A phobia is an irrational fear that causes great anxiety or panic and a strong desire to avoid the feared object or situation. With a phobia you are aware that the fear is unreasonable and out of proportion to the actual danger, but you are unable to control it.
Fear and phobia limit you
Fear can limit you, making your life smaller because you strive to avoid the object of your fear. If you have fear of flying, then you avoid flying. This limits your choice of where you can go on holiday or business. And so your fear affects not only you, but also your family, friends and colleagues.
Phobia is even more limiting. A phobia is an excessive or unreasonable fear of an object or situation. A fear of flying is a phobia if you find yourself trembling or sweating when you see someone flying in a plane on TV, or you find yourself avoiding programmes and magazines where you might see something about flying.
Types of phobia
People can develop fears and phobias about almost any object or situation. Some of common ones are:
- Fear of flying
- Fear of dentists
- Fear of needles
- Fear of blood
- Fear of driving
- Fear of being sick
- Fear of public speaking
- Fear of spiders
- Fear of dogs
- Fear of different animals
Difference between fear and phobia
Fear is a useful inbuilt response to a danger immediately facing us. It uses the fight-or-flight response to give us the extra energy to fight or flee from the threat immediately facing us.
By contrast, a phobia is an irrational and excessive fear. The object of your phobia does not pose an immediate, but your mind and body are reacting as though it does. So, for example, fear of a wild dog running towards you is perfectly normal, because that is an immediate danger. But fear of a picture of a wild dog would be irrational, because a picture is harmless. Yet someone with a dog phobia could feel fear just by looking at that picture. Furthermore, the fear reaction to the dog could be so excessive that they trigger a panic attack.
The burden of phobia
A phobia is hard work. You may find yourself scanning your environment for the object or situation that you fear. You spend a lot of time and energy thinking about ways to avoid anything that relates to the feared object or situation. Focusing on the phobia in this way unfortunately makes it more prominent.
You feel powerless in the face of the phobia. Even though you know the fear is irrational, still you cannot prevent that very real feeling of fear from occurring. So you may also feel embarassment or shame for this senseless fear. Or a sense of being misunderstood by others, who do not appreciate how very real this fear feels to you. Or a sense of frustration at how your phobia interferes with your family, social or work life.
The cause of phobias
Phobias are learned fears. They are learned in a variety of ways. And almost any situation or object can be the cause of a phobia. Often you are not aware of how you learned to fear that object or situation.
Sometimes the object was present when you were undergoing a period of anxiety or stress. Something that was once neutral became unconsciously associated with the strong negative feelings you were experiencing at that time.
Sometimes you pick up clues from others around you that that object is to be feared. Your mother may have been afraid of dogs, so by watching her fearful reactions you learned to be afraid of them too.
Sometimes a traumatic incident may cause a phobia. A trauma is an event that causes a severe physical or emotional experience. Being in a car crash may cause a phobia to travelling in a car. Even witnessing a car crash may cause a phobia to develop.
Smaller everyday traumas over a period of time may also build up a phobia. So, a series of hazardous car journeys, say in difficult conditions or with dangerous drivers, may accumulate to a phobia of driving or being in a car.
How hypnotherapy can help with fears and phobias
Hypnotherapy has a number of effective techniques to resolve fears and phobias. These approaches remove the excessive and irrational fear that has been associated with the feared object or situation. Fear is brought back down to its normal healthy place in your life. So, if you had a dog phobia, you could now calmly walk in the park without anxiously trying to avoid all dogs. However, just like any healthy person, you would still feel a helpful fight-or-flight response if an aggressive dog were suddenly to rush at you.
Hypnotherapy would not only break the association between the trigger object or situation and the fear response, but would also help you to learn new and helpful ways to deal with situations that your phobia has taught you to avoid. You would be free of the limitations that the phobia has imposed on your life and those around you.