Phobias

Testimonials

Attending sessions with Anne gave my thirteen year old daughter confidence to get through a period in her life when she had a fear of a particular class at school, as she believed that classroom environment made her feel nauseous. After a couple of sessions with Anne in a safe environment observed by me her mother, A. was better able to deal with the reality of the situation and confront her fear, overcoming it quickly and without regress. I would recommend attendance with Anne for anyone who feels a bit confused about how to manage any phobia.

CM, Father

I came to see you back in June about my fear of heights and felt properly ‘cured’ during just my second session with you.
Well, just to let you know it was a huge success, I felt I must tell you that since the last session I have:

Been on the London Eye
Enjoyed both a mini plane and helicopter flight over the Grand Canyon
Been on the Vegas Eye (supposedly one of the biggest ‘Eyes’ in the world).
 
I just wanted to say thank you so much Anne, I wasn’t ever remotely anxious or afraid during any of the above!

I did keep what I learned in my sessions ‘there’ in case I needed to use them, but I really didn’t.

Although being afraid of heights isn’t the end of the world, it’s been absolutely wonderful for me to once again enjoy experiences that have been denied to me for so long.

SB, Scaling the Heights!

Phobias take many forms from fear of flying to fear of buttons to fear of vomit.  They usually appear irrational to the outsider and difficult to understand but to the person who has the phobia it can have a major impact on their life.

Phobias can be ‘simple’ or more complex. A ‘simple’ phobia is usually triggered by a ‘one-off’ event such as being scared by a barking dog as a child or a bird flying up in front of you when you were young. We can also learn our phobias from parents or key people in our lives. A more complex phobia can have a number of different experiences that have led to the phobia.

I remember working with an older client a few years ago for a severe Arachnaphobia or fear of spiders.  As a child he had been playing in the garden and the neighbour’s dog had started to bark and he had been frightened. As he tried to escape he fell against the old wall he was trying to scramble over. He remembered seeing, what he thought were little spiders on him, and as he was already frightened by the dog his brain linked the spiders to that fear too. We worked on a number of different aspects and eventually his fear reduced and he was able to see a spider and talk about them without the extreme fear reaction he had had.

I've also had a number of clients who have Emetaphobia, a fear of vomit or vomiting. I worked with a young girl who was scared of going to school in case she was sick. This fear had been triggered by seeing a class mate being very sick and how horrible that seemed to her.

Fear of Heights is another common phobia, as is Fear of Flying. There really is no reason why people should suffer with a phobia as, usually, they can be fairly quickly resolved.

Working online is an effective way of resolving many issues including fears and phobias.

Fear Of Speaking In Public

Often people don't think of this as a phobia. However, it is often triggered by an event, perhaps being asked to read out loud at school or speak in front of the class. You might have stumbled over some words or blushed. Perhaps someone laughed or commented and then you started to worry about it happening again and again. Your fear response became worse each time you imagined it going wrong.

If you think about it, if you were a lone individual, millenia ago in the wilds of Africa, the odds are you wouldn’t survive long. I often wonder if part of our fear of public speaking, of being in the spotlight, is due to some ancient gene memory of the ancient fear of being alone in a potentially dangerous environment!

We worry about forgetting, our mouths going dry, blushing, someone judging us and finding us lacking. All these and more can lead us to fear speaking in public, at meetings or larger social settings.

You may benefit from my Speak Confidently In Public MP3. This audio is designed to help you become more comfortable and calm when thinking about speaking in public as well as giving you help on aspects of speaking such as stance, breathing and pacing.  If Stammering or Stuttering is an issue then the my MP3 may help for that.

There are a number of different techniques that can be used to help reduce the ‘fear’ response and change how you feel about the trigger of your phobia so that you no longer respond in that way. The NLP technique the Fast Phobia Cure, sometimes called the rewind technique, hypno-desensitisation, Cognitive Behavioural Hypnotherapy and BWRT® are used to help resolve phobias.