Put me under the category of ‘it’s psychological torture’. Something happened to me recently that did ‘confirm’ one of my big fears/phobias and rather than being cured through exposure, it has made me much, much worse and greatly increased the effort I make to not respond to irrational thoughts caused by this fear. This theory would say that instead, it would teach me that it’s really not that bad when something like that happens, since I got over that specific occurrence (but not my overall fear), so it would decrease my fear.
You wont find many self help books on it, because its generally considered to be a treatment that needs to be done with a therapist. Its a bit counter-intuitive because most people consider the solution is to stop being anxious rather than improve ones ability to cope with anxiety symptoms.
Heres a handout that runs through some of the concepts one model uses:
Otara
My one phobia is ghosts and spirits. I can’t even go into buildings I suspect have a room that’s haunted, and I have no interest in curing it. However, if I were interested in trying to overcome my fear staying in a hotel with hauntings would do it, then work up to staying in a haunted room, then. … brrrr I can’t go on. Seriously.
I don’t comment on whether the therapy is effective or humane but I don’t think your examples do much to clarify. The therapy could only possibly work where the fear is irrational, and where exposure to the cause of the fear gradually causes you to realise that.
You are never going to start thinking “actually, this torture isn’t too bad really” or “now that I’ve been raped for an hour it’s becoming OK”.
But you might think “I’ve been with spiders for an hour and they haven’t actually done anything bad and I’m getting used to it”.
Spiders freak me out, but I was able to deal with them when I worked at a summer camp over the summer. I had to, as they would crawl over everything and asking a seven-year-old to take care of a harvest spider would have done nothing for my camp cred.
I spent a few minutes on Saturday perched on my couch like a fifties housewife while my friend scooped up a spider and dropped it out of the window, so I can safely say my experiences didn’t cure me. In my defence, it was a really big spider and I was sharing the couch with another friend.
Since my fear of heights stems from falling off a cliff, I’m skeptical of how effective flooding would be in my case. Please don’t throw me off an airplane just to prove a point. 
Aw, she’s the mother of your kids, for God’s sake. You could show some respect when talking about her.
A small cliff (a metre or two) over looking deep but calm water? doesn’t sound that bad 
/thread
They did that on King of the Hill. Dale tried to cure Hank’s phobia of bats by using the “G. Gordon Liddy method” which was basically this. No, it didn’t exactly work, although he did manage to control his phobia long enough to save Bobby. I’d take slow desensitization myself.