What exactly are you afraid of?

It’s been said that everything you want is on the other side of fear. There can be no doubt about it, fear is very limiting. It’s often only fear that prevents us from achieving our full potential and is also one of the major causes of chronic illness. Being able to overcome fear is a highly beneficial quality.

For a clinical hypnotherapist, dealing with a specific fear on behalf of a client is usually a very simple matter. For example, a clinical hypnotherapist could reframe the fear, desensitise the client to the fear or just break up the fear by rewinding it mentally. As easy as it is to create a fear, it’s usually just as easy to remove. But, what if you don’t know what it is that you’re afraid of?

Anxiety and panic attacks are good examples of fears unknown to the person experiencing the fear. Being afraid of something, and not knowing specifically what it is that you’re afraid of makes being afraid even more frightening. There’s the added fear of the unknown. How is it possible to be unaware of what you’re afraid of?

Sometimes our fears in life are suppressed during the events that create them as they’re just too scary to deal with at the time. For example, if a very young child is having a lovely stroll with loved ones through a forest and temporarily gets lost, this could be potentially very frightening. This child could be lost for only a few minutes before being reunited with loved ones, but to the young child, this could be seen as a life threatening event.

The child described may not yet have developed the skills necessary to deal with such a close brush with death (in the mind of the child) and so the memory of this event is suppressed. The subconscious mind is the protective mind and will automatically protect the child from the discomfort of the memory of the event. The event will not be consciously recalled and the subconscious protection doesn’t end here.

Even though the memory of the event is suppressed, the subconscious mind will create the emotion (fear/anxiety/panic attack) every time something similar to being in a forest occurs. Just the thought of being in a forest could trigger fear, deemed as irrational fear, as the cause is unknown to the child. The child will grow up into an adult who will avoid the great outdoors at all costs.

In this same way, many of us have hidden fears that hold us back in life and prevent us from doing the things we need to do get what we want from life. These hidden fears prevent us from helping ourselves and others. In this way we have a lack of confidence in our own ability to help ourselves and others. Fortunately, help is at hand.

A clinical hypnotherapist will be able to help you to discover the fears that are holding you back in life. Only once these fears have been discovered and eliminated can you move forward and live the life you are meant to live.