Fears & Phobias
Do you live your life in constant dread of confronting a situation/place/creature/or object?
Are you fed up with feeling frightened? Fed-up of your fear dominating your thoughts? Fed-up of stopping you from doing the things you want/need to do?
Perhaps you have a fear of flying, spiders, heights, visiting the dentist or the hospital, snakes, dogs, deep water, enclosed spaces (claustrophobia), open spaces (agoraphobia), bananas, buttons, vomiting, needles, pain, or public speaking? Perhaps it’s something else?
Perhaps it’s time to let it go.
If you’re reading this because you have a phobia, then hats off to you for being brave enough to even seek out help to tackle that horrendous blight on your life.
Yep. I know what it’s like because I lived with a MASSIVE PHOBIA for 25 years.
And for all that time I was just too scared to even think about getting help for it… because I thought that meant having to confront the problem head-on, face-to-face.
Instead, I let it go on and on, stopping me from having a proper life, from doing my job properly, from having relationships, from being able to even do wonderful simple things like visiting friends, going to the pub, walking in a park, or through a wood, or on a beach, or from even walking outside unaccompanied without being in constant dread.
I used to cry and shake if I even saw an image of my dreaded thing. People laughed at me, and worse, pitied me.
In fact, because I was so reluctant to address my phobia, it finally got addressed for me when my worst nightmare came true… and I got locked in a room – with a dog.
And that was how I ended up confronting my fears – with terror and sweating and crying and pleading and heart palpitations for 30 long minutes.
After about a week of scary enforced contact like this, I was finally free of fear. And then, how I regretted those lost years, where I had lived my life entirely enslaved to the dread of seeing a dog, and how I wished I had gone and seen a hypnotherapist, and done it in a much less traumatic way.
So if you are suffering even a fraction of the way I suffered, I feel for you and I understand you.
I know what it’s like when you have to explain yourself to people who think you’re mad, or pathetic.
I know what it’s like to hear those well-meaning people say “It’s alright love, it won’t hurt you” and how you want to throttle them.
I know what it’s like when you feel sick at the thought of doing something where there is a risk of contact and then how silly you feel, asking people if it’s safe for you.
When you come to me for hypnotherapy treatment, you don’t have to worry about being subjected to contact with your object of fear.
You just relax (in my very comfy chair), listen to my voice, and be guided around your mind so that we can get to the root of your fear, and deal with it mentally, in a safe environment.
And we might even do some EFT (Emotional Freedom Technique) to speed up and enhance your progress along. You can conquer this!*
And the first step is to book a complimentary** consultation.
It is really an informal chat so that I can get to understand your needs better and devise the best treatment for you.
Treatment sessions last one hour and cost £89 each.
I can’t express enough how good it feels to be phobia-free.
I can visit my friends, sit in a pub. walk through the park and play on a beach, and I have been “mum” to three fantastic Spaniels.
And that, for me, is priceless.
Things I can help with…
Flying
Hypnotherapy for Fear of Flying
Hypnosis for fear of flying is one of my most popular fear-based hypnotherapy treatments.
I fix it a lot! And, as far as I’m aware, not a single client has ever bottled getting on a flight after coming to see me.
In fact, I’ve been sent plenty of happy in-flight photos from previously terrified fliers, now calm, relaxed and in control at 30,000 feet.
The only think to really work out, is what kind of a fear sits behind your anxiety to fly.
A strange question, you might think.
But actually, fear of flying is a symptom of a whole raft of DIFFERENT fears which all culminate in a flying anxiety.
The skill is in working out what type of fear YOU have – because everyone is different.
So what follows is a list of all the main fears which have been presented in my office by previous clients as to why they were too scared go get on a plane. See which fits your feelings most. Of course you might relate to all of them…
- You once had a nasty experience on a flight (maybe there was an emergency, or a lot of turbulence) and after that you didn’t want to get on again, or it just got harder and harder.
- You have always been frightened of flying but have never had a bad experience yourself. You just know that you are too scared in case it crashes and you don’t want to die in a plane crash.
- You have heard about someone dying or witnessed a terrible crash event, either in person, or via those plane crash TV shows and just think it might happen to you and the risks are too great.
- You have a fear of heights, and just can’t stomach being so high off the ground. If you flew, you’d want an aisle seat and couldn’t look out of the window or walk to the toilet at all.
- You don’t really understand how a plane stays up there and doesn’t just drop out of the sky.
- You need to be in control and hate the fact that you have to let other people take care of your safety while you’re in the air. You would feel much happier if you were flying the plane.
