Rewire Your Brain's Response to Phobias
Don’t let fears and phobias hold you back in life any longer. It doesn’t have to be that way.
BWRT and hypnotherapy can help you to eliminate phobias, dissolve fears and to help you enjoy life again.
What Are Phobias and How Do We Get Them?
The definition of a phobia is “an irrational, obsessive, and intense fear that is focused on a specific circumstance, idea or thing.”
If you have a phobia you can experience an overwhelming fear and desire to avoid that trigger situation.
Phobias are part of the fight or flight response to things or situations that the body perceives as a danger. It’s as if the brain’s safety alarm system has become over sensitive and triggers when there is not really any real danger or threat.
It is more common than you might think. In the UK around 70 percent experience a mild phobic response and about 20 percent of those have a serious enough issue to fit the above definition.
Treating phobias with BWRT is an effective and safe method to get back control of your life.
What Is The Difference Between A Fear and A Phobia?
No-one is born with a phobia. A phobia is a learnt behaviour. Your mind and body learn to associate the object of your phobia with feelings of anxiety, panic and disgust.
Fear is a natural response caused by real danger. For example, we are all scared of coming face to face with a wild, hungry animal, and fear is a survival instinct which warns us against certain things or situations.
A phobia, on the other hand, is a completely irrational fear of an object or situation that causes little or no danger.
Maybe you’ve been told something is horrific, or dangerous, or perhaps you’ve seen someone else react with panic to that thing. Once your body is used to giving you a shot of adrenaline in that situation, chances are it will do it next time, too. Suddenly you have a phobia!
Contrary to popular belief, most phobias are not caused by a single traumatic event, so don’t worry if you can’t remember why or when it started. The most important thing is not how it started but how to stop it.
How Can BWRT Help To Treat Phobias?
From a therapeutic point of view, it is the response that the phobia creates that is important.
When we learn something, the brain creates a new pathway (neural pathway) which allows us to repeat the new behaviour in future without conscious input. Take driving for example, when you learn to drive you have to consciously think about where your hands and feet go and what they have to do. Once you have mastered the art, it is easy to drive to a destination without consciously being aware of how you did it.
When life experience creates a phobia, a new pathway (neural pathway) is formed in the brain. and the fear will automatically be re-created, without conscious thought, every time the phobiais triggered in future.
Brain Working Recursive Therapy (BWRT) is a very effective and completely natural therapy which provides a rational answer to an irrational problem because it stops problematic neural pathways in the brain from creating the extreme fear in the first place, allowing a new response (neural pathway) to take the place of the old one.
This ‘re-wiring’ technique allows the brain to respond in a completely different way thus eliminating the phobia.
There are no exercises or follow up work for clients to do once therapy is complete because the work is done at the early part of the brain before it reaches a conscious level.
Further Reading
Common Emotional Effects of Phobias
Here are five examples of the emotional effects some people experience as a result of their phobia.
Life-Limiting and Severe Anxiety
One of the main criteria for diagnosing a phobia is that it is life-limiting in nature. Depending on what your phobia is, you might find it a real struggle to run errands, go out with friends, or even make it to work every day. In other words, a specific phobia can significantly impair your education, your career, and your overall quality of life.
Isolation
Limitations associated with phobias can make you experience social isolation. You may wonder why you are not like everybody else. This can affect your relationships with family and friends, which could contribute to you becoming reclusive and depressed.
Embarrassment
Phobias can create awkward and embarrassing situations. For example, how do you explain to your best friend that you can never visit her home because she owns a dog? How do you turn down a trip to the Bahamas with a new love because you can’t bring yourself to get on a plane?
Social phobia can be especially difficult to manage because the underlying fear is of humiliation. Having a phobic reaction can make you feel embarrassed, which often only reinforces the persistent fear.
Feeling Out of Control
Perhaps one of the worst emotional components of a phobia is the out-of-control feeling. You may understand that your phobia is irrational and/or excessive, but no matter how hard you try, you cannot get it under control.
You are not alone if you spend time thinking about what your life would be like if you could simply live daily without the dread of coming into contact with that specific object or situation.
Helplessness
Helplessness may appear when you realize that your phobia has affected several or even all aspects of your life, like your job, social life, and general happiness. You may feel that there is nothing you can do to heal. You may assume that you will always have your phobia. You may wish things were different, but feel that they never will be.