A phobia is usually caused by one experience (that usually but not always happened in the first 7 years of your life) and the intensity of the emotion experienced at that time caused the mind to generalise that emotion so that it is remembered and re-triggered whenever a similar situation is encountered. As that emotion is re-experienced time and time again the fear is more and more deeply embedded. The sufferer is now locked inside a particular pattern of behaviour which whilst they know is abnormal, is to them very real, and extremely uncomfortable.

All behaviour is learnt. We learnt how to read and write and how to open a door. The way the mind works is to generalise a pattern of behaviour, otherwise nothing could be learnt and everything we encounter would have to be individually learnt every time. Take the example of opening a door. Once we have learnt to open a particular door this knowledge is generalised as a pattern of behaviour for opening all doors.

Sometimes we have to do something several times before the pattern of behaviour is generalised, sometimes it is generalised after just one experience.

Where a subject has a phobia, the fear experienced on one occasion (possibly more) has been generalised and applied again and again in similar situations. Thus, for example, a bad experience at the dentist which has created fear has been generalised and the fear transferred to each subsequent visit to the dentist, whether or not the visit involved actual pain or not, and whether or not it was the same dentist or not.

It is possible to develop a phobia simply by identifying with someone else's fear, without anything actually happening to you personally. Take a fear of spiders, this can often be traced back to an identification with a sibling or parent who jumps on a chair and screams and as a child you learn by copying..and so that fear becomes imprinted in your mind too.

In certain cases the fear has been so intense at the time of the instigating event that it has actually been repressed; put to the back of the mind rather than kept in conscious awareness. In such a case it may be necessary to use hypno-analysis to revisit that event and allow the emotion to be released. (This isn't as painful as it sounds!)

More usually however, the subject can identify (with a bit of searching) the instigating event or the worst experience of the phobia in play. In such a case, hypnosis and NLP techniques can be utilised to "de-generalise" that event and thus put it back into perspective thereby eliminating the abnormal fear.

It must be remembered that within every phobia there is a positive intent; to protect you from something. Thus it is necessary to "negotiate" within your mind so that this positive intent is achieved in an alternative and more appropriate manner. Again, hypnosis and NLP techniques will be utilised to achieve this aim.

The final step in phobia removal is to vividly picture and imagine yourself feeling comfortable in a situation that would have previously induced the fear, and to then generalise that good emotion as a pattern of behaviour for the future.

You know you want to be phobia-free, you want to look and feel good, you've read this page, so call Roseanna now on 670303 to make an appointment. It really is that easy.

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