Treatments for Phobias

For someone with a phobia life can be very difficult, depending on the phobia they have and its severity. They may spend hours of their day anxiously worrying about being in a situation that causes them so much fear. Someone with a phobia of birds may fear leaving their house and when they are outside they may have to plan their route to avoid places where birds, such as pigeons, congregate. If they do come close to birds the encounter may trigger a full blown panic attack. So people with phobias are genuinely suffering and about 10% of the population has one.

Their are many treatments available and some are more effective than others. If you go to your doctor you may be given drugs which just mask the symptoms but don't cure the problem. You may also be offered some form of counselling or talking therapy. This can can be helpful to a degree as can Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT). I have, in a previous post, discussed how really effective Hypnotherapy can be. I cured myself of my own phobia of going to the dentist by using self-hypnosis suggestion therapy.

Eye Movement De-sensitisation and Reprocessing (EMDR) is another effective therapy. It works by scrambling the programme that runs the phobia and replacing it with another, more positive one. The Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT) is another very effective therapy and one of my favourites.

Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP) is perhaps the most effective therapy and has a specific technique, the Fast Phobia Cure, for treating phobias. Other NLP techniques can be effective
too.

In my book "Stress Free Dentistry. The easy way to overcome your fear of going to the dentist" I explain the NLP Fast Phobia Cure as well as hypnosis suggestion therapy, the technique I used to treat myself. For a copy go to www.lulu.com and put "Stress Free Dentistry" into search. the techniques can easily be adapted to treat any phobia.