Do you have a specific phobia that you’d like some help with? It may not have a huge impact on your life (we can all survive pretty well in the UK with a fear of snakes), but you’d still be happier if your phobia didn’t exist.
In this blog, we explore what a “simple phobia” is, and how solution focused hypnotherapy can help you overcome your fear.
What Is A Simple Phobia?
It seems unfair to call a phobia “simple”, but I can assure you, we’re not belittling a phobia by using this name. This type of phobia is called simple (or sometimes “specific”) to differentiate it from a complex phobia.
A simple phobia is a fear that’s triggered by a specific object or situation. Common simple phobias include dogs, spiders and going to the dentist. These phobias tend to be mild and cause no danger, and on the whole, we manage them better as we get older.
How Is A Simple Phobia Different From A Complex Phobia?
Complex phobias are more serious, and include more life-limiting fears: common examples are agoraphobia and social phobia. While simple phobias are generally caused by a specific incident, usually in childhood, complex phobias often develop during adolescence or later.
One of the easiest ways to tell the difference between simple and complex phobias is whether you think about them when the trigger isn’t there.
For example, say you have a fear of snakes. Do you think about snakes when there isn’t one around? It’s unlikely. However, a person with a complex phobia like emetophobia (fear of vomiting) will think about their fear even when it’s not present and their brain will churn over a lot of “what if” anxieties. An emetophobe will miss a hospital appointment just in case they come into contact with vomit.
What Are The Types Of Simple Phobia?
Simple phobias are split into five categories:
- Zoophobia (animal phobia). This is a common fear. If you’re facing down an escaped lion, it’s probably rational to be scared; however a British house spider or a lapdog on a lead isn’t going to hurt you. To the individual with zoophobia, there’s little difference.
- Situation phobia. A lot of us experience this. I feel we should apologise to dentists for using them as an example again, but a visit to the dentist is triggering for many people. Flying is another common one, or public speaking.
- Environmental phobia. Phobia symptoms can develop in a specific place: fear of germs in the GP surgery, (this can be linked to OCD), fear of heights on the cliff path, fear of deep water if you’re on a boat.
- Bodily phobia. This could be a fear of injections or the sight of blood. There’s also a sexual phobia, which can be caused by something like a fear of catching an STD.
How Can Hypnotherapy Help With Specific Phobias?
Happily, people with simple phobias can respond really well to solution focused hypnotherapy techniques. It generally takes as little as three sessions to take clients from phobic to managing their fear.
What do these three sessions look like? We use the Three Rs: Relaxation, Rewind and Reframe. These are hypnotherapy techniques that use deep relaxation to treat phobias. We begin with a simple session discussing the phobia and experiencing deep relaxation (often for the first time) before moving onto these two techniques.
We’ll take a closer look at how hypnotherapy is used to help simple phobias.
What Is The Rewind Technique For Phobias?
The Rewind Technique was developed to help patients with PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder). This condition occurs when the brain doesn’t process a traumatic event correctly – the memory basically gets stuck. The Rewind Technique helps to move the traumatic event from the short-term to the long-term memory, where it can be safely stored.
Under hypnosis, the individual is calmer. They’re not producing the alert hormones that affect the brain’s processing function. In this deeply relaxed state, we take the person to a safe and happy place in their minds, where they’re asked to visualise a TV screen. They then watch themselves watching the screen, creating a mental dissociation from the traumatic event(s). “Rewinding” the trauma, like a film being played backwards, followed by “fast forwarding” the trauma, furthers the dissociation. The same technique can be applied to phobias.
How Is The Reframe Technique Used In Hypnotherapy?
The third phobia session moves on to look at a positive future – the essence of solution focused hypnotherapy. We discuss what the ideal outcome would be (“I would like to hold my daughter’s pet tarantula but I’m an arachnophobe”) and create an ideal scenario (the parent visualises holding the spider. It feels soft and friendly, and everyone is smiling). This ideal scenario is then planted in the person’s mind using hypnosis techniques.
Under hypnosis, the mind can’t tell what’s a genuine memory and what’s the “memory” of this visualised ideal outcome. It accepts our fairy tale ending as real, and will therefore refer back to it in the future. When the parent next tries to handle the tarantula, their brain will open up this ideal scenario.
Run together as three sessions, these techniques can be extremely successful at managing simple phobias.
Hypnotherapy For Simple Phobias With Great Minds Clinic
If you have a phobia that you’d like me to help you with, please contact me. We’ll have a confidential chat about the process and techniques we can use, and take it from there.
