What to do if you have a phobia following a trauma

Phobias are strange things. They seem quite illogical when you think about them clearly, but they can dominate the lives of sufferers. Some phobias are quite straightforward and focus on a specific object or situation. One of my first hypnotherapy clients had a massive fear of wasps following a nasty sting from a hornet. She would shut herself inside and close the windows if there was even a hint of a wasp outside. 

However, there is hope. Hypnotherapy, as well as other types of therapy, can lead people out of having a phobic reaction. After a couple of hypnotherapy sessions, the same client told me that she had collected a cup of juice that her daughter had left outside, saw a wasp in it and, without screaming and running away, had casually emptied the juice and the wasp onto the grass. 

Following a trauma, phobias can dominate lives

A specific phobia can interfere with your life when you happen to encounter the object of your fears. However, it is also possible to develop complex phobias that dominate a significant part of your life, even when the object of your fear is not present, as these fictional examples (based on real-life stories) illustrate:

Edith was driving her car in the winter when she hit a patch of black ice, skidded, and rolled the car over, landing on its roof. Although she was unharmed by the accident, she is now unable to drive in cold weather because of massive anxiety that overwhelms her.

Sunil was walking through the streets one evening when he was grabbed from behind and mugged. His wallet and phone were stolen, and he suffered minor bruising. He now feels massive anxiety at the thought of going out in the dark. He has no social life, spending every evening inside watching television.

The birth of Maria’s first child had been traumatic for both her and her baby. She had panic attacks when she realised her baby had been taken to the special care baby unit. The baby survived and happily became strong and healthy. Maria is now in morbid fear of getting pregnant again. She no longer enjoys sex with her husband and usually avoids it.

What is going on in the phobic brain?

We all have a primitive part of our brain that focuses on survival. If we suffer from a traumatic event, the survival part of the brain very quickly learns that the circumstances that happened at the time might be dangerous, and so creates fear or anxiety whenever those circumstances occur again. 

This primitive part of the brain is not clever or intelligent. It cannot think about how logical the fear is. It is a very primitive response mechanism. It works on the principle that if the circumstances around the traumatic event reoccur, then the traumatic event will also reoccur. So this primitive part of the brain creates fear and anxiety whenever those circumstances occur, or even when we think about those circumstances.

The technical term for when someone develops a phobia following a traumatic event is a “secondary phobia”. We can also develop phobias by learning them from our family or by overthinking what might happen without actually experiencing something traumatic. These are termed “primary phobias”.

How hypnotherapy can help with phobias

Hypnotherapists are used to helping people deal with all types of phobias. The techniques they use will vary depending on the type of phobia. For phobias that arise from a traumatic event (secondary phobias), the main focus will be to confuse that primitive part of the brain that is causing the problem. This confusion can help break the association that the primitive part of the brain has with the object of fear. 

After helping to break the association, a hypnotherapist will often help their client rebuild a better relationship with whatever they had previously feared. 

What to expect from a hypnotherapist when dealing with a phobia

The first thing to know is that hypnotherapy is not magic. A hypnotherapist cannot simply snap their fingers and make you change. You have to do a bit of work, and it may take time.

This is typically what you might expect to happen:

A hypnotherapist may ask you to describe the traumatic incident. (If it is too much for you to describe all the details of what happened, you should say so. There are other techniques that the hypnotherapist can use.) They may then get you to relax a bit, guiding you into a light trance, where you are very relaxed, but fully aware of what is going on and what the hypnotherapist is saying.

Then comes the crazy bit… and I do mean crazy. The hypnotherapist will ask you to remember the traumatic incident in different ways from the way you remember it. You may imagine yourself in a cinema watching yourself on a screen. Maybe there is background music playing that wasn’t there when the incident happened. Maybe the film starts running backwards or super-fast. Maybe the characters speak like Mickey Mouse. This may be repeated in different ways.

Following the crazy bit, which is designed to confuse and break down the memory of what actually happened, there is likely to be a session designed to build up your confidence again. Here, the hypnotherapist will ask you to imagine a situation (that hasn’t happened yet) where you confront whatever is the source of your phobia in a very relaxed and calm way.

What I have described may happen over several sessions. 

What happens afterwards?

When helping a client with a phobia, I always like to get them to face whatever was causing them fear as soon as possible. In that way, they can prove to themselves that all the craziness that they have gone through has worked. The phobia is then less likely to return at a later date. So it is worth deliberately confronting whatever it is you used to be afraid of soon after the hypnotherapy.

And finally…

A phobia can be created by a traumatic event. The survival part of the brain simply and stupidly associates the context of the event with danger and so creates fear or anxiety. If a phobia is severely impacting your life, you should do something about it.

Hypnotherapy is just one way to deal with a phobia. Other therapies are available, but having seen the success that my clients have achieved, I would recommend hypnotherapy as a first port of call.