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Phobia Treatments That Work

by Alan B. Densky, CH

Ponder an existence limited by fear and anxiety, in which each act is scrutinized and even the most insignificant decision is agonized over. Extensive time is spent scrutinizing daily obligations or situations that many people manage easily. According to the National Institute of Health, better than 40 million people in the United States who experience anxiety disorders have this type of existence.

Concordantly, about 18 percent of adults living in the United States experience a kind of a panic disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, general anxiety disorder or phobias, such as a social phobia, agoraphobia, or a specific phobia, which embody common fears of articles like elevators, heights or germs.

Are you like them? A lot of people do not know how to distinguish if their inherent concerns have morphed into a phobia. A phobia is classified as an irrational dread or fear. If someone comes across a phobia trigger, that person may grow panicked with increased heart palpitation and breathing. Frequently, he or she may begin feeling a choking sensation or their palms turn clammy. The person may additionally hear ringing in their ears and realize they are unable to concentrate on the surroundings.

Like any unpleasant consciousness, people will try great lengths to escape the happenings, items and settings that cause them. If someone has a social phobia, they may evade social settings, or if it is a common phobia, such as spiders or coffins, people who have a phobia will try to escape those triggers.

The anxiety disorder phobia could be one of the most complicated to resolve because ensuing problems frequently result from the anxiety phobia relationship, such as melancholy or substance abuse. In fact, most people who suffer from one anxiety disorder often cultivate additional anxiety disorders.

Though it can be useful to meet with a mental health professional to identify your phobia and understand the core of it, the vital action is entering into treatment for the phobia and anxiety. Several therapies exist for effectively eliminating a phobia, including talk therapy, drugs, systematic desensitization, hypnotherapy and Nuero-Linguistic Programming.

Normally, drug treatments for phobia and anxiety treatment can include sedatives, which actually exacerbate the problem because sedatives don't address the primary cause of the phobia. Other mental health professionals prefer to use talk therapy; however, conversing about or even thinking about the situation or environment of the underlying anxiety phobia can produce a panic attack.

Traditional hypnosiswhich simply helps the subject attain a relaxed hypnosis state and then offering post-hypnotic suggestions or commandscan be very effective if the he or she is receptive to it. That said, a lot of people with phobias reject the idea that they will be more relaxed and at ease when they are challenged with the environment or situation that triggers anxiety from the related phobia.

Knowing the challenges and even hindrances of other types of phobia treatments, systematic desensitization can be a helpful treatment. It is the process of gradually desensitizing a subject to the trigger that sets off the anxiety disorder phobia and resulting panic attacks.

For example, if a subject wishes to prevail over a phobia of dogs, she is asked to first be seated and think about a dog until she is secure with the image. Then, she is given a photo of a dog to look at. Perhaps she progresses to embracing a plush dog and so on until she is able to remain in the presence of a dog without the panic symptomspossibly even touch it.

The principal point is that, following each progression, the client admits that nothing unpleasant happened and that she is safe. If at any time she undergoes fear or panic, the therapist asks the client to revert to the preceding step until she has recaptured a sense of comfort.

Fortunately, there is a method to make this process less painful and frightening: Systematic desensitization can be performed while the client is in a relaxed hypnosis state. While in a relaxed hypnotic trance, the woman would be asked to execute the same actions, but she would actually remain very peaceful as she imagined herself feeling comfortable and relaxed in the anxiety provoking situation.

Just as in the live systematic desensitization that happens without the assistance of hypnosis, if the subject feels any anxiety connected to her phobia, she is coached to step back to the previous action. The only disadvantage is that this technique may require a fair amount of time to create reprieve from a phobia.

The fastest and most effective technique to eliminate a phobia is a Neuro-Linguistic Programming method called a Visual/Kinesthetic Disassociation. It frequently cures the client of a chronic phobia in just one session. The technique actually programs the client to disassociate, or mentally step outside of themselves at the time that they would usually suffer their anxiety attack. The process literally splits the subjective emotions from the mental images that create the panic attack in the first place.

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

Alan B. Densky, CH spent 30 years helping clients eliminate illogical fears. He offers a successful anxiety phobia treatment based on NLP and hypnosis. Learn more on his Neuro-VISION self hypnosis website using his Free research library and video hypnosis library.

Published September 26th, 2007

Filed in Health, Psychology, Weight Loss