fears & phobias
Do you have a fear or phobia that's restricting your life, and that of your family?
Have you heard hypnosis can help?
Are you concerned you might pass your phobia on to your children?
Imagine what life will be like without this fear.
what's the difference between a fear and phobia?
Can you imagine walking along and noticing a snake on the path ahead of you? You’re likely to have a fear or startle response, right? This is a rational and healthy reaction because some snakes are dangerous.
Now, I wonder what happens if you see a picture of a snake or just think of one? Does your heart beat faster as part of the fight-or-flight response that kept your ancestors safe? Are adrenalin and cortisol coursing through your body to prepare you to run from the imaginary snake? If so, you can probably appreciate this reaction is excessive, irrationally so.
When a fear becomes overwhelming and impedes normal daily functioning, it’s considered a phobia. The word phobia comes from the Greek word for flight, terror and strangulation.
Research has demonstrated that hypnosis is effective for all kinds of phobias, including dental phobia, needle phobia, fear of flying and fear of vomiting, among others.
Research studies have found that hypnotherapy creates relaxation, reduces anxiety symptoms and helps gain a sense of control.
Hypnosis enhances CBT (Cognitive Behavioural Therapy), which is often used to treat phobias of all kinds.
schedule 20 minutes with me
Via Zoom, from the comfort of your own home. No cost and no obligation.
Tell me how you’re affected by a fear or phobia and I’ll tell you how I can help.
how hypnosis eliminated my dental phobia
Hear how decades of suffering were brought to an end for me with a brief hypnosis session.
how does hypnotic coaching help resolve fears and phobias?
We’ll start by getting you feeling beautifully calm, because you’ve probably been living in a state of anxiety from the constant stress of scanning the environment to make sure you’re safe. Not to mention the impact on your life and potential tensions with friends and family.
Perhaps you had a full-blown panic attack when you couldn’t avoid exposure to the problem situation. You may have felt a rapid heartbeat, shortness of breath and the strong desire to escape.
You’ll experience soothing hypnosis for relaxation. Allowing your body and mind to have a holiday from tension and worry. You’ll be guided into this pleasant, relaxed state by listening to the sound of my voice and engaging your mind and your imagination in suggestions I offer you. And you’ll get an audio recording to listen to at home.
You’ll also learn easy techniques to switch off, or at least turn down, the anxiety response. We’ll begin with the breath because this is a language your body speaks. You’ll notice the beneficial effect is immediate and you start to take control over feelings of anxiety. You’ll take away a toolkit of powerful techniques to use any time you need to bring stress levels under control. And the more you use them, the more naturally and automatically these tools come to you.
Did you realise, the part of you that created this phobic response has a positive intention? This may be a part outside of your conscious awareness.
It is doing its best to keep you safe from anything similar to the situation that hurt you the first time around. That’s how it sees its job. When you look at it like this, you probably notice all phobias, even the more quirky, seem a lot more rational.
I often liken this protective part to an over-enthusiastic bodyguard. It’ll rugby-tackle you to the ground to get you out of the way of a rope that reminds it of a snake. It’ll cause you to hyperventilate so you’re unable to speak in public. Because last time you did, in the classroom at age 10, someone sniggered and you felt stupid. It’s not going to let that happen to you again—oh, no! The mind makes predictions based on patterns and sets up response strategies accordingly.
Once this part understands that its strategy isn’t working for you at this stage in your life, we seek its consent to do something different for you. You may notice that when it’s onside, the behaviour that puzzled you and caused such distress simply disappears.
Here’s a bit of the science. Neurons in your brain form interconnections based on simultaneous firing over a period of time. You may have heard the saying, ‘Neurons that fire together, wire together’. The good news is you can alter this association, by repetition. This is the domain of neuroplasticity.
Imagine, the sight of a dog has your heart beating faster and panic rising. Now imagine how things are different when the dog reminds you of chuckling at Snoopy cartoons when you were a kid. Fear and anxiety are replaced by a happy, warm fuzzy feeling.
Hypnosis doesn’t delete or remove the memory of being frightened by a dog. That wouldn’t be ethical or safe because you learnt a useful lesson: sometimes dogs can be aggressive. You’ll keep your memory and the lesson intact, but we’ll remove all the negative emotions that were keeping you stuck. Sound good?
I won’t send you off after one session to not hear from you again. I believe in testing our work. We need to be sure improvements we see during our sessions carry over to your daily life. If your phobia is related to something you rarely encounter, I’d like to hear back from you when you have the opportunity to test.
During our session, you may remain calm as you look at a picture of a spider and imagine it there in front of you. But I want to know you won’t freak out when a spider gets in the shower with you.
You may not come to like spiders. (I’m not dead keen on touching them.) But that doesn’t matter. What does matter, is they’ll no longer have a negative impact on your quality of life.
Questions about hypnosis for fears and phobias
Please get in touch if you have any questions that aren’t covered below.
It’s €180 for two sessions of 1-to-1 hypnotic coaching with me. You can expect the first session to run for about 90 minutes. The follow-up session will be about one hour long.
The hypnosis and coaching techniques I use are applicable across all phobias, because the mechanisms for the way phobias are set up follow patterns. If the phobia or fear you’re struggling with isn’t mentioned on this page, that’s no reason not to get in touch.
You may think your phobia is bizarre or unusual, but they’re more common than you may think. It recently came up in conversation that three of my closest friends have family members with a button phobia.
Schedule a free 20-minute call with me, and we’ll have a chat about how I can help.
Phobias can usually be resolved quickly. We’ll anticipate that it’ll be under control, if not completely gone within two sessions.
Most therapies for phobias, including Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT), involve desensitising people by gradual exposure to the situation or the object provoking the fear.
Mind coaching can also involve gradual exposure, but it is generally a shorter intervention than CBT. Hypnosis is quicker than CBT at changing how you feel, as CBT is primarily focused on working with thoughts and behaviours. Hypnosis is also great for accessing underlying causes, which are outside your conscious awareness.
I’m trained in Cognitive-Behavioural Hypnotherapy, so you’ll have the best of both worlds. We can draw on whichever process is right for you, whenever it’s right for you.
Remember, the phobic response has been learnt by you, albeit outside your conscious awareness, so it can be unlearnt by you.
If you have a mental health diagnosis, we’ll check with your GP or psychiatrist to ensure that hypnosis is right for you. If you have psychosis, suicide ideation or certain other conditions, it may not be appropriate for me to work with you using hypnosis. I never take a risk and go beyond my scope of practice.
If it transpires that hypnosis isn’t right for you once we’ve spoken, I won’t leave you hanging. If you wish, I’ll help you find someone with the appropriate expertise to support you.
where do phobias come from?
Some phobias start with an event, often in childhood, that was traumatic for the person. A child bitten by a dog might go on to develop a fear of all dogs. An adult, frightened when stuck in a lift, might become afraid of getting into one again. This may generalise out into a fear of all small, enclosed spaces.
My dental phobia expanded to become a fear of needles in any context. If I hadn’t got this under control, this could have become a major issue.
You don’t need to remember how or why it began for us to resolve your fear or phobia.
ready to get started?
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Or get in touch with me via phone or email. You can find my details on the Contact page.
