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A phobia is an acute anxiety about something quite specific. It might be spiders, needles, birds, small spaces, or the sight of blood. Whatever the trigger, the fear feels completely disproportionate to the actual danger – and yet it feels utterly real and utterly overwhelming in the moment.
To understand why phobias happen, it helps to understand what your subconscious mind is actually trying to do.
Your Subconscious Mind Is Trying to Protect You
One of the key roles of the subconscious mind is to keep you safe – to alert you to, and protect you from, pain or discomfort. Ultimately, its job is to keep you alive. It does this by triggering anxiety whenever it perceives danger, and that perception is led by the interpretation of your past experiences.
This is a brilliant system, most of the time. The problem is in how it learns what to be afraid of.
The Trouble Is, It Often Blames the Wrong Thing
When you experience a moment of real distress, your subconscious mind looks around for something to blame, so it can watch out for that thing in future and warn you before it happens again. The intention is good. But in cases of phobia, the subconscious mind almost always blames the wrong thing.
Take a phobia of small spaces, for example. The space itself hasn’t done anything wrong. It’s just a space. But somewhere along the way, the subconscious mind attached the feeling of danger to it – and now it sounds the alarm every time you encounter one.
A Real Example: A Phobia of ‘All Things Medical’
I worked with a client whose phobia was of anything medical – needles, hospitals, doctors, all of it. It’s a very common one. Her phobia started when she was a little girl, watching ambulance staff take her mother away to hospital during a flare-up of a chronic condition.
In that moment, as a small child, what she understood was that her mother was being taken away by frightening strangers – that she was being abandoned. She also heard her mother say she didn’t want to leave her little girl. Through the eyes and understanding of a young child, the situation was misread, and the wrong thing got the blame. The ambulance staff, the uniforms, the hospital, the whole ‘medical world’ became fused with that feeling of fear and loss – not because any of it was actually dangerous, but because that’s what her subconscious mind was looking at when the distress hit.
This is why there is an almost endless list of possible phobias. Needles, blood, emetophobia, spiders, birds, insects, dogs, cats, medical settings – the list goes on and on. Each one traces back to a moment where fear and something specific got wired together, however illogically.
The Good News: Phobias Are Often an Easy Fix
Because a phobia is built on a case of mistaken blame, it can often be resolved surprisingly quickly. Once we reattribute the blame to the real, original cause of that old distress, the phobia collapses. The belief the subconscious mind has been holding onto as ‘true’ is gently challenged at the subconscious level, the source of the fear dissolves, and the anxious feeling goes with it.
Treating the Cause, Not Managing the Symptom
With my hypnotherapy process, I clear issues such as phobias at the source. Because we’re dealing with the root cause, you’re not being taught how to manage the anxiety, or encouraged to face it gradually and white-knuckle your way through it. Instead, we go directly to the original belief and change it at the subconscious level. This allows for change that is deep, efficient and lasting – rather than a lifetime of coping strategies for a fear that was never really about the thing you thought it was.
If a phobia is holding you back – whatever it is – get in touch. Together we can find out what your subconscious mind is really trying to protect you from, and help it let go of the fear for good.
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