Consider an existence restricted by terror and panic, in which each movement is pored over and even the smallest decision is angst-ridden. Extensive time is expended analyzing daily obligations or circumstances that most people manage easily. According to the National Institute of Health, more than 40 million adults in the United States who experience anxiety disorders live this type of reality.
Concordantly, better than 18 percent of people living in the United States suffer a kind of a panic disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, broad anxiety disorder or phobias, such as a social phobia, agoraphobia, or a specific phobia, which embody common fears of items like germs, heights or elevators.
Are you like them? Many people don’t know how to find out if their natural fears have morphed into a phobia. A phobia is categorized as an illogical fear or dread. When a person meets a phobia trigger, they may grow panicked with faster heartbeat and breathing. Frequently, he or she may begin experiencing a choking sensation or their palms get sweaty. They could also hear ringing in their ears and recognize they are not able to concentrate on their surroundings.
As with any unpleasant consciousness, people can go to great lengths to avoid the feelings, things or places that cause them. If someone has a social phobia, that person might avoid people, or if it is a common phobia, such as spiders or coffins, those who suffer a phobia may try to escape those triggers.
The anxiety disorder phobia can be one of the most difficult to unravel because subsequent problems commonly result from the anxiety phobia relationship, such as melancholy or drug addiction. In fact, the majority of people who suffer from one anxiety disorder regularly develop other anxiety disorders.
Though it may be useful to visit with a mental health professional to diagnose your phobia and investigate the root of it, the chief action is initiating treatment for the phobia and anxiety. There are several therapies for successfully treating a phobia, including drugs, talk therapy, systematic desensitization, hypnotherapy, and Neuro-Linguistic Programming.
Usually, medication for phobia and anxiety treatment can include sedatives, which actually exacerbate the difficulty because sedatives don’t focus on the underlying reason for the phobia. Other mental health professionals prefer to use talk therapy; however, talking about or even thinking about the condition or setting of the underlying anxiety phobia can cause a panic attack.
Traditional hypnosiswhich merely helps the subject attain a relaxed state of hypnosis and then giving post-hypnotic commands or suggestionscan be very effective if the person is amenable to it. However, many people with phobias discard the notion that they will be more comfortable and calm when they are challenged with the environment or situation that prompts anxiety from the correlating phobia.
Knowing the challenges and even hindrances of other types of treatment for phobias, systematic desensitization can be an effectual treatment. It is the process of slowly desensitizing a client to the trigger that produces the anxiety disorder phobia and ensuing panic attacks.
For example, if a client desires to overcome a phobia of dogs, she is asked to first sit and think about a dog until she is comfortable with the image. Then, she is given a picture of a dog to view. Perhaps she moves forward to embracing a stuffed dog and so on until she is able to be in the presence of a dog without the panic symptomspossibly even pet the dog.
The main point is that, following each action, the subject admits that nothing unpleasant occurred and that she is safe. If at any time she undergoes panic or fear, the therapist asks the client to revert to the preceding step until she has gotten back a feeling of comfort.
Fortunately, there is a way to make this process less frightening and painful: Systematic desensitization can be completed while the subject is in a relaxed state of hypnosis. While in a relaxed hypnotic trance, the client would be asked to perform the same actions, but she would actually remain very peaceful as she imagined herself feeling relaxed and comfortable in the anxiety provoking situation.
Just like live systematic desensitization that happens without the assistance of hypnosis, if the subject feels any anxiety concerning her phobia, she is commanded to go back to the previous action. The only disadvantage is that this technique can necessitate a fair amount of time to create reprieve from a phobia.
The quickest and most effective method to do away with a phobia is a Neuro-Linguistic Programming procedure called a Visual/Kinesthetic Disassociation. It commonly cures the subject of a chronic phobia in just one session. The technique actually programs the subject to disassociate, or mentally step outside of themselves at the time that they might normally begin their anxiety attack. The process literally splits the subjective feelings from the mental images that create the panic attack in the first place.
CONCLUSION: While any phobia treatment that someone embarks on will necessitate commitment and work, systematic desensitization coupled with hypnosis can offer an effective cure. But the NLP Visual/Kinesthetic Disassociation can offer an answer that almost seems magical by allowing the subject to overcome the phobia quickly with significantly lessperhaps even nopanic or discomfort.
Alan B. Densky, CH spent 30 years to help clients overcome unfounded phobias. He offers a powerful anxiety phobia program based on NLP and Ericksonian hypnosis. Learn more on his Neuro-VISION hypnotherapy website using his Free research index and video research index.
- Alan B. Densky, CH
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