How To Use Hypnosis To Help You Cope With Your Phobias

How can hypnosis help me cope with my phobias?

Phobias are one of the more prevalent issues that we deal with with hypnotherapy. It's important to understand what a phobia is. Fear is a defense response; it is a response to a threat. A phobia is a fear response that is blown way out of proportion to the actual threat. In fact, there may not be any threat at all, and yet this person feels this profound sense of fear or dread or panic. So, a phobia is an irrational fear response, in other words, the mind is triggering fear at an inappropriate time. Now we learn our fears and our phobias through a process called association and identification. We associate an environmental event and we identify with it and if a person associates and identifies an event with a fear response, the two become connected and it produces a phobia. Hypnosis works by desensitizing the person to the response, and what we would do in treating the phobia, is disconnect the input with the output, and desensitize the person to the fact that, you know, spiders really aren't very harmful at all. And amazingly, in a very short order most of the time, that person will not be able to feel the phobic reaction. It is, in a way, a process of reconditioning a response to a trigger. And so, through a process called systematic desensitization, which is one of the more powerful ways we treat phobias, very very soon, a person who's got a fear of spiders or driving on the freeway or flying in an airplane can look at any one of those triggers and feel nothing but calm.