over the fear. Martin, have you seen clients with fears that are unusual like this before?

21:27Martin Antony Yes. You are the only person I've seen who has

21:29 this specific fear.

21:31Georgia Hampton So I'm special. You're you're special. Thank

21:34 you.

21:34Martin Antony But the way I often answer that question is,

21:37 yes, this is an unusual fear, but it's not unusual to have an unusual fear.

21:41Yowei Shaw What are your favorite unusual fears that

21:43 you've seen?

21:44Martin Antony We've seen a couple of people with fears of

21:46 flowers. One of them was specifically afraid of hollyhocks and had a memory of her brother, I think it was, chasing her with hollyhocks when she was a little kid. She might be the only person in the world who has that specific fear. Other one was a fear of sunflowers, and she was in a big field filled with sunflowers when she was very young, and the sunflowers were taller than her. And she got separated from her parents, and she developed a fear of sunflowers after that.

22:13 And if she saw one, she would panic.

22:15Yowei Shaw Do you have any nonflower examples?

22:18Martin Antony Yeah. Someone who had a fear of airplanes flying

22:22 overhead. So, again, very specific. She was okay being in an airplane, but if the airplane was flying overhead, she would panic. And and if she was wearing a hat or holding an umbrella, it felt safer. She didn't know why. The first thought I had if an umbrella is gonna protect her that maybe she's afraid, like, someone flush a toilet on the plane and it just, you know, run on her or something. But, no, it wasn't that. She had no idea what it was she was afraid of, but yet she had that fear. I've seen lots of people...

22:50 And in these cases, I mean, it's still a fear based problem, but these other ones were diagnosed as OCD where people had very specific triggers for their their contamination related fears. And when we think about OCD, we might think about people who are afraid of touching something that's... Will make them sick, and then they have to wash their hands over and over again. But contamination can be from anything. One person that I treated who was afraid of death related stimuli.

23:14 So she lived in a small town, and she would avoid the funeral director in that town. And if she was sitting on a bus and she was sitting beside somebody who was wearing all black, she'd think, oh, maybe this person came from a funeral, and she'd have to go home. And she might throw out the clothes she was wearing and wash her hands excessively. I've also seen people who are afraid of certain colors. So touching or coming into contact with anything that's green, for example, they'd have to go and wash their hands because it felt contaminated.

23:43 And they had no idea why. Like, they wouldn't be able to say that this is why I think green is dangerous. It was just this feeling that they would get without any... Anything that they were able to articulate. Sometimes we don't know what the trigger is. I I remember somebody we interviewed years ago who was afraid of cats. She didn't know why she was afraid of cats, but she was able to trace it back to a time that she was sexually assaulted. And there was a cat in the room, and she never made the connection. It wasn't until we talked about the assault, and she remembered there was a cat there, and she remembered that I wasn't afraid of cats before that day that she realized why she was afraid of cats. The other thing I'll just mention

24:22 about your situation, it's not unusual either for people to have an experience, deal with it okay, and then later have another experience that... I'll just share with you an example. After 09:11, which I know for me feels like yesterday, but probably doesn't for the two of you. So I remember after nine eleven seeing some people who were in in other wars previously, maybe maybe Vietnam or something like that, and dealt with those traumas well. They had experienced some trauma in Vietnam. But then after nine eleven, started to develop post traumatic stress in relation to the Vietnam War.

25:00 This is a little different than what you experienced, but those triggers from Vietnam would all of a sudden be really anxiety provoking even though they weren't before nine eleven. So Right. Again, our minds are complicated. We do interesting things with the information we're presented with, and it's hard to know for any one individual exactly what happened. We can only speculate and and guess.

25:21Georgia Hampton I have a question for you, but I also

25:23 have a comment. I realized there's a part of the original shipwreck story I completely forgot to tell you. Oh. When I swam back from seeing the shipwreck and was very unsettled and confused about that feeling, I was the only person in the water. And the captain of our boat saw me coming back and was like, hey.

25:47 Woah. Woah. Woah. Stop. Stop. Stop. And I was like, what? He's like, I just need you to know there is a barracuda under the ship, And it should be fine, but it's there, and you need to go very slowly to the ladder, and everything will be fine. The barracuda was maybe three feet away from me. I saw it under the ship.

