Phobias: Conquer Them With Hypnosis?
I was taught that we are born with only two innate fears: the fear of falling and the fear of loud noises. All other fears must be learned. It is not difficult to understand how we learn to be afraid. It seems like parents spend a lot of time making children afraid in an attempt to keep them safe. They don’t want their children to get hurt so parents come up with many things to keep them afraid.
Phobias, however, are irrational fears that from my experience have their roots in a previous experience. The previous experience can be totally unrelated to the phobia. For example; a gentleman came to me for a fear of public speaking that he thought began in college with a professor telling the public speaking class that when you stand in front of a group to speak you begin to feel tight in the chest, breathing becomes difficult, you may begin to sweat and you feel really scared. He basically described a panic attack. This appeared to be the onset of this man’s fear of public speaking. In hypnosis, using a regression technique, I brought him back to the first time he felt that same scary feeling and he described the scene: “I am 3 years old, my parents are screaming at each other and plates are breaking.” Even though this was not in his conscious memory, that fear remained in his unconscious mind and was triggered by the professor’s comments. From then on he associated the fear with public speaking. At the end of the session, the fear was gone.
Many clients come to me as a last resort with a variety of different phobias. They don’t want to take drugs because they don’t feel better on the meds, just a milder version of the fear or phobia. One common phobia I have worked with is a fear of driving on the highway or over bridges. I have always found a previous experience that created the phobia, even though until the state of hypnosis, they were unaware of the previous incident. After a few sessions of hypnosis, driving is no longer an issue.
All your life experiences, the good, the bad and the ugly, are stored in the unconscious part of the mind. When something happens that triggers the previous experience, all the scary feelings come back vividly and get bigger each time. Its not that one is actually afraid of something; the fear is of feeling afraid. A phobia is a fear of feeling afraid. Whether it’s a fear of heights or driving or snakes…it is a fear of the way they feel that is the real issue. It is a feeling of being out of control. You are not out of control, but you feel like you are.
It is a shame that people live with phobias because they get worse over time and it is not necessary to suffer! Hypnosis make take a few sessions but it is the most effective way to eliminate the fears and phobias that interfere with the quality of life for those who suffer needlessly. Everyone responds differently to hypnosis and each time it is easier and easier to go deeper and deeper.
