How Hypnosis Can Help Clients With Fears and Phobias

Fears and phobias are one of the most common issues that people seek a hypnotherapist’s help with, and this article aims to explain the benefits of using this mode of therapy with sufferers.

Firstly, how do we distinguish between a genuine fear or phobia and a simple aversion?

For example, a client might mention that they cannot stand talking to people on the phone, so is this a fear or an aversion?

Our response is that it depends on the severity of the reaction that is experienced by the subject who is answering or making the phone call.  If they work themselves into a frenzy at the prospect of having to talk on the phone, 

if they refuse point blank to answer the phone or if their reaction is one of shaking, sweating, etc. then it could be considered a genuine fear.

However, if the subject can answer or makes a call but falters while speaking, or tries to avoid doing it, but eventually gives in, this could be classed as an aversion or a dislike of phones.

Similarly, someone with a genuine fear of flying will avoid flying at all costs.  They will avoid going on holiday abroad or may insist on driving or taking a boat or ferry or, if they really can’t avoid flying, they will take anti-anxiety medications in advance or you could see them huddled in their seat on the plane, working themselves into a panic, crying and feeling genuinely upset.

Others might say they hate flying but they go anyway, always feeling relieved when they reach their destination safely.  This isn’t a controlling fear but a dislike or aversion.

But where and why does a fear develop?

Apart from possibly an innate aversion to loud noises, babies aren’t born with fears.  They may fight to survive which would obviously create anxiety and this survival response could be triggered by any one of a number of things.

According to research, the concept of fear often begins at around 6 to 8 months of age, usually as a consequence of conditioning or negative experience so clearly, our fears and phobias are learned at some stage in our lives.

The aforementioned subjects with a fear of flying could have read or heard about a plane crashing or had a scary reaction to someone while talking on the phone, or perhaps they received bad news over a phone call or saw someone else with that fear.  Any future bad experiences linked to phones would serve to compound the fear and could create a full-blown phobia.

So, how can hypnosis help?

Hypnotherapy training will help you to identify how, when, where and why your client’s fear or phobia began and to plan a suitable strategy to help them overcome it.

A number of techniques can help to establish the cause, for example, straightforward regression to cause, ideomotor signals or Timelines can be used.

But don’t just ask your client about the cause; they may consciously know why they are afraid of something but if that was enough to help, they would have already been able to work through their fear.

Hypnotherapists address the subconscious mind, the part of them that is usually inaccessible, the part of them that the client cannot consciously control.

The event which significantly affected them so much, has probably been repressed – that is, submerged in the subconscious to create an inappropriate response and then forgotten about.

Clients with a fear of public speaking may consciously remember feeling uncomfortable when being made to speak up in class in front of their fellow students and they may later attribute that event to their phobia, but during regression, the cause could be found to go deeper than that.

The therapist would want to know why they felt uncomfortable at the time, and gentle questioning while in trance might reveal, for example, an even earlier memory of being made to recite something in front a group of people, one of who really wasn’t interested in hearing what the subject had to say.

Perhaps they caught the expression on an uncle or cousin’s face or overheard them giggling or whispering something negative afterwards and mistakenly assumed that they were the topic of conversation.

As you can see, any one of a number of things could have triggered their fear and the therapist’s job is to help them to reframe the experience in some way.

Hypnotherapists have a number of tools to choose from and will know which ones are likely to help.  They may decide to use inner child therapy and bring in an imaginary comfort figure to reassure or offer guidance to the client or they may mentally project the image onto a screen and watch it diminish and grow smaller and weaker before eventually disappearing (along with the phobia) completely.

If an earlier event is extremely traumatic and the client feels unwilling to recall the actual memory, the hypnotherapist can use symbols to represent the offending memory.

They can completely ‘reframe’ the experience to allow the client to see the event in a different light or they can bring in ‘anchors’ to have the client project an image into the future and reenact the event while pressing the finger and thumb together to trigger feelings of confidence.

In many cases, bringing the offending memory into conscious awareness is all that is necessary to help someone put the event into perspective and feel (and subsequently react) in a completely different way about public speaking, flying, talking on the telephone, being in the dark or whatever it is that your client was afraid of.

Unusually a client may suffer an abreaction, perhaps crying as they ‘relive’ their unwanted memory.

Abreactions are worse for the inexperienced hypnotherapist than they are for the client.  Therapists who have encountered abreactions before are unperturbed by their client’s response, instead they often feel intrigued by it, finding their client’s calmness rather odd.

When questioned about the memory and/or their reaction, once the client comes out of trance, the latter usually report that it didn’t bother them at all.  The client will feel as though any negative event was happening to someone else and there will be no discomfort whatsoever attached to the memory.

It is often said that someone with a fear or phobia has already been negatively hypnotised and so, if they can be negatively hypnotised, they can also be positively hypnotised to help rid them of their fear or phobia.

If you are a hypnotherapist who is treating your client with a fear or phobia and if it is possible, it can be interesting to ‘test’ a client’s reaction to the phobic material at the end of their course of therapy.

For instance, we once helped a young girl to overcome her fear of dogs and arranged with her parent and an associate, to bring their (friendly) dog to the end of the girl’s final session; the expression on her face was a delight.

Of course, testing isn’t always possible, but we’d recommend following up with the client afterwards.  For example, ask your fear of flying client to let you know how their flight was when they return from holiday or the fear of balloons client to contact you after their next party.

The positive feedback will help your confidence and self-belief and if the response isn’t positive (which happens occasionally), you may learn something important that will help your future sessions to improve.

How many sessions to use for a fear or phobia?

This will obviously depend on each individual and for how long they have had their fear, how easily a client goes into trance and the sort of memories that are linked to their fear.

It is quite possible that a client can overcome their fear of phobia after a single session but in most instances, they would require between 3 and 6 sessions of hypnotherapy.

Finally, have confidence in yourself and believe that you can do it and your confidence will infect your client.

Good luck, and happy phobia fixing.