Phobias And Fears General Information

Hypnotherapy and NLP are well proven approaches to helping phobias for good

It is said that we humans are only born with two fears, those being loud noises and falling. The rest of the things we are frightened of are learned behaviours.

Phobias are, for example, an indication of how wonderfully fast the brain learns a new behaviour. Often it just takes one ‘bad’ experience for the unconscious mind to generalise behaviours of being terrified of something that can last for years, sometimes a lifetime.

The good news is that because the brain does learn to be scared so quickly, it can learn a different and more useful behaviour (not to be scared) just as quickly.

Phobia Help techniques are rapid, comfortable and easy

It usually amazes people who come for help with a phobia they have had for as long as they can remember, that the thoughts, feelings and behaviour can change so fast, often within a matter of minutes, and for good.

Phobias we get to help people with include phobias of  public speaking, flying, spiders (arachnophobia), heights, lifts, snakes, dental phobia, social phobia, needles, vomit (emetophobia), buttons, Frogs, Bees, Wasps, dogs and cats, hospitals, doctors, riding horses, failure, driving and interviews. Occasionally someone will come up with one we haven’t dealt with, but the good news is that the phobia-help techniques are equally effective with all of them.

How Are You Going To Help Me Overcome My Phobia?

For many years the only treatment available for people with phobias was desensitisation. For example, if you had a phobia of spiders you would gradually (very gradually) be introduced to the object you feared over a period of months, starting with tiny pictures, moving to slightly bigger pictures and eventually maybe a video and so forth. This was usually a painful process, when it worked at all, with people gradually getting used to the spiders whilst gritting their teeth!

Hypnotherapy has been the best approach for decades

The other treatment that had success was hypnotherapy, getting the person to deeply relax and build conditioned responses of calm whilst in a hypnotic trance, and/or/ using direct and indirect metaphor, embedded commands, getting the person to float back through time and ‘come to terms’ with their experiences amongst many others. Any or all of these techniques are still valid.

Then in the 1970’s Richard Bandler, co – creator of NLP, after asking psychiatrists and psychologists what their ‘most difficult’ clients were and being told ‘Phobics! Even talking to them about the phobia freaks them out,’ informed them that he was going to find an easy way to help them.

The psychologists were highly sceptical that this was possible. ‘After all,’ they said, ‘we have been studying them for years’.

The point they had been missing is that they had been studying the one group of people in the world that did not know how to help a phobia!

Studying the right people

Richard’s approach was to find people who had once had a phobia and then ask them how they got over it. He expected to find a few people but had hundreds of replies to newspaper adverts for ‘ex-phobics’ (it turns out that it is quite common for people to get over phobias by themselves) and they all said the same sort of thing – ‘I used to have this terrible phobia but one day I said to myself ‘enough is enough’, I saw myself in the situation and I had to laugh, it was like the straw that broke the camel’s back, and ever since that moment it hasn’t bothered me a bit’.

The NLP Fast Phobia Process

This may not seem like much information to most people but there is a lot there if you know what you are looking for and Richard used it as the core of what became known as the ‘NLP Fast Phobia Process’. The treatment often takes just a few minutes to resolve even a severe and chronic phobia.

Since then new approaches have been invented which sometimes work even faster. One such technique is from the field of Neuro-Hypnotic Repatterning which reverses the flow of the ‘phobic-feeling’ in the body to neutralise it (a bit difficult to describe but often straightforward to experience).

The treatment uses combinations of the fastest and most effective techniques that we have learned over the years and the number of sessions needed to resolve most common phobias is one, or very occasionally two.

What experience do you have with helping people with phobias?

We have sorted literally hundreds of phobias through the years. A few years ago I (Steve Tromans) used to help out with Richard Bandler and Paul McKenna’s NLP trainings. My role was to be in charge of a team of assistants whose job it was to help people learn and practice NLP exercises. On the NLP Practitioner course they teach the delegates how to use the Fast Phobia Process and to make it a convincing experience they provide tarantula spiders and pythons. The majority of people on the course would have some fear or phobia of spiders or snakes, or, more commonly, public speaking, and they were given the chance to test the effectiveness of the treatment by handling the spiders and snakes or going up on stage to say a few words.

Many people did not know there were going to be live spiders and snakes and a few would ‘abreact’ when they heard that there would be these creatures in the room later that day. My job was to take those who ran white-faced from the room, sit them down and get rid of their phobia for them . These days I don’t have the time to assist on these courses (too many clients, three children etc – not that I’m complaining) though I have many good memories of these times.