Phobias have nothing to do with cognition, as the phobic often knows it's irrational.
Of all the phobias I’ve treated publicly over 14 years of running workshops, this has got to be one of the strangest.
Julia looked nervous from the very start of the hypnosis workshop. She was friendly and engaging, just a little anxious it seemed. On day two I found out why.
When it came time for me to demonstrate the Rewind Technique, I asked for a volunteer, someone who would like to have their phobia cured. No one volunteered at first. But I noticed the friend who had accompanied Julia nudge her as if to say, “Go on, now’s your chance!”
She came and sat opposite me in front of the 30 or so workshop attendees. I asked her what she’d like help with.
Prefer to watch instead?
It’s so hard to talk about
Julia, like many phobics, found it hard to talk about what terrified her. We find this with many people who have extreme phobias.
Just watch below how uncomfortable John here looks even talking about his snake phobia when I ask him about it. He would later tell me just talking about snakes had made him sweat.
At least John could say the word snake. Julia couldn’t even say the words connected to her fear. She pointed to her tummy and said it was something that she was terrified of. I stupidly blurted out:
“Ah, belly buttons!”
She shuddered and said she couldn’t even say those words. So I immediately stopped using them until after we’d done the Rewind Technique.
So what was going on here?
Naturally occurring post-hypnotic triggers
Through a process of pattern matching, our brains become conditioned. We learn to associate a switch with a light coming on and so, with barely any conscious thought, we press the switch. At one time we had no idea illumination and the pressing of a switch were linked in any way. We had to learn that.
We hear the word chocolate and salivate. But at one time the word chocolate had no meaning to us. We had to learn to associate it with the actual experience of eating said confection.
There’s an important equation, if you like, to this kind of conditioning.
Repetition versus intensity
Our pattern of response becomes matched to a pattern of stimulus though either repetition or intensity.
So someone doesn’t need to keep nearly dying in a train wreck to eventually develop a phobia of train travel. One intense experience is enough.
Discover How Thousands of Therapists Stop PTSD Symptoms in a Single Session
But for you to associate an advertising jingle with a product, you may need to hear that jingle over and over until eventually it becomes linked to the sight of the product.
Deep within our limbic system, our amygdala becomes stamped with an emotional learning which will fire off automatically (and hopefully usefully) when we experience anything that reminds us of that initial learning.
Understanding phobias holistically
As I explain in my article Trauma Treatment: Why PTSD & Phobias Are A Case Of Bad Hypnosis, there is always a hypnotic element to this kind of learning and we can see all post-traumatic phobic effects as a kind of hypnotic learning that produces post-hypnotic effects. There is a hypnotic ‘suggestion’ from the life experience of the phobic (or PTSD sufferer) so that henceforth certain triggers (such as the word or sight of a snake or belly button) will produce the post-hypnotic experience of feeling traumatized all over again.
This has nothing to do with cognition, as the phobic often knows it’s irrational – so trying to use cognitive approaches at this stage may be like trying to prevent an earthquake by reasoning with the ground.
As you can see in the above video, John can’t at first explain why he has his phobia of snakes. So I ask him how he knows he has a snake phobia. He gives me three examples of when he saw a snake, and that gives me enough material to work with.
With Julia it was clear where her phobia came from. She had almost died giving birth and at one point one of the surgeons trying to save her and her baby (who did survive) said:
“It’s no good. We are going to have to operate through her belly button!”
Because of the trance-like nature of Julia’s terror in that situation years before, his words had acted like a post-hypnotic suggestion.
For years afterwards she couldn’t hear the words belly button, look at her own (she wore a bandage over it), or see naked torsos without feeling a deep terror.
All I had to do was to use the Rewind Technique (a way of exposing the client to the memory in such a way that they can review it calmly in a disassociated way) and we’d be able to cure the phobia.
Julia relaxed as we spoke about what it would mean to her to be free of that phobia (still not mentioning the BB words). I asked her about her best times and helped her access those times so she could relax deeply.
After the Rewind Technique it was time to test our work together.
Embarrassing for me!
After we’ve worked to lift a phobia we need to, if at all possible, check our work has been successful. In Julia’s case I wanted to show the audience of students as well as Julia that her phobia was gone.
Near the end of the above video, we can see John looks nice and relaxed immediately after our Rewind work. Notice also in how he can now even hold a snake free of any disgust or fear. It was a powerful demonstration to him that his session had worked and also confirmation for me that I’d helped him.
With Julia, all those years ago. I wondered how we could test out our work during that demonstration.
Her belly button was heavily strapped up so I realized I’d have to ‘suffer for my art’ and expose my own belly button to her and the rest of the group!
Somewhat reluctantly I exposed my naked tummy, no doubt holding it as flat as possible.
She stared at my exposed midriff, then eventually prodded it and laughed. But I didn’t care about my vanished dignity because her years-long, life-debilitating phobia had gone and she knew it.
What’s more, she could now think about the traumatic birth of her daughter calmly.
After this we want to know, of course, that our work with our (formerly) phobic client has stuck.
Following up after Rewind
Phobia cures tend to stick. The mind seeks efficiency and economy, and once it has a better way of responding it keeps that. I used the Rewind Technique on myself for public speaking early on and now I find I can’t get nervous when presenting.
Anyway, during John’s three-month follow-up he relates that snakes no longer bother him at all. He can now walk in places where he used to fear he might see a snake, and watch TV without fearing a snake might suddenly appear.
With Julia it was a little harder to get feedback, as she wasn’t a client so much as a demonstration volunteer. She’d been out of the country for a while, as she told me when she did finally email me six months after the workshop.
She wrote that she now liked belly buttons! She associated them with positivity and found they could even be “erotic”! She felt her life had been transformed; she no longer wore that thick bandage over her own belly button and felt “reconnected” to her own body and life.
It matters not what the phobia is, as all phobias tend to work the same.
So we need to:
- discover the initial cause or, if no instigating cause is obvious, at least elicit the worst memories of phobic times to work on
- get a sample of the phobic response (while controlling the levels of fear during the session so as to protect the client)
- work on those memories using Rewind
- demonstrate to the client the phobia has gone or greatly diminished, and
- follow up with the client a few months later to get feedback (if possible).
There’s always a freeing-up element to lifting phobias. Life becomes more open for your client and the ripple effect can be huge. Newly phobia-free clients tend to start living more fully in all kinds of ways.
As John A. Shedd wrote:
“A ship in harbour is safe, but that’s not what ships are built for.”
Learn the Rewind Technique with our online course. Click here to read more and sign up now.
Discover How Thousands of Therapists Stop PTSD Symptoms in a Single Session
About Mark Tyrrell
Psychology is my passion. I've been a psychotherapist trainer since 1998, specializing in brief, solution focused approaches. I now teach practitioners all over the world via our online courses.
Find out more about my trauma treatment course hereYou can also get my articles on YouTube, find me on Instagram, Amazon, Twitter, and Facebook.
