Resolve Phobias Fast with Rewind & Hypnotherapy

You may have lived with your phobia and the profound anxiety and distress it causes for months or years. So what stops you tackling the problem?

You can get rid of your phobia without any more trauma in just a few therapeutic sessions.

Why people live with phobias?

You might find the thought of overcoming your phobia is traumatic in itself. You might imagine you will be asked to face the spider or the needle, either in reality or in your imagination.

The thought terrifies you.

The good news is you can deal with your phobia using Rewind Phobia or Trauma Therapy and Solution Focused hypnotherapy without any re-traumatisation.

What is a phobia?

A phobia is an overpowering, unbearable and irrational fear to an animal, insect, inanimate object or experience. Phobias range from the bizarre to the banal: birds and dogs, spiders and bees, buttons and tissues, flying and driving, even monkeys, milk and money.

These phobias can seem utterly weird to those that don’t suffer from them, but they are absolutely overwhelming and terrifying for the sufferer.

Yet you still may be holding on to this debilitating condition. Why?

Why do people hold on to phobias?

You may have a phobia that’s so severe you have organised your lives, and your family’s lives, around the problem. You may simply avoid the trigger for the phobia at all costs, and have been so successful at doing so, you no longer think you have a problem.

However, you are restricting your life and impacting on the lives of your family and friends in the belief that there is nothing to be done.

Extreme responses

Reactions to phobias can be extreme.

You may find thinking about the phobic problem can be enough to create an overwhelming fear response. This is anticipatory anxiety.

When friends and family don’t understand

In addition to the distress caused by anticipating your phobia, you may experience the irritation and frustration of friends and family. They may make adjustments around you but they really don’t really understand how distressing the problem is for you, which leads to frustration and even anger.

What do phobia responses feel like?

Reactions can include nausea, sweating, stomach upset, screaming, trembling, heart palpitations and even shortness of breath. The reaction appears completely irrational to the observer.

To you, experiencing the phobic response - or the even the anticipation of it - can feel life-threatening.

Phobias, especially complex phobias, can be a very serious, debilitating and distressing condition.

What creates a phobia?

The origins of a phobia can be a specific time or event which was traumatic for the individual. This creates a negative ‘anchor’ so that when you are confronted with the object that causes you to be anxious and fearful, you re-experience those feelings all over again, with the same or increasing intensity.

Phobias can also be a behavioural response learnt from a parent or sibling.

How common are phobias?

Phobias are extremely common. The NHS calls phobias the most common anxiety disorder.

Some people are more pre-disposed to be anxious than others and are therefore pre-disposed to developing phobias. Those who suffer from sensory processing disorders and are forced to live in highly stressful situations, developing irrational fears and phobias will be more common.

How Can I Remove a Phobia?

Many other therapeutic approaches take a long time to desensitise you to your fear, bringing it into your consciousness and rationalising the irrational responses. With CBT, for example, you may also have to confront your fear, albeit slowly and in a very controlled way.

At one time, psychologists would use a prolonged process known as systematic desensitisations to resolve the phobia. This could take many sessions.

Today, you can resolve simple irrational fears and phobias in a much more comfortable way.

How does Rewind Phobia works

Rewind Trauma Therapy works on the basis that you have unconsciously programmed your mind to ‘do’ this behaviour in response to the fear stimulus.

Our minds are wonderful learning machines; and unlearning machines.

Rewind Trauma Therapy and Hypnosis can erase the negative patterns in our unconscious so that we simply cannot recreate the phobic response. Changing the response from a powerful negative response to a neutral response can happen very quickly.

At some stage in your life you learnt how to ‘do your current phobia’. Now you can learn how to undo it.

Using Rewind Trauma or Phobia Therapy, and if necessary hypnotherapy, I can help you to re-programme your mind so that you will unlearn the phobia, often within a few hours.

How quickly can I resolve my phobia?

Usually a phobia can be removed using the Rewind Trauma or Phobia Therapy within 1-2 hours if you are with the right therapist.

How can I resolve complex phobias?

If the phobia is complex, like emetophobia, social phobia, agoraphobia or medical phobia, and it is associated with a number of more profound underlying anxieties, we may need to work together a little longer.

Complicating factors that may impact the speed of resolution include Generalised Anxiety Disorder (GAD), trauma, sensory sensitivity, OCD and deep-rooted associated shame. In these cases resolution may take weeks or even months.

Anxiety that accompanies irrational fears and complex phobias is trying to protect us from the thing we fear. Often there are inner conflicts: we want to be free from anxiety; we don’t want to let go of anxiety.

