What’s Your Phobia?

By Deborah Lindemann C.H.T.

Katie, one of my clients, experienced heart palpitations, profuse sweating, light-headedness, anxiety, numbness in her extremities and more. She didn’t have a disease or a particular health problem; these were her symptoms whenever she would just think about flying on an airplane, much less get on one. Fear of flying is just one of many phobias that can be successfully treated in adults and children in as little as one session using hypnosis.

At last count there are around five hundred and thirty named phobias, ranging from Agoraphobia (fear of open public places) to Zoophobia (fear of animals). A phobia may be present whenever a person feels intense, irrational fear of a specific object, activity, or situation that most other people find non-threatening.

Understandably, since the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Towers on September 11th, 2001, the very idea of flying has become terrifying to many people who previously had no fear of flying.

One of the highly effective hypnotic processes I use is an easy Time Line Therapy de-sensitization process called, "The Phobia Cure". This process takes the emotional charge off of the negative memory by deleting the emotions from the event. In addition, the old memory is replaced with a new positive memory of how you want to act or be as the new picture in the desired situation. This can be done in a very light state of hypnosis and usually within one session.

In some cases, there is also an underlying "fear" in a root cause memory that also needs to be cleared before the "Phobia Cure" is done. Often the root cause is completely unconscious. It may have taken place in your childhood or possibly a past lifetime.

If you have a phobia, you might deal with it in a variety of ways, from rearranging your lifestyle to accommodate your fears, to ignoring them while trying to live normally. For those of you who feel you must rearrange your life to avoid your phobia, it can be emotionally devastating and a major barrier to your own quality of life, both personally and professionally. But you don’t have to live that way.

In addition to the techniques described above, through hypnotic relaxation the conscious critical mind is set aside, allowing the suggestible unconscious mind to operate. Once your logical conscious mind is relaxed, your subconscious mind can now accept a healthy new script. Your subconscious mind is capable of making this positive change because it doesn’t know the difference between a real and an imagined experience. As long as the new script is in line with your morals and values, your unconscious mind will automatically adapt to this new behavior.

The power of hypnotic suggestion can alter cognitive processes as diverse as memory, pain perception, anxiety and phobic reactions. The study and use of hypnotic phenomena is now squarely in the domain of normal cognitive science, with papers on hypnosis published in some of the most selective scientific and medical journals.

Today, my client Katie is free of her phobia and feels comfortable flying.