phobia or fear?
  types of phobia
  having a phobia
  phobia names
  the science of phobias

phobia or fear?

Phobias are not the same as normal fear responses.

It is normal, for example, to experience some fear when on a precipice or in the presence of a snake. But not to be terrified at the thought of a high place or snake. It is the overwhelming terror that distinguishes a phobia.

If you have a phobia you will be able to induce some of the common fear responses - shortness of breath, sweating, dizziness, nausea, increased heart-rate, blushing, shaking - just by thinking about the trigger.

You are likely to have only one phobia. You may have other fears, but probably only one phobia. People generally seem to have the capacity for only one proper phobia.

types of phobia

Our clients bring with them some very interesting examples of phobias. These phobias fall into two types:

specific or simple phobias

These are phobias linked to a specific object or situation. Examples are spiders, snakes, bees, goldfish, sharks, worms, frogs, birds, dogs, cats, vomiting, flying, driving, clowns, balloons, hats, thunder, needles, blood, dentists, beards, velvet, feathers, lifts and marbles.

Specific phobias can also be generalised - for example to all slimy green reptiles rather than just frogs. This seems to happen when the original traumatic event can't be recalled.

non-specific or severe phobias

These phobias produce a more general anxiety or terror linked to social or performance situations and are often accompanied by panic attacks.

Agoraphobia (open spaces), claustrophobia (confined spaces) and social phobia (public speaking, being the centre of attention) are non-specific phobias.

having a phobia

what it feels like to have a phobia

Most people with a phobia are normal, happy and balanced.

They have just got this phobia, this thing they feel powerless to do anything to change. So it's very frustrating because a part of them (the rational thinking part) knows that it doesn't make sense, that they are okay and probably quite safe with that thing or in that situation. But they nevertheless find that when they are exposed to that thing or situation, or thinking about it, another part of them (the irrational unconscious part) drives out rational thought and anxiety and panic floods in.

Have a read through the science of phobias below to see exactly how and why this happens.

Phobias will often start to affect self-confidence and self-esteem. Sufferers feel they are not understood, that others think they are stupid. And it can make them feel embarrassed and stupid. Like a slur on their sanity.

But phobias are a very human thing. It's to do with the way we are wired. And they rarely go any deeper than that. It's like getting a puncture: it can happen to anyone and it doesn't matter when, where or how you got it. You just know you've got it and that it can be fixed.

About 10% of the human race has a phobia. So phobias are not strange or bizarre, in fact they are incredibly common. And although it can feel like you are the only one, you are not.

how phobias begin

There are several ways to get a phobia. We may:

Learn it as a child from a parent (typically our mother) because we model their behaviour and thinking styles so strongly.

Suffer a traumatic incident or very emotionally upsetting event.

Learn it vicariously by being traumatised by someone else's trauma. For example, if a survivor of traffic accident recounts their ordeal very vividly, a listener with a very powerful imagination may develop a phobia.

Build it up slowly in our minds. Sometimes there is no specific event that sets up a phobia. Instead, we often find that there has been a slow build-up of ideas reinforced by a series of small relatively minor incidents. Driving phobia and fear of flying are usually slow-builds with something mild (like being stuck in a traffic jam or a bumpy flight) which normally would be okay but at the time the individual was perhaps a little more stressed that normal (background stress levels raised by other things like relationships or work) and this tipped them into a mild panic attack. This builds into a phobia.

At the start, it may take some time for people to recognise that they have a phobia. But then the panic starts to occur more frequently and consistently and a pattern emerges.

It's important to understand that anybody can get a phobia. But in our experience it is the more imaginative, creative or artistic people who are more prone to developing phobias. This is because phobias have a lot to do with the misuse of the imagination. That's why we treat all kinds of people in our clinics: from a ballerina phobic about sharks to a massive policeman frightened of spiders. We have treated them all and at all extremes: from mild panic to people who used to vomit, soil themselves or pass out when exposed to their phobic trigger.

how phobias continue

The response that drives our phobias is our most instinctive survival response - the ancient "fight or flight" response. So when we are in danger we either prepare to either stand and fight or to run away.

Sometimes the unconscious mind - which is responsible for survival - overdoes it and gets an idea that a particular things or situation is life-threatening and attaches the fight or flight response to it.

So it attaches feelings of discomfort, anxiety or terror to that object or situation to make you avoid it. And it has probably been quite successful at doing this.

So the phobic response is simply a protection mechanism that got glued to the wrong kind of thing - something that in reality may not be life-threatening at all. In fact, with another part of your mind - your conscious mind - you have always known this. But that hasn't helped because this isn't about being logical and rational - if it was then you would not have had a phobia.

No, this is about the irrational, illogical and creative unconscious mind which is a great virtual reality simulator - creating monsters in our minds which, of course, do not exist in the real world. Imagining things beyond the realm of probability, possibility or likelihood even.

When the protection mechanism got glued to whatever that thing or situation was, the unconscious mind created a very strong pattern around that thing. And after that, whenever it recognises a match to that thing - and it doesn't have to be a precise match - it will trigger those feelings of anxiety and panic.This is why phobia tend to spread out and generalise - particularly agoraphobia and claustrophobia - as more a more situations are approximately matched creating more and more reference templates for "life-threatening " situations. And every time panic occurs it just reinforces the idea that your mind has got that this is "dangerous" or "life-threatening". This is why phobias get naturally worse over time rather than better.

Safety and avoidance strategies are used by the sufferer to reduce the danger and to control or accommodate their panic and embarrassment.