26:11 It was huge. Classic fish story, but, like, it was huge. I promise you. Look up what barracudas look like. They... They're they're big. And what was so odd was it kind of knocked me out of that feeling for, I'd say, pretty obvious reasons. A more immediate threat was present. But I remember dealing with that in a very calm way where I was like, well, what am I supposed to do? Like, I have to get out of the ocean.

26:41 I have to use this ladder to get out. But I do... I I only mention this because I do wonder if there's some connection there of, like, danger and fear.

26:52Martin Antony Well well, this... The stress level of

26:54 being around the barracuda may have heightened your reaction to the other situations. I'll just share with you an example of that happening. So I was working with somebody who had a fear of escalators. So we were doing exposure therapy, just practicing going up and down escalators, and she was doing great.

27:08 Her fear had come down a lot. And then one day, she came in, and she was experiencing a lot of stress at work that had nothing to do with her fear of escalators or heights. She was just having a stressful week related to some deal that was gonna fall through or something. And that week, her fear of escalators was through the roof. And this happens all the time.

27:27 I I see people with... Who develop panic disorder and panic attacks after having an experience that has nothing to do with panic attacks. So they have a bad reaction to a drug or something. They have these intense symptoms, and then later when they experience those symptoms that remind them of that experience with the drug, they have a panic attack. I'm familiar with this.

27:45 If we have an intense physical reaction, we we associate it with the context where it happened.

27:52Georgia Hampton I... It's so funny because truly up until I

27:55 think literally this conversation, the barracuda was just this, like, weird little other part. I was like, isn't that also so silly?

28:02Martin Antony The other thing I find interesting is that you

28:05 weren't afraid of the movie Titanic the first time you saw it. It

28:08Georgia Hampton affected you wasn't.

28:09Martin Antony Yeah. Affected you differently the second time.

28:11 And that might be be... Again, because of that earlier shipwreck. Maybe because because of the added stress of the barracuda three feet away from you. That sounds horrifying to me. Yeah. In the moment, we we deal with stress pretty well often. Like, we have no choice. Right?

28:25Georgia Hampton Of course.

28:26Martin Antony You have to do what you need to do, but it's

28:29 often afterwards where it sometimes hits us after we've dealt with it. Yeah. So that barracuda, even though in the moment may not have felt scary, it could have had an impact on you and and and colored that whole experience in a way that that stuck with you so that when you watch the movie again years later, it affected you very differently than when you watched it before that experience. I'm speculating again. I hate to do that.

28:52 And I I also wanna mention there's a whole bunch of people who don't know why their fear began. And, again, the nice thing is if somebody wants to get over the problem, you don't need to know what the trigger is to do that.

29:07Yowei Shaw After the break, what you're getting wrong about

29:10 exposure therapy, and how to actually do it without making the problem worse. So how do you face your fear when the thing you're afraid of is at the bottom of the ocean? According to Martin, when it comes to specific phobias, there's one treatment with more evidence behind it than any other, exposure therapy. Which... Okay.

29:38 I've heard of exposure therapy. We all have. You know, someone who's afraid of spiders starts by looking at a spider in a cage, then works their way up to holding a spider in their hand. But Georgia has a problem with that.

29:51Georgia Hampton There is never a world where I'm going to join

29:53 James Cameron on, like, his forty seventh trip down to the Titanic. Frankly, thank god. I don't know if I could ever get there. But walk me through a little bit of what that process is like because I'm curious how that could apply here. Yeah.

30:10Yowei Shaw Fortunately, Martin explains there are different

30:13 kinds of exposure therapy. There's in person live exposure, like going to see another shipwreck. Then there's something called interoceptive exposure. This is for people who are afraid of the physical sensations that come with fear, like a racing heart or cold clammy hands. And the treatment is to bring on those sensations on purpose.

30:35Martin Antony We use this a lot with people with panic attacks.

30:37 If they're afraid of being dizzy, we teach them to spin around. If they're afraid of feeling their heart racing, we teach them to run on the spot to get their heart racing.

30:44Yowei Shaw The third kind of exposure involves exposing

30:47 yourself to the thoughts and images you're afraid of. And this one obviously seems relevant for Georgia.

