How to end phobias
Hypnosis can help you cure your phobia.
Imagine being confined to your home for an undetermined amount of time. You think it won’t be more than a few weeks, but before you know it nearly two years have passed and it just seems more and more improbable that you will ever be able to live a ‘normal’ life.
Yet there is no one standing at the front door stopping you from leaving. The only things preventing you from walking out your front door to the grocery store down the street are irrational thoughts that trigger the most uncomfortable feelings inside you. Feelings so strong you are forced to return to your home and do whatever you can to relax yourself so the pain goes away.
Now imagine this happening randomly throughout the day. There is nothing logical about it. The feelings come and go as they please and there is no magic pill or surgery to make them go away. Imagine not knowing how much longer you could live like this before giving up. You would probably get depressed and even contemplate suicide.
This was my life for nearly two years. The psychological term is agoraphobia. I heard of this word years before I was ever confined to my home and I remember wondering how it is possible to wake up one morning and not be able to walk out the front door. It didn’t make any sense, which is exactly why it is defined as an irrational fear of leaving your home. It’s not something that happens overnight. In my case, I believe it was a culmination of a lifetime of events, in addition to my genetics.
To give you an example of how it feels, just imagine something you’re afraid of for no logical reason. It’s sometimes difficult to determine whether or not something is a fear and sometimes our subconscious won’t let us accept it. The most common ones are spiders, snakes, darkness, heights, and enclosed spaces. I’ll use spiders in my example. Imagine you wake up one morning, look out your window, and you see hundreds of spiders of all shapes and sizes roaming the streets. You watch the news and a scientist assures everyone that none of them are poisonous, so your life is not in danger.
Now imagine going to the grocery store and not knowing if a tarantula is hiding among the apples, or going to school or work and not knowing whether one will pop out of your knapsack or briefcase when you open it, or just having to look up at ceilings all the time to make sure none jump down on your head.
Of course, you are well aware that if any of these things were to happen to you, you wouldn’t get hurt or die. In fact, if we replaced tarantulas with cats, puppies, rabbits, or birds, you might even enjoy being surprised by one appearing unexpectedly. So what’s the difference between a bird and a tarantula? To someone with arachnophobia, a fear of spiders, the main difference is that their mind has learned to associate danger with spiders. Therefore, the sight of one may trigger a fight-or-flight response to react. In other words, their body gives them the choice to challenge the fear or run away from it. It is when we choose the latter that an irrational fear develops.
A phobia is an irrational anxiety about a person, place or thing, which:
is out of proportion to any actual danger
cannot be reasoned or explained away
appears silly to the sufferer
but cannot be voluntarily controlled, and
leads to avoidance of what is feared.
If your life, like that of an estimated 16 million Americans, is restricted because you’re too anxious…
to drive
to fly in a plane
to take an elevator
to lie on a beach
to wash your hair
to enter a restaurant
to use a public toilet
to undergo surgery
to pick up a telephone
to shake hands with a stranger
to even leave your home
… you know what misery and frustration a phobia can cause.
Drugs can certainly calm you down, perhaps sedate you enough so you can drag yourself onto that plane, or across that bridge.
But beneath the chemical calm, the fear lives on.
Drug-free solutions to simple or complex phobias include cognitive therapy, hypnoanalysis, role-playing, EFT (Emotional Freedom Techniques), behaviour therapy, Rogerian therapy.
— Dr Bryan M. Knight, MSW, PhD