Treating phobias with hypnosis and
hypnotherapy.
In my experience phobias generally respond very well
to the hypnotic approach.
In a classic / textbook case we find that the person
with a phobia has had an experience in their
childhood which was traumatic enough for them at the
time for them to not be able to fully experience /
process the emotional content. When emotions can not
be felt we can think of them as causing a packet of
energy that gets pushed into the unconscious.. and
there it sits, possibly expressing itself in a
variety of minor ways (dislikes, things or people
that one might tend to avoid without really knowing
why etc) There may be later reinforcing experiences
that add power to that packet of energy, but it may
continue to remain largely under the surface.
It may be many years later that something happens to
trigger the full blown phobia, and surprisingly it
may be rather a minor event, but when the time and
the conditions are right the packet of energy finds a
way of expressing itself.
So you end up feeling great anxiety - we could say
that you are feeling the anxiety that has been buried
away inside you for all these years but it has
attached itself to something in your life that may
not even resemble the initial experience.
Once the energy is being felt in this way there is a
tendency for it to generalise. Phobias, if left
untreated, tend to spread into other areas - a fear
of flying that starts as a mild anxiety, might get so
bad that you can't get on a plane, it can then
include a fear of airports, later a fear of being a
passenger in a car and so on..
In this classic case we find that hypnosis takes us
back to the root cause - whatever it was that the
child could not cope with at the time.Iit is likely
that the adult with their greater understanding,
emotional maturity etc can cope with it now, so we
can use regression therapy to take us back to the
root cause, the relavent emotions can then be felt,
experienced, processed and integrated - basically the
packet of energy is allowed full expression in the
session and after that it has no need to express
itself through the various phobias. After that its a
matter of seeing how this repressed energy has
afftcted us in ways we hadn't even realised, and then
we can get to making some positive changes in our
life.
Sometimes we feel that we know what has caused our
phobia, maybe we have a fear of driving that started
with a car accident, these cases are often even
simpler to resolve, we just use hypnotherapy
techniques to change the way we feel about the causal
event, we get a new perspective on it and we program
new emotional responses.
We don't have to use regression techniques to deal
with phobias, some people would rather not do so. We
have many techniques that we can use to help you move
toward freedom from these unwanted emotional
responses.