Some anxiety is perfectly natural. It’s a protective function that helps us to stay alert and focused when we sense danger. When we have a complex phobia, our anxiety becomes debilitating. We may know our fears and anxieties are damaging us. We may know our fears are irrational. Yet we are locked in a virtual prison where we excessively ruminate, obsess, procrastinate and practising avoidance behaviours. Its likely our complex phobia is affecting family, friends and work life. Then we become stuck and need help.

If we’ve been intensely fearful every day for many years, we are most likely to need more time to gently change those unhelpful programmes and patterns of thinking and reacting.

Phobias: Common and Rare

Here are just a few phobias that Sense-Ability can help you overcome, complete with their very serious sounding Latin names.

You may find some amusing, or ridiculous, but there is no end to the list of things that create this very distressing phobic response. However debilitating, unusual or strange they may seem, they can be overcome.

I have marked typically complex phobias with a (C).

Situational Phobias:

Atychiphobia: fear of failure - often deep rooted and linked to self-limiting beliefs (C)
Basophobia - fear of falling (C)
Casadastraphobia - fear of falling upwards into the sky (C)
Dentophobia: the dentist - can impact on dental health
Glossophobia: presenting/public speaking - can impact on your career
Iatrophobia: fear of visiting doctors – with obvious health implications (C)
Pteromerhanophobia: flying - making holidays stressful, often confronted only when the sufferer has to fly, for example to a funeral
Trypanophobia: the fear of medical procedures involving needles
Iatrophobia: deep fear and distrust of doctors (C)

Environmental Phobias:

Agoraphobia: fear of open spaces (C)
Acrophobia: heights - from climbing ladders to standing on cliffs (C)
Aquaphobia: water - usually the sea, rivers or lakes but can be water in the bath
Arsonphobia: fire - a reasonable fear, but a crippling phobia (C)
Astraphobia: thunder & lightning - not easy to avoid when the storms come
Claustrophobia: fear of enclosed spaces
Mysophobia: germs - can lead to OCD like behaviours (C)

Creature Phobias

Ailurophobia: cats – hard to avoid in our cat loving culture
Arachnophobia: spiders – although spiders are benign in this country, this is one of the most common phobias.
Cynophobia: dogs – making walks more stressful rather than relaxing
Ichthyophobia: fish – easy to avoid on the whole but can affect swimming in the sea or lakes
Musophobia: mice & rats – also one of the more common phobias
Ophidiophobia: snakes – not a wholly unreasonable fear but can be crippling on holiday
Ranidaphobia: frogs – you never know when you might see one
Selachophobia: sharks – don’t watch Jaws, the root of many phobias

Object Phobias

Automatonophobia: the fear of ventriloquist dummies or anything that resembles a human being including wax statues, scarecrows and mannequins.
Catoptrophobia: mirrors – a rare phobia linked to self worth or in some cases supernatural fears (C)
Chrometophobia: money – a complex but rare phobia (C)
Coulrophobia: fear of clowns
Emetophobia: fear of vomiting (C)
Koumpounophobia: buttons – this is much more common than you might hink
Lactaphobia: milk – a phobia more common in children
Trypanophobia: needles – a common phobias with clear health implications
Trypophobia - aversion to the sight of repetitive patterns or clusters of small holes or bumps

Body Phobias

Chirophobia: hands – having a huge impact on social interaction
Epistaxiophobia: nosebleeds –many different root causes, including cultural
Genophobia: sexual relationships – often linked to a strict religious upbringing (C)
Genuphobia: knees – a fear of one's own, other people's and a fear of kneeling
Gerascophobia: fear of growing old – we all fear this to some extent, but if we can’t adapt to the aging process, we don’t stay living in the moment and enjoying life (C)
Haemophobia: blood – another very common phobia with health implications
Necrophobia: dead or dying people and/or things (C)
Omphalophobia: belly buttons - a fear of their own or other people's belly buttons
Thanatophobia: dying yourself – this seems a natural fear, but a lack of acceptance of the cycles of life can have a crippling impact to how we live now (C)

NB: Social Phobia is more commonly known as known as Social Anxiety Disorder and is a more complex anxiety disorder that requires a tailored approach.

Freeing yourself from phobia

If you would like more information on how Sense-Ability might be able to help you resolve your phobia, so you can live your life fear free, please contact Jane Pendry on 07843 813 883 or at jane@sense-ability.co.uk

If you choose to rid yourself of your phobia for ever, so you can move on with your life with comfort and ease, please get in touch to discuss the best therapeutic approach for you without obligation.

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