- You have claustrophobia, or claustrophobic tendencies and you hate the fact that once you’re on, you can’t get off. Perhaps because you feel you can’t breathe, or there are too many people between you and the door and you like to know you can always get away.
- You are prone to panic attacks and you worry that you’ll have a panic attack on board and not only will it be very upsetting, but you’ll also cause a scene, which also scares you.
- You don’t like being too far away from home in case something happens and you can’t get back to safety. It’s not so much the plane of the flight itself, but that you’ll be somewhere a long way from home and in a situation you can’t control.
- You worry about your health and are concerned that if you go abroad, you might not get the care you need.
Now of course there maybe be a different reason why you don’t like to fly and that’s fine – we’ll figure out what that is when you come to see me.
So don’t put this off. If your flight is looming on the horizon, and you’re too terrified to get on, come and see me to fix that now and the sooner the better.
Holidays are something to look forward to, not dread. After all, you’ve worked hard enough for them, am I right?
Driving
Fear of driving and motorways.
If you’ve got this one, rest assured, you are definitely not alone. From my perspective, it seems like there are millions of nervous drivers out there who are petrified of motorways, dual carriageways, bridges and even roundabouts.
Now perhaps you know the cause of this one instantly. It might have been an accident, or an incident you witnessed, or a distressing/stressful journey you once had?
If that’s the case, that’s marvellous because it’s usually quite straightforward to calm that past experience down and return you to being the calm driver/passenger you once were.
However, sometimes these feelings have come out of the blue, or they are a result of other fears.
A familiar theme amongst clients seeking hypnosis for driving anxiety, is that it developed after they became parents. Perhaps the fear was heightened by a worry of what would happen to their children if the worst were to happen to them.
Another pattern can be found with those who already have claustrophobic and agoraphobic tendencies, who don’t like motorways because they feel “trapped” on them, or that they “can’t get off” and therefore back home to safety.
People with a fear of heights sometimes have driving anxieties, particularly around bridges, or on roads where there is an “edge” or visible gap between the road and the surrounding landscape. And those clients will have spent many extra hours/days or even months of their lives taking long arduous diversions to avoid bridges and elevated roads. And that’s on top of the stressful times spent plotting these routes, avoiding trips and making excuses about their choices.
And for others still, driving and motorway anxiety has a different cause – perhaps a little thought got in there one day about crashing, or worse, and then a habit formed. Every time they passed a certain place, or even got in the car, the bad thought happened until driving became an unpleasant experience to be done as little as possible or as fast as possible to get it over with.
And those thoughts might begin with “What if…?”.
Well here’s a what if thought for you.
What if you could actually start enjoying the freedom that driving gives you again? Where would you go? What would you do? What might life be like?
If you’re wondering, then come in and see me for that complimentary consultation…
Spiders, Insects and Bugs
Hypnotherapy for Fear of Spiders and Insects
If you have a phobia of spiders/insects/creepy crawlies, you can relax now because we can get rid of that with hypnosis.
How am I so confident about this? Because I accidentally managed to get rid of my own fear of them while hypnotising others!
Yep, along with dog phobia, I had a huge panic response to Daddy-long-legs, and a moderate fear of spiders. But I don’t have either of them at all now – all thanks to my spider hypnotherapy treatment.
Like many fears, my spider fear began as a child. I was okay with them until I watched the film Arachnophobia when I was about 12, and then my problems started. I was convinced they would somehow land on me from above, get in my hair, and then up my nose etc…
Now spider fear does seem to make some psychological sense in places where spiders are deadly. They move very fast and they can be poisonous. Which means you perhaps should be wary in places like Australia etc.
But when it comes to jumping out of your skin, or checking every room before you enter when you’re just going about your daily life here in England, then spider fear is something you can survive without.
I had no idea I’d fixed myself until a few days after a spider-phobic client had been to see me. In preparation for her visit, I’d run through the treatment techniques in my head a couple of times just so I knew my hypnotic instructions could be clearly followed.
Then, one evening at home in front of the telly, I happened to notice that a big black spider, of the kind that would have always made me scream, was sitting on the rug just a yard from my feet.
And without thinking, I just said to him: “Awwwwwww, you’re a nice big spider. You’d better run away before my dog eats you.”
I did not panic, I did not scream. I felt nothing except calm, and slight concern that my spider might be eaten/squashed by my dog.
The spider ran back into the dark corner it had come from, and I laughed my head off.
I did it for me. Let me do it for you.
It’s quick, easy, involves no spiders, and the results are lasting. I won’t be watching Arachnophobia again any time soon though!
PS. I’ve not batted an eyelid at Daddy-long-legs since then either!