No one was born with the irrational 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 frightening experiences may have been passed through by the phobic individual - often, but by no means always, in childhood. Or it may, in fact, have been a reaction to another person's phobia.
Children who witness a parent flinch and grimace whenever a snake appears on TV, for example, can easily internalize this fear themselves.
Phobias are in fact a very common form of anxiety disorder that vary in severity and intensity from individual to individual.
Many of us are familiar with the commoner phobias such as the fear of flying or the fear of spiders, but it is in fact possible to be afraid of almost anything, from bald people (peladophobia) to chopsticks (consecotaleophobia).
There are, in fact, in excess of 500 recognized phobias.
Practically everybody who experiences the restricting and inhibiting effects of a phobia is only too well aware of its irrational nature.
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 difficulty with this is that many phobic triggers are unavoidable, and avoidance also serves to reinforce and more deeply entrench the phobia.
While it may indeed be easy for the city-dwelling snake phobic person to avoid snakes, for instance, it isn't nearly so easy for the person who has a phobia of water to avoid all water, or for the arachnobic person to always avoid spiders.
Agorophobia is perhaps the only phobia that is regularly treated as a medical condition - the fear of open spaces, public places and crowds 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 already, a phobia is acquired by 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.
Author Resource:
Peter Field is a leading British hypnotherapist with busy clinics in London and Birmingham, UK. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Health and a Member of the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy. His FREE hypnosis Mp3 download is now available and more of his absorbing articles and other useful information may be found on his website: Peter Field Hypnosis UK
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