Phobias are very common... In fact 1 in 10 of us are affected.

At some point in our lives we could be affected - and phobias can take many forms...

Although some phobias seem to have a genuine protective purpose - such as a fear of heights or fear of snakes - many seem to be totally irrational.

In reality, all phobias have a root cause and phobic behaviour is there to serve a purpose - usually to protect us from some perceived danger.

Phobias usually start when a person is exposed to an event which is emotionally intense.

When faced with overwhelming feelings, the mind goes into survival mode, and looks around the environment for the cause of the danger. 

Phobias usually become a problem when the mind picks the wrong source of danger, or where it 'generalises' the source to include other items which seem irrational to be afraid of.

An unchecked phobia can continue to generalise over time until it becomes difficult for a person to do anything without fear - known as agoraphobia, or fear of panic attacks.

Obsessive behaviour can often arise from such unchecked fears, and is often linked to a fear of losing control or fear of getting something wrong - the obsessive behaviour becomes the way of trying to retain control or avoid a perceived catastrophe.

Taking back control of your phobia

Once our mind has selected what it thinks is the cause of the danger, the memory and its associated emotions are usually buried out of conscious awareness, and used as a reference point for future encounters. This is partly to protect us from the emotions, and partly so that we cannot interfere consciously with this survival mechanism.

This is why phobias are so hard to control consciously, and why people often believe that they just have to 'live with' their phobia. In reality, a phobia is simply a learned response - you were not born with your phobia - and anything that is learned can be un-learned!

Hypnotherapy is so effective in helping people to overcome phobias because it allows us to find and safely release the emotions of the sensitising event, which originally caused the phobia. And with the unhelpful emotions gone, the mind no longer has a reference point for the phobia, meaning the phobia just disappears.

With Cognitive Hypnotherapy and NLP the great thing is that it doesn't matter how long you have suffered your phobia - you can be helped in this short amount of time.

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