Recently at training I had a chance to break my personal record of removing phobias. At this training 19 people out of the 75 had a phobia, and in 10 minuets I had assisted them in removing phobias. For each of those 19 people, their phobia was gone!
Let's first talk about what a phobia is. To put it into context, the dictionary definition is "a persistent, irrational fear of a specific object, activity, or situation that leads to a compelling desire to avoid it". Here is the interesting part of a phobia; it is fear and fear is there to protect you. Many spiders and snakes (especially in Australia) are dangerous and it is OK to have a fear of them. Heights can be dangerous and again if you are on a tall building or higher up in a tree, a fear of falling is OK. But it's the "compelling desire to avoid it" that is the interesting part.
Let's look at fear of flying, one that many people have. Also one that a lot of people have investment to overcome especially if they want to have a holiday. This can be a great example of how one day the phobia can cause you to face it. Recently I was on a flight and in the seat next to me was a young woman having a heavy breathing, sweating phobic reaction to flying. I asked her what was wrong just in case I was doing a major mind read. She said "I have a fear of flying". My response was "so how come you are on a plane?" She gave me the reasons. I mentioned it was her lucky day as I was a hypnotherapist and had helped many people to remove their phobias and could help her in as little as 10 minutes. All she would need to do was to ask. We had not even finished boarding the plane. She thanked me kindly for the offer but passed. Her boyfriend was giving her a lot of attention and trying to calm her down.
This had me intrigued to understand what was the investment in having the phobia or how could doing anything else make the feeling worse? Perhaps subconsciously she was enjoying the extra attention from her boyfriend? Secondary gain from an emotional issue is one that is never apparent but often a driving force in keeping the issue. So I left it at that. I have learned from the past that it is important for the client to want to do the process. Anyway back to the 19 people that decided to let it go.
i wanted to make sure everyone had the choice so I asked if everyone wanted to commit to the process and how would they know it was gone. We did a few tests to narrow down the rational fears vs. phobias.Then using hypnosis I completed the simple yet very effective process with the group, making sure each person was able to go through the process without fully experiencing the phobic response.
After some checking I found a few people still had some residual fear on the event, so with some more minor work with a few that wanted to commit 100% in making sure it was dealt with, we checked again and all 19 people felt that the phobia was gone. By testing an event in the future and by talking about their past fear they could tell it was no longer a persistent, irrational fear of a specific object, activity, or situation that leads to a compelling desire to avoid it. They could think about it as not being an issue now.
Some of the comments used to describe the clients' feelings about the process:
The real test is when they came face to face to that fear. This has been proven many times to be a great test as a convincer for people that are non believers or people that have a good grip on the problem, however it is not necessary.