We all suffer from fears and that is because a fear is a natural reaction when faced with possible real danger. For example the fear of heights when walking dangerously close to a cliff edge. A fear is your survival instinct to keep you out of harms way.

A Phobia can be considered similar to a fear because it would have originated from a natural fear. But a phobia is quite different because it has become an irrational over exaggerated fear. Often situations that present little or no danger can greatly affect an individual with a phobia.

When the fear of something (be it spiders, the dark, fear of flying or public speaking) becomes so intense that you will do anything to avoid it, this can be said to be a phobia. We all tend to have minor fears about certain things or issues, but if these do not threaten to interfere with the way we live our lives, then we can usually cope with them. Somebody with a strong phobia would tend to react with emotion even just thinking about the thing in question and, in this case it can make that person’s life very uncomfortable.

Phobias are often picked up in childhood, sometimes from our parents who may have been fearful of the same thing, and unknowingly have passed this fear on to the next generation.  Sometimes they develop from an attempt to make sense of an unexpected and intense anxiety or panic (e.g.”I feel fearful, therefore I must be afraid of something”). As children, we are like sponges, and our minds are very receptive, particularly in times of high emotion, for example when we have had an accident, or been hurt by something or somebody. These feelings and emotions can then become hardwired into the subconcious mind, and thus a phobia is establised.

Commonly people try to escape, and avoid the feared situation wherever possible. This may be fairly easy if the feared object is rarely encountered (e.g. fear of snakes) and avoidance will not therefore restrict the person’s life very much. At other times (e.g. agoraphobia, social phobia) avoiding the feared situation limits their life severely.

Escape and avoidance also make the feared object/situation more frightening.

With some phobias the person may have specific thoughts which attribute some threat to the feared situation.

This is particularly true for social phobia where there is often a fear of being negatively evaluated by others, and for agoraphobia when there may be a fear of collapsing and dying with no one around to help, or of having a panic attack and making a fool of oneself in front of other people.

By using a combination of Hypnotherapy and NLP (Neurolinguistic programming), it is possible to get rid of the phobia very quickly. We can work at removing the trigger that causes your phobia and use techniques to release your emotions about your phobia.

Working with hypnotherpy

Liz Jones used hypnotherapy to get her back on her horse read more…..