Treating Fear and Phobias with Hypnosis
Phobias are irrational fears of a situation, things, or activities. Those with phobias will either tolerate it with anxiety or go to great lengths to avoid it. It can potentially trigger a panic attack in some, and in severe cases literally control a person’s life.
Unless treated, a phobia tends to get worse over time. It is a “conditioned response,” meaning each time someone experiences a phobia, their behavior reinforces and strengthens the phobia. Phobias can emerge at any age, at any given time.
How Hypnotherapy Helps
Hypnotherapy accesses the underlying cause of the phobia and removes the person’s conditioned response to the stimulus (situation, thing, or activity). When using hypnosis to treat a phobia, the goal of your hypnotherapist is to discover the first trigger from which your phobias developed. Usually the fear is formed from a traumatic event that occurred during an earlier time in life, such as childhood, which may have become a repressed memory that lasts for years afterwards.
Repression and Hypnotherapy
Our mind uses a protective mechanism called repression; it keeps the memory of our trauma out of our conscious mind until ready to be dealt with.
At Healing Soul Hypnosis, I use techniques to help you become very relaxed and focused (which is the hypnotic trance) to access your unconscious, where a person is more receptive to suggestion. A subconscious door is opened to bring about your desired change.
It is also during this trance state that the repressed unconscious memories can be unlocked and pulled through to conscious awareness. This is done by subconsciously going back to the place and time where the distressing even occurred. By addressing the old memory consciously enables you to better understand it as well as begin to see it clearer and no longer threatening. Once this is achieved, the phobia will normally disappear.
Common Phobias that Hypnosis Can Treat
The most common fears and phobias that hypnosis can help soothe include:
- Fear of confined spaces
- Fear of dentists
- Fear of crowds
- Fear of dogs or cats
- Fear of flying
- Fear of heights
- Fear of needles
- Fear of blood
- Fear of pregnancy
- Fear of sickness
- Fear of spiders or insects
- Fear of water
- Fear of driving on freeways, bridges, or being afraid to drive at all
- Fear of public speaking
- Fear of illness or death
- Fears associated with taking exams
- Fear of hospitals or doctors (‘White coat’ phobia)
The list goes on and on.
Basically, everyone has something they fear or situations they wish to avoid. Fear is a part of everyday life and an important natural process to help keep us safe.
But for some, anxieties and fears can become relentless and overwhelming to the point where normal coping mechanisms just do not help. Even though they know the response is inappropriate, the need to avoid the object or situations that cause the anxiety can become intense and drastically interfere with daily life. Sometimes career or personal decisions are made to avoid a phobic situation.
Adults with phobias realize their fears are irrational, but facing, or thinking of facing the feared object or situation triggers a panic attack or severe anxiety.
Treatment depends on several factors including:
- How severely the phobia is affecting
- Maturity level and personality structure
- How determined the patient is to be free from their phobia
- The type, depth, and severity of the phobia
At Healing Soul Hypnosis, I DO NOT expose my clients to the object of their phobia. It is important to understand that when someone comes to see help, they are still frightened of the phobia item. I have zero intention of traumatizing clients in any way, shape, or form.
If you are struggling with any fears or phobias and wish to try a hypnotherapy session with Healing Soul Hypnosis, please don’t hesitate to contact me.
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