I often get asked “How does hypnotherapy help with fear and phobias?”, and my answer to that is, that we are all born with only 2 fears, the fear of falling and the fear of loud noises. Everything else is a learnt behaviour that comes from either parents, peers, reading something, or from an emotional or traumatic event.
Some fear is good, it can keep you safe, it can keep you alert when you need to be, for example walking along a cliff edge, or crossing the road, but when it becomes irrational and starts to affect your life and stops you from doing everyday things, then that is the time to look for some help.
You may start to feel anxiety, and start to worry about future events, and start to avoid certain situations, fearful of what may happen, (remember anxiety is just our imagination of overdrive, it’s all the “What if’s” ). Anxiety is just a fear, usually unfounded!
Some fear is needed as a warning light, take a child that has touched a hot iron and burnt his fingers, the subconscious mind learns very quickly that irons are hot and dangerous, and we need to be careful around them. Our brain learns very quickly, sometimes only it takes once, for us to not do it again. This can also create faulty pattern matches through, and sometimes our brain warns us of something that isn’t true, for example, a guy that walks through a wood and gets bitten by a snake, every time he walks through a wood, he gets paranoid about a snake jumping out and biting him again, he may see a slim log, and jump out of the way of it (faulty pattern matching).
Also when we give in to the fear, we are actually feeding the fear, if you think of the fear as a stray cat, the more you feed the cat, the more it will come back, so stop feeding the cat and eventually it disappears.
Some people have some strange irrational fears, such as buttons, cotton wool, baked beans, etc. Sometimes we don’t know what caused these to manifest, it could be something that we don’t even remember, say the lady with button phobia, she may have choked on a button when she was a small toddler, but would never remember it. The fact her mother may have panicked and screamed, and not let her go near buttons again, would’ve probably created this phobia.
How do we resolve phobias, well I use a variety of techniques, but the main one is reducing any traumatic memories involved with the phobia, and then creating new memories around the situation/object/animal/etc, seeing themselves calm and relaxed. The mind doesn’t know if a memory is fake or real, think of a dream you may have had and questioned if that really happened? And even if you know it was just a dream, sometimes it can stay upsetting for a good few hours, or even days!
And so hypnosis is great for creating these new memories, and calm feelings around the situations or things that bother you. Phobias is normally a 4 session program, so lets have a chat and see how we can help you.
Whether our sessions are face to face or online, hypnosis can help you overcome these fears, contact me for more information.
