Aspiring Spirit

Imagine an existence controlled by anxiety and terror, where each act is scrutinized and even the most inconsequential decision is angst-ridden. Hours are spent studying daily duties or situations that the majority of people endure easily. According to the National Institute of Health, more than 40 million people in the United States who suffer from anxiety disorders have this manner of life.

Concordantly, about 18 percent of those living in the United States endure a form of a panic disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, generalized anxiety disorder or phobias, such as a social phobia, agoraphobia, or a specific phobia, which embody common fears of things like elevators, heights or germs.

Are you among those people? Many people aren’t sure how to tell if their natural fears have transformed into a phobia. A phobia is categorized as an unreasonable fear or dread. When a person comes across a phobia trigger, they might become panicked with increased heart rate and respiration. Frequently, that person might begin experiencing a choking sensation or their hands get sweaty. The person may also hear ringing in their ears and recognize they are powerless to focus on their atmosphere.

As with any unpleasant feeling, people can go to great lengths to avoid the incident, places or things that initiate them. If someone has a social phobia, that person may avoid social settings, or if it is a common phobia, like coffins or spiders, people who have a phobia will seek to get away from those triggers.

The anxiety disorder phobia might be one of the most complicated to unravel because consequent issues commonly result from the anxiety phobia relationship, such as melancholy or drug abuse. In fact, most people who suffer from one anxiety disorder regularly acquire additional anxiety disorders.

Though it can be useful to meet with a mental health professional to diagnose your phobia and investigate the origin of it, the essential step is initiating treatment for the anxiety and phobia. Several therapies exist for successfully eliminating a phobia, including drugs, talk therapy, systematic desensitization, hypnotherapy, and Neuro-Linguistic Programming.

Usually, drugs for anxiety and phobia treatment include sedatives, which actually exacerbate the problem because sedatives don’t tackle the underlying cause of the phobia. Other mental health professionals choose talk therapy; however, discussing or even thinking about the situation or atmosphere of the causal anxiety phobia can produce a panic attack.

Traditional hypnosiswhich merely assists the subject reach a relaxed hypnosis state and then offering post-hypnotic commands or suggestionscan be very effective if the he or she is open to it. However, many people with phobias refuse the notion that they will be more comfortable and at ease when they are faced with the situation or environment that produces anxiety from the associated phobia.

Given the challenges and even hindrances of other forms of phobia treatments, systematic desensitization can be a helpful therapy. It is the practice of gradually desensitizing a person to the trigger that sets off the anxiety disorder phobia and resulting panic attacks.

For instance, if a person wishes to rise above a phobia of dogs, she is asked to first sit and imagine a dog until she is secure with the picture. Then, she is given a photograph of a dog to view. Perhaps she progresses to embracing a stuffed dog and so on until she is able to stay in the presence of a canine without the panic symptomspossibly even touch it.

The key point is that, after each movement, she admits that nothing bad occurred and that she is safe. If at any time she undergoes panic or fear, the therapist asks the subject to revert to the preceding step until she has redeemed a sense of ease.

Fortunately, there is a way to make this process less painful and frightening: Systematic desensitization can be carried out while the subject is in a relaxed hypnosis state. While in a relaxed hypnotic trance, the woman would be asked to complete the same actions, but she would actually be feeling very peaceful as she imagined herself feeling comfortable and relaxed in the situation that brings about anxiety.

Just like live systematic desensitization that transpires without the assistance of hypnosis, if the client feels any anxiety connected to her phobia, she is directed to go back to the previous step. The only negative aspect is that this technique may need a fair amount of time to bring relief from a phobia.

The fastest and most effective way to eliminate a phobia is a Neuro-Linguistic Programming practice called a Visual/Kinesthetic Disassociation. It commonly cures the subject of a long-term phobia in only one session. The practice actually programs the subject to disassociate, or mentally step outside of themselves at the time that they would typically suffer their anxiety attack. The process literally separates the subjective emotions from the mental images that create the panic attack in the first place.

CONCLUSION: While any phobia treatment that someone embarks on will entail work and commitment, systematic desensitization coupled with hypnosis can offer an effective cure. But the NLP Visual/Kinesthetic Disassociation can offer an answer that almost seems magical by allowing the subject to overcome the phobia quickly with significantly lessperhaps even nodiscomfort or panic.

Alan B. Densky, CH spent 30 years to help clients overcome irrational fears and phobias. He offers an effective phobia treatment based on NLP and hypnotherapy. Learn more at his Neuro-VISION self hypnosis website using his Free article index and video research index.

- Alan B. Densky, CH