Phobias

A phobia is an intense irrational fear of either an object, animal, creature, situation or scenario.

The phobia will usually originate through having been exposed to a very traumatic experience,

usually in childhood (but not in all cases) which is then typically repressed. When the fear is at

its most intense ' imprinting ' takes place, whereby the person experiencing the intense fear

' learns ' very quickly to feel afraid (conditioned response) when exposed to that particular

stimulus. Avoidance of the stimulus reinforces the fear even further.

There are three categories of phobias i.e. Specific - Social - Agoraphobia

Specific Phobias are characterised by the presence of a very specific stimulus as the trigger

i.e. - cats, dogs, birds, feathers, blood, lifts, spiders etc.

Social Phobia is typified by an inability to function 'normally' in a social situation i.e. unable to eat

or drink in public e.g. restaurants etc, fear of drawing attention to oneself in public, of being

exposed in some way.

Agoraphobia is translated literally from the greek language as 'fear of the market place' and is by

far the most complex and involved of all the phobias. There is growing evidence to suggest that

the secondary psychological component of 'imprinting' is caused by an underlying physiological
dysfunction in the sensory processing apparatus of the brain whereby the panic is triggered

initially by an overload of visual and auditory sensory stimuli e.g. crowds, bright lights, loud noise.
Typically, agoraphobics will suffer with vestibular apparatus problems (inner ear - balance) and

may also suffer with coordination problems which can be perceived as 'clumsiness'. Agoraphobics
will generally feel threatened or exposed when travelling away from what they consider to be a

place of safety (e.g. home).

Hypnotherapists treat all categories of phobias on a day-to-day basis with great success and
treatment typically will be to 'decommission' the conditioned response (the intense fear)