Phobias
Phobias
How to end a phobia
what is a Phobia?
A phobia is an unreasonable, uncontrollable and automatic fear of some person, place, thing or event. All phobias can be treated.
There are thousands of different phobias. Common phobias include fear of heights (vertigo), fear of confined spaces (claustrophobia), fear of being in an open space (agoraphobia). Other phobias are fear of spiders, needles, blood, snakes, fear of the dark..... it appears that people can get a phobia about almost anything. There have been people afraid of the letter 'b', or terrified of open gates, or of rooms painted green. There is nothing funny about this - these phobias, and all the others, can be extremely distressing and can ruin the person's quality of life.
Phobias are all in the mind, and are treated by using mind based therapies such as cognitive modelling. Some phobias are easily reversed, others need more than one session.
RATIONALE
Phobias are differentiated by the fact that they happen in the context of specific situations. They are marked by anxiety and avoidance. Thus some people get panic attacks when they fear they might get trapped and won't be able to get to a place of safety. For example, some people feel anxious in common places such as elevators, subways, planes, tunnels and bridges. Social phobias are found in interpersonal situations such as public speaking and simple phobias are permanent irrational fears of specific objects or animals. Phobias may be mildly bothersome or severely incapacitating. There are individuals who stay imprisoned in their homes for years because they fear the anxiety they may experience if they venture outside.
In all these cases the unconscious mind is doing what it is designed to do: keeping you safe. Because the mind has convinced itself that there is a danger in the situation, the mind tries every way it can to stop you from getting into that situation. By making you ill or making you run away, your mind feels it has succeeded in keeping you out of harm's way, and it will keep doing it, because it is working so well. The more you try to go into the feared situation, the more your mind will resist. That is why no amount of willpower will help. It is also why hypnotherapy is so successful. Hypnotherapy works directly on the mind.
How do you know if you have a phobia?
There are lots of things we are quite right to be afraid of. For example, fear of heights is a natural and valuable form of self preservation. Heights are dangerous - you should keep away from them.
To be classed as a phobia you would need to have an unreasonable fear of heights, with distinctive symptoms as listed:
Common phobia symptoms and sensations include:
Shortness of breath or smothering sensation
Palpitations, pounding heart, or accelerated heart rate
Chest pain or discomfort
Trembling or shaking
Feeling of choking
Sweating
Nausea or stomach distress
Feeling unsteady, dizzy, lightheaded, or faint
Feelings of unreality or of being detached from yourself
Fear of losing control or going mad
Fear of dying
Numbness or tingling sensations
Hot or cold flashes
Fear of fainting
(Blood-injection-injury phobias are the only ones where actual fainting occurs).
If you can imagine yourself doing a bungee jump, even though you don't think you could actually bring yourself to do one, then you don't have a phobia of fear of heights. If the very idea makes you sweat and want to run away then you are phobic.
TREATMENT
There are two ways of treating phobias: Graduated exposure and Cognitive Modelling.
Graduated exposure consists of letting the person experience what they fear in a controlled environment. A typical psychologist's treatment of a spider phobia would be to start off by telling the person that there is a picture of a spider in the next room, and measure how they feel about that. Then the person would be told that the was a picture of a spider in a drawer in the room, and allowed to be calm about that. Then the person would gradually be encouraged to open the drawer, then handle the picture. Then the person might be introduced to a toy spider, then a more realistic one, and gradually work up to being in the room with a real spider, and eventually holding a real spider.
This treatment of course is limited to physical objects or repeatable situations. If you have fear of baked beans then you can be exposed to baked beans fairly easily, but if you are afraid of being alone at night, then there is no practical way of reproducing that. Fortunately, graduated exposure does not have to involve the real thing. Using a real spider can take months. Using hypnosis and cognitive techniques can sometimes do the same thing in minutes. The hypnotist can get the person to imagine a spider in the next room, imagine a picture, and so on. This is much faster and more flexible than using real objects or places.
Cognitive Modelling consists of guiding the person in altering how they perceive what they fear. By changing the image of your fear, you change the fear itself. The principle is identical to the NLP technique known as submodalities and utilised in the Fast Phobia Technique and the Swish technique.
Cognitive modelling starts by exploring how good the individual is at visualising. The person is taken through a series of mental exercises to improve their visualisations skills and to show them how to use these skills to re-visualise past events that bother them. Once the client is comfortable and competent with the exercises the client is either taken through the Magic Cinema process or a Lucid Dreaming process.
Once the person has changed how they visualise their fear they are then invited to think about a situation where they might have had the fear in the past and to test their reaction now. Usually the only reaction is surprise that they don't feel anything now, or a slight feeling of uneasiness. If that is the case the procedure is repeated until the fear is totally gone.
If you can imagine yourself doing the feared thing then you can probably work out a sort of graduated exposure routine for yourself, and gradually work up to it. If you get the shivers then you probably need some cognitive help.
Exception
The only exception is Fear of Blood, or more exactly the Blood-Injection-Injury phobia. Instead of the usual increase in heart rate and increased blood pressure the opposite occurs. The person's heart rate and blood pressure falls, and they feel dizzy and may lose control and faint. This susceptibility has a physical component and tends to run in families. The person feels faint quite easily and the phobia develops as fear of the possibility of losing control and fainting in public, rather than fear of the blood itself. The treatment consists of teaching the person how to become aware of the onset of the symptoms, and how to keep their blood pressure up by using their muscles to counteract the fall in pressure. Once the person learns how to avoid feeling faint the phobia fades.
Follow up
Once the pattern of response has been changed, it is changed forever, there is generally no need for a follow up. When you stop believing in Santa Claus, once the belief is changed, you can never believe in Santa Claus again. It is the same with phobias, once it is changed, it is gone forever.