30:54Martin Antony So I worked with somebody with OCD who was afraid

30:57 of anything to do with Satan and hell. So her exposure, you know, we can't expose her to actual Satan. We don't know how to do that. But we could expose her to the words. So I had her write out the word Satan and put up these signs in her bedroom. And in a couple of weeks, she wasn't afraid of them anymore.

31:14Yowei Shaw So Georgia doesn't need a submarine. She can do all

31:17 of this from her laptop. But there's a catch.

31:20Martin Antony Exposure almost always works. When it doesn't

31:22 work, it's because people aren't doing it. Yeah. Or they're not doing it often enough or they're not staying in the situation long enough. So if you just do exposure for a couple of minutes and then you escape from a situation, what you learn is that when I'm in the situation, I feel terrible. And when I escape, I feel this enormous sense of relief. It feels much better. If you stay in the situation, what you learn is that I can cope with this. Mhmm. The situation is not as dangerous as it feels, and you start to feel a little bit better.

31:48 And before you know it, it's getting boring. It's not scary anymore. So we'd want you to take an hour, an hour and a half, two hours. Do that four or five times a week. Do that for six weeks or something, and you'd notice a huge change.

32:03Georgia Hampton Honestly, it sounds daunting because I hate

32:06 this goddamn ship in the ocean. I'm laughing because the thing I had a conversation about with myself privately was like, oh, well, I'm kind of doing a baby version of that when I watch these videos by mistake. And sometimes, will sort of knee jerk scroll away and then be like, okay, hold on. Let's go back there. Let's look at that again.

32:30 But I do that in the exact way you just described, which is I go back and I look at it maybe one more time, and then I'm like, ah, and then I leave. And I'm like, I was so brave.

32:42Martin Antony Well, people will sometimes say to me, I already

32:44 get exposure. I see spiders. If anything, my fear gets worse when I see spiders. It doesn't get better. And... But there's important differences between the exposure you're getting in everyday life and the exposure that you get in therapy. So in everyday life, your exposure is brief. Mhmm. Might be a few seconds. And even if you force yourself, it might be a minute.

33:02 Mhmm. Maybe forty five seconds if you force yourself. It's infrequent. So we know there's been studies with agoraphobia showing that once a week exposure for an hour is less... For ten weeks is less effective than once a day exposure for ten days for an hour.

33:19Georgia Hampton This is so much more work than I want it to be.

33:23Yowei Shaw And, apparently, you can't just take three weeks off

33:26 when you feel like it. You have to keep practicing. Martin says, ideally going as quickly as you can without getting overwhelmed, and ideally making things scarier and scarier for yourself. So for Georgia, if seeing a Titanic video makes her feel like a cold wet hand is grabbing her by the wrist

33:45Martin Antony I was imagining tying a cold washcloth around

33:49 your your wrist or something or even having a person with a cold wet hand holding your arm or something, you might just laugh. Like, it might not feel like it it really does anything. But sometimes doing little things like that to bring it to life a little bit are actually things that can help in the long term because it really tests out this belief that this is dangerous.

34:09Yowei Shaw It was around this point that I realized that

34:11 Martin has a surprisingly creative job because he's basically designing these mini haunted houses customized to each person's worst fears, except the goal is to make them less scared. And some of the exposure exercises he told us about are pretty wild, like this colleague who had a patient who was afraid of residues, things like stickers and oils.

34:35Martin Antony So his therapist had him walk around his house in

34:37 his underwear covered in olive oil. Woah. Just to just just to get kinda get used to that.

34:44Yowei Shaw Or there are the patients Martin's worked with

34:46 who have OCD related contamination fears, like germ fears, where Martin takes things to the next level of nasty.

34:53Martin Antony I've had people touch food to the floor and then

34:56 eat it.

34:57Georgia Hampton Oh,

34:57Martin Antony sure. Touching touching toilet seats in a

35:00 public bathroom. Or even people with OCD, sometimes they will get intrusive thoughts about harming a loved one. So they might become afraid of being around knives or pencils or scissors, anything that they could stab somebody with so they avoid all these things at all costs. And what we'll do is we'll have them...

35:16 First of all, I've had people hold a knife to my chest for an hour.

35:20Georgia Hampton Woah. And and For an hour?

