A case study - fear of spiders
Phobias often appear gradually but surely and most are learnt behaviours from our parents, others are from our experiences.
One client has given me permission to use her story as an example:
Miss X had an extreme, irrational fear of spiders. She’d had this fear for as long as she could remember and all she knew was that her mother also had a fear of spiders too. The fear was that bad she couldn’t look at a picture of a spider and hated even the word. Before she went to bed Miss X would vacuum her room thoroughly, check her bed and tuck her duvet all under her body, and pull it right up above the nose. She couldn’t sleep without the lights on and often took hours to get to sleep.
This is an extreme example and I’m glad to say that after one session, Miss X is no longer going through her bedtime routine, in fact she finds spiders interesting and can certainly remove one from the bath with no issues at all.
More information about phobias
When a baby is born it has fear of only 2 things, loud noises and falling. This means that all the fears in a person’s life have been learnt at some stage, either by experience or in fact learnt behaviour from our parents. A phobia is not a conscious response to a trigger, it is a subconscious reaction, and no one consciously decides to feel panic and anxiety.
A phobia is an extreme manifestation of a fear. For example, people have phobias and fears of:
- spiders
- dogs
- flying
- needles
- heights
- being stuck
- water
- snakes
- thunder and lightening
- germs and dirt
- … The list goes on…
How do you know if your phobia is causing you a poor quality of life? I say to potential clients that if a fear causes you to be irrational then you should seek to eliminate this issue.
What to do next to banish my fears and phobias
No matter how extreme your fear is, rest assured that no matter how ingrained or how long it is that you have had the fear a person can quickly lose that fear very easily indeed. During hypnotherapy I will use a number of techniques from basic NLP, advanced NLP, timeline therapy, fast phobia cure for the rewind techniques which are all highly effective. After the therapy in hypnosis you will be the exact same person you were, you will remember that you had a fear of X, Y or Z. However, your physiological response will have changed. You may feel a little butterfly in your stomach but this will dissipate to nothing and in a short amount of time you will no longer even think of your previous fear.
Do not suffer with irrational fear, something can be done quickly, and easily and it really will change your quality of living.
The thing to remember about fears and phobias is that they are generally learned behaviour which means if you have children, it could be that you’re passing this fear directly to them which is going to affect their quality of life.
