Exposure therapy is designed to help someone overcome fears or traumatic experiences. This is a strategy developed under Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT). This exposes a person to a phobia, often progressively and under various circumstances, so their mind may form different associations to this phobia. Even if you only expose yourself to a piece of the fear, you will gain confidence from it.
It works wonderfully if you don't think you have what it takes to overcome the fear. You must believe in yourself to overcome any trauma. As belief in yourself grows, so do your efforts towards the desired end.
If you don't think you can do something, you won't really try to. That's what so often leads to failure or long years of struggling with a fear. Specifically with anxiety attacks, a sufferer will often avoid stressful situations, which is counterproductive. It will degrade their self-esteem by letting the fear win in a way, and the brain will in turn justify what it is doing by putting the fear on a pedestal.
Someone will grow to feel that the fear can't be overcome at all like this. When exposed to these stressful situations again in a manner they can deal with, confidence is gained and it begins to show them that they don't need to be so afraid.
There are several forms of exposure therapy. Which one you should use depends on where your primary fears lie and how much confidence you have against them. The styles are exposure in its general form, imagined exposure, and physical exposure. You should already understand the central form, so imagined and physical will be the primary focus from here on.
The imagined exposure helps when you don't feel you can even get near a place or situation without having significant problems. It also works well if, in order to expose yourself to the stress directly, you'd have to use an uncontrolled environment, which isn't ideal in the early stages. This is a mental exercise of visualization. This serves to guide you subconscious to help you deal with the problem.
Visualizations work very well as the subconscious, which to some degree directs our every action, can not distinguish between what is real and what is vividly imagined. Here you will visualize yourself in what you would normally feel to be a stressful situation, but instead you will handle it calmly and decisively. When you do this, a part of you will feel you have done it and that you can do it again. In order to make something happen purposefully, or believe you can do so, you must be able to make a mental picture of how it would look. By repeating this on a regular basis, you will develop the confidence to be the person you see yourself being.
Should you find yourself excessively worried or scared of the physical symptoms of the anxiety attack, physical exposure can be beneficial. This exposure centers around simulating the feared symptoms in a controlled environment separate from the anxiety attacks in order to show that there is nothing to fear from them when you're having the attack. Racing heart and trouble breathing are the main ones.
More often than not, the greater fear of the physical symptoms is when you don't know what is happening to you. When you learn more about what is going on, that fear will begin to go away.
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