Hypnosis for Phobias and Fears

If you have, or have ever had a phobia, or a strong fear, then you will know that it can both very limiting and debilitating. Depending on what your phobia is, you may even find yourself feeling quite isolated or even misunderstood. People around you may not understand exactly how difficult life can be for you with this phobia. Others who do not know you so well may may even joke about what’s going on with you. As phobias can be quite destructive in someone’s life, they sometimes even lead to extreme anxiety, depression or other mental health issues.

If you are able to look at it objectively, then the reality is that some phobias can seem to be quite irrational, in the sense that the response is out of proportion to the reality of the situation. For example, if you think about it, then having a fear of spiders in the UK doesn’t make much sense. Spiders tend to be a couple of inches at biggest, and none of them are poisonous. However, it is estimated that one in ten people in the UK has a fear of spiders, and if you are one of these people, then your fear of spiders will probably be very real for you. And it’s probably not something you can look at rationally, or more likely be rational around.

However, fear is an essential survival instinct, and phobias are essentially a maladaptive expression of this surivival instinct. Panic attacks, or partial symptoms of panic attacks such as increased breathing rate, sweaty palms, body shakes and other physical manifestations are often part of the phobic response and will be completely beyond someone’s  voluntary control.

In the case of more serious phobias, then avoidance of the fear-invoking situation may even happen. Fear of flying becomes a complete avoidance of flying. Fear of spiders means you avoid certain places, fears of dogs make you extremely careful where you go when you are out of the house etc etc.

That so-called irrational response is something that hypnosis for phobias and fears is often able to help people to deal with. For the place where that comes from is the subconscious mind. There is an old pattern or belief sitting somewhere within our subconscious that somehow is creating that fear response every time we encounter “that something”. Commonly, that fear can even be triggered by a photo of “that something”, a tv programme about it or even a passing conversation about it. It’s definitely no laughing matter.

I once worked with a lady who had a crippling fear of spiders. She thought she knew where it came from (one of her older brothers had played a trick on her when she was about 3 years old). In spite of this knowledge, she was still unable to cope around spiders and simply became overwhelmed by panic when in their presence, or even by the thought of them. The problem for her was that she was booked to go on holiday to Australia, where several types of spiders are dangerous, and she didn’t want to have that reaction in potentially dangerous circumstances. She booked in for 3 sessions of hypnosis and responded to it very well. At the end of the first session, she declared that she felt much clearer already and was looking forward to the next session.

I often give clients “homework”, especially for phobias, and in her case that was downloading a picture of a spider from the internet. However, she didn’t get that far though. On the bus home, she’d messaged her partner at the time to tell him about the session and that it had gone well. He had promptly texted her back with a photo of the most unpleasant looking spider she’d ever seen (her words). She was so angry with him that he’d rang him up while still on the bus and shouted at him for 5 minutes in plain hearing of everyone on the bus. Apparently the shouting continued for some time when she got home too!!

When she came back the next week, she admitted that she was still mad at him; “that moron” were her actual words. However “that moron” seemed to be an unwitting accomplice for the hypnotic process as all of her symptoms which I’d measured on session 1 were down by a good amount. After that second session, fate or the Universe (your choice) again intervened, and presented her with a spider making its way slowly across her kitchen wall whch she watched for 10 minutes. (Funnily the enough the homework I’d given her was to watch a live spider for anything up to a minute.)

Session 3 was a breeze for her, and a few weeks later later she messaged me to say she is in Australia and had seen a couple of redback spiders, had observed them for a few seconds and then moved calmy away. In her words, she was totally sorted with spiders now.

Not every phobia story is as easy as that one was, however hypnosis is highly helpful for many phobia sufferers. In that client’s case, she thought that she knew the origins of her phobia, but in we didn’t actually go there, and we don’t always need to find the source of the problem to help change it for the better. I guess that I’ve had to get 10% or so of fear flying clients that I have worked to go back to the source of the issue; the other 90% have been normal hypnosis.

It’s worth pointing out that hypnosis for phobias and fears is not a one-session approach, and generally I would recommend between 3-6 sessions. What I do is to measure how your particular symptoms respond as we go along, and will be able to work out how many more sessions you need … or not.

You can book a series of 3 sessions of hypnosis for phobias and fears on this link

or book a free consultation  to talk in more detail about hypnosis for phobias and fears

If you want to fund out more about hypnotherapy then please have a look at this short Q&A download

Hypnosis for Phobias and Fears