Phobia Work

How They Arise, and How They Can Be Cured With Hypnotherapy

Peo­ple, it seems, can be pho­bic of just about any­thing and every­thing, as any inter­net search will tell you. Lists of pho­bias are often pre­sented in a slightly voyeuris­tic, isn’t-that-weird sort of way. Yet for those who actu­ally suf­fer from pho­bias, there is much more to it than odd enter­tain­ment value or mate­r­ial for pub trivia quizzes. Pho­bia suf­fer­ers are, lit­er­ally, in fear of their lives.

So what exactly is a pho­bia? The dic­tio­nary will define it as an irra­tional fear of an object or cir­cum­stance. The impor­tant word there is irra­tional, since fear is some­times per­fectly ratio­nal. If you’re con­fronted with an angry lion or a charg­ing rhi­noc­eros, you’re prob­a­bly well advised to be afraid. That’s use­ful infor­ma­tion that you’re in mor­tal peril, and you should remove your­self from dan­ger as quickly as pos­si­ble. Our instincts take care of that for us – the so-called fight or flight response.

Our dis­tant ances­tors faced lit­eral life or death strug­gles on a daily basis. Imag­ine that one of these ances­tors is ambushed by a lion in tall grass. If they escape, then they’ve learned some­thing from the expe­ri­ence – that the rustling of tall grass, for instance, can sig­nal dan­ger. From then on, the rustling of tall grass will trig­ger an instinc­tive fear response, prepar­ing the body for fight or flight.

The learned fear response is inex­act. It has to be, since it would make no sense, in sur­vival terms, if the pre­cise con­di­tions of the ini­tial attack had to be dupli­cated before the instincts kick in. So any­thing which even remotely resem­bles, or was even ten­ta­tively con­nected with, the ini­tial attack can become a trig­ger for the fear instinct. In the case of our dis­tant ances­tor, any rustling move­ment might be enough to set the instincts in motion.

It’s impor­tant to stress that all this takes place on an uncon­scious level. Ratio­nal thought doesn’t get a look in at such times. It can’t, because the instincts are there to keep you alive, and in the world in which mod­ern humans evolved, stand­ing around think­ing about things would get you killed pretty quickly.

These days, thank­fully, we rarely face gen­uine life or death sit­u­a­tions. How­ever, the devel­op­ment of our soci­ety scarcely even reg­is­ters on the evo­lu­tion­ary scale. Our instincts haven’t caught up yet, and they’re still doing their job of keep­ing us alive, in much the same way they did hun­dreds of thou­sands of years ago.

So learn­ing how to be afraid is an impor­tant ancient sur­vival mech­a­nism. It’s just that the pho­bia suf­ferer has learned to be afraid of the wrong thing. It’s a vicious cir­cle too, since every time the suf­ferer has a pho­bic expe­ri­ence, it rein­forces the idea that the object or cir­cum­stance is some­thing to be afraid of. We can also see the inex­act nature of learned fear at work. Some­body who is claus­tro­pho­bic, for exam­ple, might have their first pho­bic episode in a lift, and then another one in a small crowded room, since it resem­bles a lift in broad enough detail to acti­vate the fear pattern.

The symp­toms of pho­bias – rac­ing heart, hyper­ven­ti­la­tion and so on – are caused by the fight-or-flight mech­a­nism flood­ing the body with adrenaline.

A mod­ern anal­ogy would be an email that arrives marked “HIGHLY URGENT”, when really it’s just to tell you that the sand­wich lady is in recep­tion (although some peo­ple might regard that as urgent of course!). There are many ways to cure pho­bias, but they all work on the same prin­ci­ple, which is to file that incom­ing email cor­rectly — in other words, to remove the uncon­scious fear pat­tern. Hyp­nother­apy is par­tic­u­larly effec­tive, since it deals directly with the unconscious.

One of the fastest, and safest, ways to cure pho­bias is the Rewind Tech­nique. This is a refined ver­sion of an NLP tech­nique, and is remark­ably effec­tive – even severe life­long pho­bias can be cured using this method, often in just one ses­sion. The prac­ti­tioner will use hyp­no­sis to relax the pho­bic client and ensure that they are feel­ing safe, before guid­ing them through a series of steps designed to “rewind” pho­bic episodes in the imag­i­na­tion. There is no in-depth explo­ration of dis­tress­ing mem­o­ries — this can be pos­i­tively harm­ful, since it just rein­forces the fear response. Indeed, the prac­ti­tioner doesn’t need to know any details at all. For this rea­son, it is also a very respect­ful and effec­tive way to treat those suf­fer­ing from post-traumatic stress dis­or­der or panic attacks.