Some years ago,I watched a young man die suddenly and tragically right in front of me. As the same time of day approached each day when it happened, I was having flashbacks and a lot of distress.

Fortunately, I knew how to deal with this. My friend a psychologist later told me my plan was pretty much exactly what he would have recommended to a client in this situation. It’s called exposure therapy.

As the distressing time approached (early evening), I pulled up a chair to the spot where the young man had been lying in shock, bleeding out despite all the first aid we were all desperately doing, weakly saying it hurts, eyes slowly closing for the last time. I sat with those images and in that place, allowing the memory to flow over me and make me anxious and upset. It really sucked, but I was determined to see it through each time I did this exercise. As the minutes and visions went by, I rated my level of distress on a scale of 1-10. When you’re at a 10, you’re pretty much curled into a ball crying and someone else has to write the time and number down on a piece of paper or phone for you.

Things start with a lot of time with your head in your hands, rocking back and forth, crying, hyperventilating, wondering why the fuck you are torturing yourself like this. You get your companion to write down a 9. You encourage the thoughts to come, to be more vivid, more horrifying. Maybe it goes all the way up to a 10. Companion should be close at hand because you’ll be a hot mess. But any reassurance offered by the companion is counterproductive. This is between you and your overactive limbic system that thinks its job is to warn you away from the same fate as the person who died.

Now, something amazing happens every single time I’ve done this: The numbers eventually start coming down. Your amygdala just can’t keep up all the panic after a while. Maybe that saber-tooth cat really isn’t in the bushes after all. Maybe the visions and memories really aren’t helping you to avoid the same danger that killed that kid. And so the distress and your numbers recording it get smaller and smaller. After maybe 40 minutes to an hour of this, you start to get bored. You’re at a 2 or a 3 and it feels like it’s time to stop the session. And it is. You won.

You can look at the progression of numbers and see the irrefutable proof that your anxiety went down. Exposure to these awful memories eventually resulted in less distress, not more. You are less inclined to try to suppress them, which is good because it works about as well as me firmly instructing you not to think about a white bear. (Try it: Think about anything but a white bear for five minutes.)

I repeated this four or five times in the weeks after the tragedy and my PTSD about it disappeared. It was just a horrible memory and that is all.

Disclaimer: Not a therapist or any other type of mental health professional. Check with one first if you’re worried about how anxious you might get during the initial exposure, and for ways to suit the exposure to your own situation if you and they agree this is worth doing.