Fears and phobias, if left unresolved can ruin the quality of our life. However, this does not need to be the case. Contact us today for Fast Effective treatment and learn how these emotional fears can be resolved; sometimes in as little as one session.
Irrational and persistent fear, over which you have no control
Phobias and fears are not genetic, they are learned through experience
For some phobias, it may be spiders or snakes or worms. For others it may be fear of crowds, fear of driving or of motorways or fear of flying. It could be shopping in supermarkets or a host of situations or experiences that literally send the sufferer into terror.
Phobias and fears are extremely common. In fact 11% of us will experience one at some time in our life and are twice as common in women as they are in men.
People can be phobic of buses if they experienced or witnessed a trauma on one or of a certain food if they once almost choked on it. In fact there are thousands of ways whereby a response can develop. Children can learn a response from their parents or carer's. It is not even necessary to witness the original cause of the fear.
The good news is that in most cases, the phobia can be dealt with quickly and easily. And for those phobias which are a little more complex, there is still a high chance of a full recovery.
Additional Information about Fear and Phobias.
Curing Phobias.
The physiology of phobias is much the same as that of post traumatic stress disorder - a pattern (memory template) is imprinted in the amygdala and is trapped there, instead of being transferred to the neo-cortex. The template may be embedded as the result of a trauma, but in many cases, children simply learn their phobias from their parents, because children are programmed by nature to learn the fear reactions of their primary carer's.
However when treating a phobia with the Fast trauma and phobia cure, we don't need to know whether a phobia was caused by a traumatic learning experience or whether it was caused by modelling. This is because the client's only need is to learn how not to be phobic in the presence of that stimulus. All that is important is the de-conditioning of the response pattern. It really doesn't matter how the pattern got there.
To de-condition the response pattern, we need the client to provide perhaps three or four examples - their most vivid memories - of when they felt fearful in the presence of the phobic stimulus. We would then simply de-condition each of those memories after relaxing the client and using the Fast trauma and phobia cure. This allows the client to repeatedly review the previously traumatic memories in their imagination while the mind and body are physiologically calm. This enables the amygdala to relearn that the stimulus is no longer a threat.
We would then encourage the client, whist still in the relaxed state, to imagine travelling into the future and seeing themselves co-existing with the previously phobic stimuli in a normal manner. To prevent a feeling of apprehension in the client, we would try, if possible, to procure an example of the feared stimulus while they were still with us so that they can test out their reactions for certain.
The client finds this process exhilarating, not only because they are freed from their inconvenience of their symptoms, but also because their brain, thereafter, literally has more spare capacity once it is not using valuable energy to maintain the phobic template.
Curing Phobias.
Therapists working from the Human Givens perspective use this technique not only for PTSD or phobias, but also in other ways.
Fear of panic attacks is common among people who have experienced one - an understandable reaction since a panic attack is literally a 'dreadful' experience. This fear can easily develop into agoraphobia, where the person is so anxious and afraid of having a panic attack that they won't even leave home.
Rising levels of background stress can cause individuals to inappropriately set off their fight or flight response, as it would if they were in a life threatening event. The person doesn't understand why their heart is pounding, why they are sweating, why their breathing rate is accelerating (all natural reactions to stress) and so jump to the conclusion that something is seriously wrong, i.e. heart attack, which exasperates the situation further.
A combination of relaxation, behavioural and cognitive therapy is a useful treatment modality for this condition: in other words, teaching the person to deal with whatever is raising their stress levels, calm themselves down and progressively re-engage with life. However, this process is rapidly accelerated if the memories of their most frightening panic attacks are de-traumatized first. Then the brain won't be pattern matching from the previous panic attack to whatever situation they are going into next. This greatly helps the recovery process.
Human Givens College - Workshop.The Fast Trauma (PTSD) and Phobia Cure.
Human Givens InstituteWeb page on trauma and phobias.