Scaredy Cat! Scaredy Cat!

Scaredy cat, scaredy cat!

Jeez phobias are great craic aren’t they? There’s yer man, could fight the whole pub but scared of spiders. And yer wan runs out of the house at the sight of a wasp. That boy there can’t go to visit his own grandchildren cos he’s scared to fly. Birds, dogs, spiders, worms, driving, flying, lifts, escalators, even feet(!), are all common phobias.

Yep. No doubt about it, phobias are really funny – as long as they belong to somebody else. For the people who have them they are far from funny. Many people have to completely rearrange their lives in order to hide their guilty little secret. It’s not much fun for their families sometimes either. Often their fear has been made worse when, as a child, someone discovered their fear and deliberately tormented them about it. Yep, you can’t beat the considerate older sibling chasing you round the garden with a worm, as a self-confidence building tool, can you?

Then, of course, there is the guilt. The guilt of depriving your loved ones of many of lifes little treats because of your fear; the guilt you feel when you think about how you might pass on your fears to your children and inflict the same turmoil and strife on the next generation.

I trained in Hypnotherapy at The Quest Institute in Regents Park in London. One of my fellow students had a career teaching microsurgery to Surgeons. She regularly carried out heart and lung transplants on mice. By any measure she was a highly qualified and respected professional – who was absolutely terrified of the dark! Being plunged into darkness would reduce her immediately to a shrieking banshee, trying to claw through walls to escape. I saw her phobia cured in jig time. Being a cynic I then asked her into a small projection room, and turned off the lights. In the complete pitch blackness this small little voice cheerfully said ‘well, well, that really is remarkable’. Wasn’t it just?

Another time I encountered a woman who was petrified of mice. After her session a colleague was dispatched to a pet shop to buy a mouse to test her reaction. The shop had no mice left, but our boy was not to be denied, so he returned with a white RAT. Now I thought this was pushing it a bit, so I was dumbfounded when she managed to stroke it, whilst remarking how cute it looked!

One lady I saw recently had a phobia of wasps and bees. No big deal, you say. Well she had been run over (as an adult) running away from a wasp. She holidayed in Spain every year because there are no wasps. At 38 she had never hosted, or even been to, a barbeque. She couldn’t even consider eating or drinking outside. If there was a wasp in the house she had to leave. She had often had to stop strangers on the street outside her house, and ask them into her home to ‘shoo’ a wasp out. Luckily most people were happy to help out the ‘mad-woman’ who stood shaking before them, but how embarrassing is that?

After just one session she sat in the kiddies playground in the Quays shopping centre, smiling and laughing, watching three wasps hover around the bins, right beside her. The following day, she calmly shoo-ed a wasp out the window of her tiny utility room.

If you suffer from a phobia, don’t suffer in silence. Help is at hand. The fact is the vast majority of phobias can be ‘cured’, totally and completely in one or two sessions with a qualified Hypnotherapist. There is no magic wand, no hocus-pocus, no lotions or potions, and absolutely no laying on of hands involved in the ‘curing’ of phobias.

Richard Bandler, the co-founder of NLP (Neuro-Linguistic Programming), wanted to find out how to help phobic people. Instead of having his theory and trying to make people fit into it, he thought it might be an idea to ask the sufferers themselves. So he put an advert in a California newspaper asking people who used to have phobias – but didn’t anymore – to come and speak to him and his team. The result of that process was the Fast Phobia Cure. Tens of thousands of people around the world have been ‘cured’ since.

I have never had a client who wasn’t absolutely gob smacked at how quick, complete and devastatingly simple the Fast Phobia Cure is. In fact the FPC has often worked as a ‘convincer’ and provided them with the evidence they needed that hypnotherapy works, and led to them addressing other issues as well. They should teach this stuff in schools – but if they did I’d be out of work!

So whether you are a phobic, or somebody who lives with one, and want to take back some control over your life, don’t despair – take action! You and your family need not suffer in silence because your fear can be sorted – quickly and painlessly. Thank you for listening