What is a 'fear'?

A fear is what we feel when we are in the presence of a real danger… it is the feeling associated with our body preparing itself to either fight the source of the danger, or escape from it.

What is a phobia?

A phobia is a similar, often extremely intense feeling of fear, which is caused this time, by a situation or object with doesn't actually pose any real threat to our safety. Common with many phobias, is the feeling of a loss of control in the given situation, this can trigger stress, anxiety, and sometimes, full scale panic.

Often the person will learn to avoid the situation or object which triggers these feelings, and when they avoid ‘it’, (and subsequently don't get these feelings of anxiety), this only serves to re-enforce the link between the object or situation, and the fear.

Phobias are often caused by an intense feeling of terror being experienced by a child, becoming detached from the stimulus of that terror, and becoming free to attach itself to another (innocuous) object or situation. Once the fear becomes attached to this secondary object, a link is established which will subsequently cause the fear to be felt when the (new) stimulus is present.

This new link may seem far removed from the original stimulus. There are a range of techniques in hypnotherapy to help the client change this subconscious linkage and so remove the phobia. The therapies used will depend on the client's situation but will be tailored to suit their needs.

How can you quickly tell the difference between a fear and a phobia?

If someone says they have a phobia of, for example, spiders you could offer them any inducement to be near or touch a spider and they could not do it.

If you offer the supposed phobic person $10,000 and they say no but then say yes they can do it for a $100,000 then it is strong indication that the person has an extreme fear rather than a true phobia.

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Some hypnotists will use as deep a state of hypnosis as they can achieve with the client to give positive suggestions that the client no longer has the fears. These suggestions may be linked to ideo-motor body responses (muscles movements driven by the unconscious or subconscious mind) as in Tom Silver's Emotion Replacement Therapy, a technique which many have found very powerful.

Other therapists will use a version of the psychologist's 'graduated exposure therapy'. This is the process where someone who is afraid of rats will first look at the word. Then next they look at a picture, then perhaps a moving image and so on until eventually they can cope with the phobia.

A hypnotherapist might go through this whole process using the client's mind and imagination to create the scenes required.

Whilst this can be successful, it often takes a very long time and of course exposes the client to the trauma of the phobia for each new stage of exposure.

Some hypnotherapists make use of the so called NLP 'fast phobia cure'. In essence this has the client view the experience one or two steps removed (for example on a cinema screen) whilst playing silly music in their head and running the 'film' backwards.

The effect of this when done skilfully is to break the old associations to the emotional memory and so relieve the client of their fear or phobia. This method can work very quickly indeed, (20 minutes or less) but does not work for every client. When it does not work effectively one of the other methods described above can be used. In some cases medical doctors will prescribe anti-anxiety medications to help control the fear or phobia symptoms.