subject: Phobia Help - Is Hypnosis An Effective Phobia Cure? [print this page] No one was born with the fear that is a phobia.
And nobody was born to live their life with fears and phobias. But what exactly is a phobia?
Phobias are conditioned fears or reflexes that are acquired on the person's life journey - a consequence of a frightening experience through which the phobic person has passed. Such experiences may have been undergone by the individual him or herself - often, but by no means always, in childhood. Or it may have been a response to another person's phobic response.
Children who observe their mother wince and grimace when a snake appears on television, for example, can very quickly pick up this fear and internalize it themselves.
Phobias are in fact a very common form of anxiety disorder that vary in severity and intensity from individual to individual.
Most people are familiar with the more common phobias such as the fear of spiders (arachnophobia) and the fear of flying (aviophobia), but it is possible to be phobic about almost anything, from velvet (haptodysphoria) to clowns (coulrophobia).
There are, in fact, in excess of 500 recognized phobias.
Almost everyone who experiences the frustrating and inhibiting effects of a phobia is very well aware that it is irrational.
At some time, most have tried their very best to rid themselves of their fears and phobias, gritting their teeth and using all of their courage to conquer their fear, but still those scared feelings remain.
This simply engenders feelings of powerlessness that serve to reinforce and confirm the phobia and to enhance the fearful feelings. Try as they might, the phobic person feels powerless to override their fear.
The most common coping strategy, and one that most phobic people adopt, is simply to try their very best to avoid the cause of the fearful feelings.
The problem with this is that not only are many phobic triggers unavoidable, but avoidance simply serves to reinforce the fear, to more deeply entrench the phobia itself.
While it may be relatively easy for the city-dwelling snake phobic to avoid snakes, for example, it isn't so easy for the water phobic person to avoid water, or for the arachnophobe to always avoid spiders.
Agorophobia is perhaps the only phobia that is regularly treated as a medical condition - the fear of the outdoors, open spaces, crowds and public places etc. Often the medical response is again to prescribe anti-anxiety drugs, perhaps combined with a course of cognitive behavioural therapy in order to cope with the symptoms.
But there is a better way of treating both this and other phobias. There is a really effective phobia treatment and phobia cure and that is through advanced transformational hypnotherapy.
The simple fact is that a phobia is a fear and fear is a feeling. Now, the home and repository of all feelings is the subconscious mind, and so it is to the subconscious mind that we must turn in order to bring about a phobia cure.
As mentioned, a phobia is acquired by undergoing a frightening experience - a perceived danger - in the individual's past. What is happening is that the subconscious mind is trying to make the person safe by preventing him or her from placing themselves in danger again, and it is attempting to do this by generating fear. It uses fear as a way of protecting the person, of keeping him or her safe.
But, of course, the subconscious mind has gotten it wrong.
With correctly applied advanced transformational hypnosis, we can reach down to deep within the subconscious mind and uncover the 'program' that the individual is working to.
When this is accomplished, the subconscious program or script can be re-written, so that the mind releases its fearful hold and frees the person from their anxiety.
In the hands of a fully qualified and experienced advanced transformational hypnotherapist, this can very often be accomplished in as little as two sessions.
If you or someone you care about suffer from the inhibiting and fearful affects of a phobia, do not despair, with the right kind of hypnotherapy you can again live your life as you were meant to live it - free of fears and phobias.