35:22Martin Antony And I use... Until their fear comes down,

35:24 till they learn that they're not gonna act on it. And I might

35:26Yowei Shaw Is have the blade sharp?

35:28Martin Antony Well, I usually use, like, a butter knife or

35:30 something, not because I'm afraid that they're gonna act on the thought, but more of what if I sneeze or they sneeze.

35:36Yowei Shaw Martin, has there ever been a case where you're

35:40 doing exposure therapy with a patient and it feels cruel because they're in so much anxiety, pain, panic, then they're like begging you to stop. Does that ever happen where people can't take those feelings?

35:59Martin Antony I never feel like I'm being cruel because I know

36:02 that it's helping. And if something's too difficult, we just make it easier. I mean, people do need to suffer a little bit, like they do need to get anxious, but they don't need to be overwhelmed with fear.

36:10Georgia Hampton Mhmm.

36:11Martin Antony The client is always in charge. I never force

36:13 people to do anything. I never trick them into doing anything. And there's no danger in doing... Like, it's not like people will have a heart attack or whatever. The worst thing that'll happen is people will feel uncomfortable. Mhmm. People say, well, what if I have a panic attack? I always answer that with the question. What if you have a panic attack?

36:29 Mhmm. What should I do if I have a panic attack? Well, why why would you have to do anything?

36:34Georgia Hampton Yeah. Just have it. Just have it.

36:36Yowei Shaw Martin told us a story about a patient of his who

36:39 learned this lesson in a situation that to me sounded like a safety hazard.

36:44Martin Antony This was somebody who has had panic disorder and

36:48 panic attacks, and they were worse in certain situations. Driving on the highway was a a bad situation for this particular person, and her homework was to practice driving from work to home on the highway, which she had been avoiding. And she was doing that, and she got to her exit. And as she was approaching her exit on the highway, she had this full blown panic attack. And her first thought was, well, I'm almost home.

37:11 Thank goodness I just get to get off the highway and I'm home. And I guess if I had to have a panic attack, that was good timing. Her second thought was, oh, wait a second. My therapist probably wants me to keep going and stay in this situation until my fear goes away, until I learn that I can actually cope with these feelings while driving. So she decided to go past her exit.

37:34 So she went past her exit for another five minutes or something. Her panic attack went away. And I'd say she got more out of that five minutes than anything we'd... Else we did in therapy.

37:44Yowei Shaw Wow. Alright. So getting rid of a fear is just a

37:50 bit of work, which made me wonder if there's a way to avoid developing a fear in the first place. Say you get into a car accident, and you feel nervous about getting into the car again.

38:01Martin Antony Well, the best thing you can do is get into the

38:04 car again. Don't let it percolate. It'll just get harder. And I'm just gonna share with you a bit of data, some research supporting this. This was a study that my research supervisor did in a hospital emergency room. What he did is he took people who had had a panic attack and came to the emergency room in the hospital thinking they were having a heart attack. And half of the people got just sort of treatment as usual, which usually is some reassurance.

38:28 Don't worry. It's just a panic attack. You're okay. Go home. Relax. Or they were told every day to go back to the place where the attack happened and go there for... I can't remember if it was a half hour or an hour, but go back there for a week. And then he brought them back a week later, and the people who went back to the place where the attack happened were much less likely to have their panic attacks get worse.

38:49 So if you are if you are wondering that, that's that's kind of what I would encourage people to do. Force themselves to do a little bit of exposure right away rather than waiting.

38:59Georgia Hampton It's funny. I just realized I've done a

39:02 version of this with something else. Totally unrelated to the Titanic though. I used to be extremely afraid of the girl from the ring, a movie I had never seen. Me

39:13Yowei Shaw too. Yes. Yep. Terrified. I had to sleep in my

39:16 parents' bedroom on the floor for, like, a week after watching it in the movie theater.

39:21Georgia Hampton Well, here's the thing. I never watched it as

39:23 a kid. You never watched it? But I just saw images of her and I was like, who the hell is that? I don't like that. I don't like the way she looks.

39:30Yowei Shaw Why is her hair over her eyes?

39:32Georgia Hampton Why is girl with long hair? So, basically,

39:36 since that movie came out, if I couldn't sleep, sometimes the image of her would come into my mind. I'd be like, I couldn't look at pictures of her, even into adulthood. So I avoided it, but that kind of made it worse because I could make her this terrifying creature that could do all sorts of terrible things.