As more and more situations are avoided, the suffer's world starts to close in. Energy and time are used in planning and avoiding the particular things or situations around their phobia. Partners and friends may have to be heavily relied upon. Excuses are made to avoid certain activities. People and situations may be manipulated. Jobs, invitations and trips may be turned down. And there is a loss of freedom and independence as the comfort zone shrinks.

Many people accommodate their phobia like this for a long time - typically for decades. But eventually these "solutions" become part of the problem: the avoidance and control behaviours become the handicap, using up time, energy and attention needed for other things. When this happens most sufferers think "enough is enough". And do something about it. And get help.

how phobias are cured: The Fast Phobia Cure

The key to curing phobias is to work with, rather than against the unconscious part of your mind that created the phobia, allowing it to re-evaluate these objects or situations as non-life threatening. And we can give it this opportunity by engaging the very same imagination and creativity that it used to create the phobia in the first place. A bit like a Sumo wrestler using his opponent's own weight to overcome him.

This is what the Fast Phobia Cure does: it allows the mind to review the object or situation of your phobia from a position of calm detachment so that the mind can go to work on these things and re-evaluate them. This de-conditions the pattern that drove the phobia. So it won't trigger again. The cause - the pattern - is gone. And without the cause there are no symptoms.

All this happens very quickly because the mind learns fast. It learned to be phobic very fast. Teaching it how not to be phobic can be, and is necessarily, equally fast. It does not take long-term treatment. It can, in fact, take minutes. And when that happens your phobia is gone. You are free.

phobia names

Most people know the technical, scientific name for their phobia.

This may give them some comfort: it has a name so they know they are not the first person in the world to have the phobia. But whatever the phobia, someone else has it whether or not it has been given a Greek/Latin name.

And knowing its name probably hasn't helped them deal with it. In fact, just the opposite: we know that some phobics experience anxiety at the mention of the scientific name. A person with a phobia of long words won't be helped by knowing they have hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia.

So we rarely use these names in our clinics and we haven't listed them here.

the science of phobias

There are two parts to your mind - one that thinks, and one that feels.

The thinking part is the conscious, rational mind that you are using now as you read this.

The feeling part is the unconscious, emotional mind. It takes care of automatic tasks like regulating the heart, controlling pain and managing our instincts.

It's the unconscious mind that is programmed to act instinctively in times of danger. It reacts very fast - making you run or fight - rather than allowing your thinking mind to philosophise while you are attacked by a tiger. This has great survival value.

The unconscious mind is also a very fast learner. The same emergency route that can bypass the rational mind in times of danger can also stamp strong emotional experiences (traumatic ones) in the unconscious mind. This makes evolutionary sense - it ensures that we have vivid imprints of the things that threaten us.

And just like we have two minds, so we have two memory systems: one for the facts and one for the emotions that may or may not go with those facts.

Sometimes, when a person experiences a very traumatic event, the highly emotional memory of the event becomes trapped - locked in the emotional brain. In an area called the amygdala - the emotional storehouse. There is no chance for the rational mind to process it and save it as an ordinary, non-threatening memory in factual storage (in the hypocampus). Like the memory of what you did last Sunday.

Instead, the emotional brain holds onto this unprocessed reaction pattern because it thinks it needs it for survival. And it will trigger it whenever you encounter a situation or object that is anything like the original trauma. It doesn't have to be a precise match.

This is pure survival again. You only need to see part of a tiger through the bushes for the fear reaction to kick in again - for the "fight or flight" response to trigger - you don't have to wait until you see the whole tiger or identify it exactly as the tiger that attacked you before. In fact, it probably only has to be something orange and black moving through the bushes. This is why the pattern matching process is necessarily approximate, or sloppy. You err on the side of safety. You don't have to have all the details to know if something is dangerous.

This is the basis of a phobia: a fear response attached to something that was present in the original trauma. The response is terror, shaking, sweating, heart pounding etc. And because of the sloppy pattern-matching it can be stuck to literally anything - animal, mineral or vegetable. It may not even be glued to the thing that caused the trauma. So, a child attacked in a pram by a dog may develop a phobia of prams rather than of dogs.

It is because phobias are created in this way, by our natural psycho-neurology, that they are so common. It's the way we are wired. Approximately 10% of people have a phobia. And it's precisely because they are created by the unconscious mind that they seem so irrational. Of course they are - the rational thinking brain hasn't had a chance to go to work on them.

Many traditional phobia treatments, including drugs, attempt to deal with the phobia by calming things down after this response pattern has triggered. They treat the symptoms, not the cause.

To treat the cause, this trapped traumatic memory has to be turned into, and saved as, an ordinary unemotional memory of a past event. The emotional tag, the terror response, needs to be unstuck from that object or situation.

This is exactly what the Fast Phobia Cure does. It allows you to review the traumatic event or memory from a calm and dissociated, or disconnected, state. Your rational mind can then do its work in turning the memory into an ordinary, neutral, non-threatening one. And store it in factual memory where it should have been to start with. This happens very quickly. The mind learns fast. It learned the fear response quickly and it learns the neutral response just as quickly. And when that happens your phobia is gone. You are free.

The methodology of the Fast Phobia Cure was first developed by Richard Bandler, one of the founders of Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP) - the new science of excellence and personal change. It is so effective at detraumatising memories that it is being used more and more as a front-line treatment for Post Traumatic Stress Disorder including trauma caused by accidents, assaults, war, terrorism and witnessing critical incidents.

More recently, work by Joe Griffin and Ivan Tyrrell of the European Therapy Studies Institute has clarified how and why the Fast Phobia Cure works.

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"I have for the first time at the age of 64 fed the ducks with my grandchildren. Something I did not manage to do with my own children. I am extremely delighted and proud of myself. Thank you."   Pam E, UK  [bird phobia]