Fears & Phobias

We all experience fear from time to time. However, these fears can grow to a point where they interfere with normal life and can make you feel imprisoned. Extreme fear, or phobia, produces uncontrollable panic, a state of mind in which all rational thinking stops until the a feeling of safety is regained.

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This is not uncommon - as many as 10% of people experience this extreme form of fear at some point in their life. The fear stimulant is highly variable, from common spiders, elevators, heights or snakes, to music boxes, ice, church bells and grass. In fact there is nothing that we cannot develop into a phobia. How this happens is explained below.

What is a Phobia?
Phobias are completely irrational and may make you embarrassed and fearful of places or people. They are intense and vivid fearful or panic reactions to an object, place, situation or a thought. They are produced by one of the oldest parts of our brain which instinctively reacts when under a perceived threat. Sometimes our brain can mismatch the cause and the effect, so we become fearful of something that is actually non-threatening. For instance, a fear of music boxes because one was playing when the person’s father died—the high level of anxiety experienced at the time became attached to the music box in error.

A phobia can be specific, related to an object, or more general, such as agoraphobia. About 1 in 10 people have a specific phobia, and for many, it does not interfere with their life unduly. Sometimes, however, phobias can, over time, effectively imprison the person, who feels so fearful of the fear itself that they restrict their activities and may rarely venture outside the house.

How treatment with EFT works:
EFT is renowned for being a gentle therapy so you need have no fear of having to face down your fears or undergoing 'flooding'. A phobia often consists of many different aspects - a fear of spiders is not simply about looking at spiders and can be about the way they move, the way they look, their size, speed, how they feel. Also there is a big part played by memories of times in the past when spiders made you feel extremely anxious or even panic.

Using EFT, I work systematically through the aspects and the memories until there is no trace of an emotional response to the feared object or situation. Nothing is rushed and I make sure that you feel safe at all times. Not every individual memory has to be treated as there is a tendency that, rather like skittles, when you take down one, some others fall down with it. Read some examples of EFT for Phobias and Fears in action.

How treatment with hypnotherapy works:
Treatment is often very quick and highly effective and does not involve having to overcome the feared object or situation itself (exposure). It uses the same power of your mind to ‘undo’ the mistaken attachment of fear to an object or situation that created the phobia in the first place—your imagination. De-conditioning involves accessing and maintaining a deeply relaxed hypnotic state with the therapist whilst experiencing the feared object or situation in your imagination. This changes the association or link between the object and the emotional response back to a normal one. If your phobia is generalised and you have lived with it for any length of time, preparation and subsequent treatment may be needed to restore effective habits and to reacquire the skills of normal living.

Download a hypnosis session
You can purchase and download specific fear or phobia hypnosis sessions using the links on the left. These can be played at home at a time when you can relax. Many people use these in conjunction with personal therapy sessions, and if you would like to speak to either of us to explore this treatment option, please see the contact details where you can either email us or telephone us.