What is a phobia?
A phobia is an intense fear of something that poses little or no actual danger. It’s important to know that phobias are common; everyone has a fear or two. Hypnotherapy for phobias has an extremely good success rate. Hence, today more and more people are looking to hypnotherapy to calm their fears and phobias.
Phobic panic responses, as opposed to true panic disorder, follow a psychological stressor. Usually, the anxiety response, that is based on fear, builds in anticipation of the event, (e.g., entering an elevator or giving a talk) and leads to avoidance of that specific situation. Panic disorder is treated with medication but phobias respond extremely well to hypnosis and psychotherapy.
Types of phobias:
• Animal Phobias: Examples include spiders, snakes, birds and dogs.
• Situational Phobias: such as flying, driving, or using the lift, stairs or ladders, going to a doctor or dentist. Also Claustrophobia or agoraphobia are common situation phobias
• Natural Environment Phobias: fear of heights, storms, water, and of the dark.
• Blood, Injection and Injury Phobias: fear of being hurt
• Social phobias: These may include social interactions (formal or informal, small or large), public speaking, going on a date, expressing disagreements, rejecting requests, performing in public, medical appointments or even using a public toilet.
• Miscellaneous Phobias: examples: fear of choking, fear of getting a disease such as cancer, and fear of clowns
David is afraid of flying. Unfortunately, he has to travel a lot for work. For weeks before every trip, he suffers from insomnia and he is anxious during the day, consciously afraid he will have to fly. Once he arrives at the “terminal” for the airport building, his anxiety keeps increases while he waits in the “departure lounge” until the “last and final call” for the boarding. Things only get worse after he boards the plane as one of the first messages from the flight attendants is how to cope with a crash and how to use oxygen in case of an emergency. He feels lightheaded, his heart pounds and it gets worse and worse with every flight.
Possible Causes of Phobias
Usually the origin of the phobia is unknown; most of them begin during early childhood, teenage years, or early adulthood. They can be caused by a stressful situation or experience.
• The phobia may be the product of severe stress in relation to an object, place or situation.
• It may result from a series of negative experiences that reinforce each other over a period of years. This may be transferred to other areas of life.
• It may be the product of a fear of fear, such as a fear of panic. This fear can be associated with anything and everything.
• It may be learned from another person such as family members, friends, neighbours or even strangers can transmit a fear.
• The phobia may be the result of a severe past trauma, for example a person might develop a driving phobia after a car accident.
Social phobias
They are now called social anxiety disorder. A person with this phobia finds social situations difficult such as going to parties, weddings, public speaking, going on a date, expressing disagreements, rejecting requests, performing in public, medical appointments, etc.
There is fear of being embarrassed or humiliated in public or being judged by other people.
A person with social anxiety disorder is much more susceptible to develop depression.
Is a phobia preventing you from doing something you would like to do?
The good news is that with hypnotherapy for phobias, most are highly treatable and can be cured. Obviously the treatment needs to be tailored to the patient for it to work (there is no “one size fits all”).
You should consider treatment for your phobia if:
• It causes intense fear and anxiety
• You recognize that the fear is excessive and unreasonable
• You avoid certain situations and places because of your phobia
• Your avoidance interferes with your normal routine or causes significant distress
• You’ve had the phobia for at least six months
Hypnotherapy for Phobias – Therapy Treatments
- RECBH – Rational Emotive Cognitive Behaviour Hypnotherapy
- CBT – Cognitive Behaviour Therapy
- Systematic Desensitisation: very effective for most types of phobias.
- Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) – very effective if the cause is trauma.
- Eye Movement Integration Therapy (EMIT) – similar to the above technique.
- Assertiveness training: very helpful for social phobia or social anxiety disorder.
- Regression: e.g. regressive therapy revealed that the fear of flying was caused by falling from a swing in childhood.
Hypnotherapy for phobias has a great track record. Not only does it work extremely well, but you tend to see results very quickly—sometimes in as a little as one to four sessions.
Maria Hypnotherapy
