[Warning: You may not want to read this post while you're eating. It mentions gross stuff.]

There’s a technique used in the world of counseling and therapy known as Exposure Therapy. Here’s the basic idea: if there is a situation or object that causes you fear or anxiety, you can learn to conquer that fear or anxiety by exposing yourself to the situation/object gradually. In small amounts, over a period of time, you would increase your exposure to the fear-inducing thing, thereby increasing your own tolerance for that thing.

I didn’t know the name for this, but I remember using it on C. when he was tiny and afraid of slides. I gradually helped him reduce his fear of slides (which was caused because one particularly mean and nasty slide flipped him upside down when he was about 18 months old) by taking “baby steps.” One day, we’d just go to the park and look at slides. Then, I’d have him sit at the bottom of the slide to have his picture taken. A week or so later, we’d practice sitting at the top of the slide. Little by little, he got used to slides and eventually overcame his fear of them.

When I was in college, one of my roommates joined me in subjecting our other roommate to an Exposure Therapy of our own design. You see, the “target roommate” was a neat freak, while the two of us were more “casual” in our approach to dorm room organization. We decided that the target roommate needed to face that which caused her anxiety, in order to overcome it. Therefore, for several days, we left piles of clothes on the floor, cluttered the desktops with books, dropped random items around the room. And then we instructed our dear roommate to not touch anything. She simply had to sit there and endure the mess. Unfortunately, in her case, the exposure therapy didn’t work. Perhaps it was because we dumped it all on her at once in a rather traumatic (for her) fashion, rather than taking baby steps.

[Let me assure you that the above was done in good fun. The three of us remain close friends to this day, and the experiment in exposure therapy did not have any long-lasting negative effects on our friendship. Also, we cleaned everything up. I promise.]

So I was thinking the other day that parenting is one long exercise in exposure therapy.

• Does the thought of cleaning up unbelievable amounts of poop and/or puke strike a chord of anxiety within you?
• Do infectious diseases make you uncomfortable?
• How about trips to the ER? Do you have a fear of hospitals, needles, or doctors?
• Do you start feeling a teeny bit anxious at the thought of public humiliation (like, for example, that of having a preschooler say, “Boy, that guy sure is fat!” at a very loud volume when you are standing right next to “that guy”)?
• Do you start feeling anxious and jittery when you are trying to survive on less than 5 hours of sleep per night?
• Does the thought of a kitchen floor sticky with orange juice or a bedroom wall with the occasional dried booger stuck to it bother your sensiblities?
• Do you fear bugs, snakes, bleeding wounds, broken bones, or pasta coming out someone’s nose?

Then the answer, if you believe the theory of exposure therapy, is just to have a couple kids. Like it or not, they will expose you to the above (and so much more) on a regular basis. They may do it gradually, or they may do it in large anxiety-ridden loads of misery. But trust me, you’ll be exposed to all kinds of things that you might not want to be exposed to.

And bit by bit, you’ll start getting used to it. You may find yourself, as I did, deciding that it’s better to catch your 2-year-old’s puke in your own t-shirt, because your t-shirt is far easier to clean than the living room carpet. You might decide that public humiliation isn’t so bad after all — it does help keep your ego in check.

But most of all, you’ll probably decide that all that exposure therapy is worth it. Especially when one of those miniature therapists that live in your home looks up at you and says, “I love you, Mom.” In my experience, you can never have too much exposure to the love of a child.