Fears and Phobias

Treatment for fears and phobias with hypnosis

“What you can see you can achieve” – Michael Joseph, founder of The British Society of Clinical Hypnosis

Clinical hypnosis addresses fears and phobias in the mind.  Therapy is a multifaceted approach.  EMDR and EFT can help the client to process the intensity of emotional response itself while hypnosis work integrates creative visualization, suggestive therapeutics, systematic desensitization, regression therapy and parts work and change a client’s perception of themselves in relation to the object of the fear.

The core objective of therapy is to sever the link between thought of the fear stimulus and an inner anxiety response.  The client is taught how to confidently approach previous anxiety triggers while imagining themselves confident and emotionally resourceful.

Therapy is developed according to the individual needs of the client paying attention to the wider structure of their life as a whole as well as their personal belief system.

The protective nature and mechanism of fear

The most fundamental directive of the human psyche is to stay alive.  Fear is actually an unconscious perception of danger.  In response, adrenaline is released into the body as a part of the body’s natural fight and flight response.  This causes a rise in heart beat, tightening of the chest and can lead to shortness of breath and panic.

Many people become fearful of the presence of fear itself, leading to a self-reinforcing (hypnotic) cycle of cyclical fear.

Educating clients in therapy about what fear is and how to alleviate the symptoms of fear through self talk, visualization and breath work is an essential step towards dissolving fear and building confidence in change.

Fear itself has a protective nature.  One part of the psyche may belief that fear is necessary to keep the individual safe.  Perhaps the fear served a genuine protective role in a client’s past that has become limiting in the present.

Hypnosis therapy can reveal the reason behind the creation of the fear iand access the creative aspect of the subconscious to learn a new behavior that satisfies the original positive intention so that the old response can be unlearned.

Fear and the story will tell ourselves

“As a man thinketh in his heart, so is he” – Prov 23:7

Fear is a belief in fear itself.  A fearful person believes themselves to be fearful.  They have quite literally “hypnotised themselves” to belief in their own fear.

Belief creates an internal dialogue.  Inner focus on negative self talk is a state of unconscious self hypnosis.  Hypnosis itself can be defined as “the mind being focused on one thing to the exclusion of everything else”.  The result is direct suggestions to the subconscious mind to generate anxious and fearful emotions.

Therapy must therefore “break the story”, creating a new pattern of inner dialogue that lead to shifts in patterns of thinking, feeling and behaving.  To be put simply, change needs to be experienced to be believed!

Fear and love

Every human emotion is based on either fear or love.  Fear and love can be viewed as two sides of a coin.  It is always possible to move from a fearful perspective to a loving one, or vice versa!

Love says “yes” and fear says “no” – the seeds of the inner story that one tells oneself about what is going on around us.  Fear feels like a closing or shrinking sensation, while love is an opening and expanding one.

Therefore to release fear is to open to love.  Perhaps fear is the core of limitations in life itself?  To overcome fear is to expand one’s vision of the world and what is possible within it.

Fear is based on an idea of something that might (or might not) happen in the future.  As the future is never actually happening now, fear is built on an internal projection that is not – in essence – real.  To realize that most people are limited by fear and that fear itself can only exist in the mind, leads to increased understand of the behavior of other people and compassion towards them.

In many ways, healing fear might be considered as a fundamental goal of spiritual practice.  The natural result is personal growth, deeping love and peace with oneself and the world around.