Stress Innoculation Therapy
- Stress Inoculation Therapy (SIT) is a ‘talking therapy’ and a form of cognitive behaviour therapy (CBT) that engages in cognitive restructuring of thoughts
- SIT prepares people to cope with stress in a similar way to an injection preparing a body’s defences against a virus or disease, but exposing them to a small ‘dose’ of it to protect them against greater levels later on
- SIT was developed by Meichenbaum (1985) and operates in three stages:
- Conceptualisation: the client identifies and expresses their fears and is encouraged to re-live stressful situations, analysing them and how they attempted to deal with them
- Skill acquisition and rehearsal: the client is taught how to relax, how to think differently about stressors and how to express their emotions as well as learning specific skills such as time management to reduce stress
- Application and follow-through: this is the ‘inoculation’ part of the training and clients work on transferring coping skills across increasingly demanding levels of stressors using role play and imagery and afterwards feeding back to the trainer
Learning how to express emotions is an important part of stress inoculation therapy.