39:52 Right. And then for some reason, I like had mentioned this to some friends, and they were like, you've never seen The Ring? Really? And then last year, my friends and I made an event of it. And we had a ring watch party. They'd had it on VHS, which is important in the movie, and bought a bunch of ring shaped foods, like peach rings and Funyuns and stuff.

40:22 And we watched it. And I could not tell you how shocked I was at how uninteresting she was. I've never thought about her ever since.

40:32Yowei Shaw It's crazy. So it seems like maybe you need to get

40:36 your crew of friends to do a Titanic rewatch at some point.

40:40Georgia Hampton I think I need to make an event of this. Mhmm.

40:43Martin Antony Was gonna say it can be helpful at least at the

40:45 start if you feel like it would be helpful to do it with somebody else and have a party or whatever. That's fine. But at some point, you're gonna wanna work up to being at home alone on the Internet By myself. The kind of thing that will actually come up in your everyday life.

41:00Georgia Hampton I really wanna I wanna do this. I I really do.

41:04 I I I think this would be very interesting, and I'm curious. My thought is to Google image search an image of the wreck and just look at it. And I'm curious how that sounds to you and how long I should look at it. Sounds like a half hour to an hour is sort of the sweet spot for a lot of your patients.

41:24Martin Antony If it gets boring after ten minutes, I'd say step

41:27 it up. Find one that's a little bit more difficult.

41:30Georgia Hampton Maybe a video.

41:31Martin Antony I I wouldn't say just look at that picture for an

41:33 hour. Just keep it moving.

41:35Georgia Hampton Okay. I feel excited.

41:43Yowei Shaw By the way, I asked Martin if you need a therapist

41:46 to do exposure therapy. He said a lot of people can do it on their own with the right resources. But if you're struggling to get started or aren't making progress or your fear is really getting in the way of your life, a therapist can help. Sometimes, even just a few sessions can make a difference. Thank you to Georgia Hampton for being our guest today.

42:09 You can listen to Georgia's reporting on Never Post, a really great podcast about the Internet and what being online is doing to all of us. And you can find more of her work at georgia-hampton.com. And thank you to Martin Antony for being today's proxy. You can learn more about his work at martinantony.com, where he has a bunch of books you can download for free about overcoming fear of everything from public speaking to dentists to dogs. We'll have those links plus Georgia's recommendations for what to read, watch, and listen to as a culture reporter in our file under feelings newsletter.

42:45 You can sign up for free in the show notes. Okay. You guys, I am feeling inspired by today's episode, and I want to finally confront my fear of the basement. Our next live proxy hang just for Proxy HQ members is happening on Thursday, November 5 at 8PM eastern. It's gonna be a special Halloween themed hang where I'm gonna be in my basement, in my dark grimy basement, and I want your help scaring me.

43:14 So start thinking about the scariest movie clips you've seen. It's for a good cause, all in the hopes that one day, I will be able to get the fish out of the basement freezer when Kyle calls.

43:24Georgia Hampton Yeah. This will greatly improve the quality of

43:27 my life.

43:28Yowei Shaw Join us at proxyhq.org. This episode was

43:32 edited by Tim Howard, mixed by Kyle Pooley, and produced and scored by me. Music in this episode by Tim Howard and theme music by Breakmaster Cylinder. Proxy and Never Post are proud members of Radiotopia from PRX, a network of independent creator owned, listener supported podcasts. Audrey Martovich is Radiotopia's executive producer, and Yowei Lazordo is director of operations.

43:54 Discover audio with vision at radiotopia.fm. We'll be back next Tuesday with our final episode of the season. Thanks for listening, everyone.

44:05Georgia Hampton Oh god. I don't know. I'm gonna have you look it

44:07 up so I don't have

44:07Yowei Shaw to look. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No.

44:08 No. No. No. Right. That would be bad. 04/15/1912 Okay. Is the anniversary of the sinking. September 1, which is coming up, is the anniversary of the Rex discovery.

44:24Georgia Hampton Oh, god. And that's its own thing. I can't...

44:26 That is like. So you have two anniversaries to contend with. I'm surrounded. I'm surrounded. Spring and fall.