How old do we need to be before we learn to be scared or even have a phobia?
You see, a recent client of ours, we’ll call her Brian because that wasn’t his name, came with what was a phobia of dogs but had it had generalised through to other animals. And that’s what can happen, in order to keep us safe and protected our best friend, our unconscious mind, decides to make sure nothing will harm us and creates a ‘good old’ fear for other things.
So now we not only spend our time thinking of the first thing that scared us but all the other things and times where can be scared. The problem is do we feel safe and protected now with all these thoughts and pictures in our head? Absolutely NOT!
This is a problem but the good news is, whilst we can learn to have a phobia in a millisecond, trigger it without thinking and generalise it to other things we can do the reverse easily. That is ~ learn how not to react in the old way, in fact act in the way you want, trigger it that way without thinking when to and generalise this new, desired way into other areas of your life.
Brian created her phobia really young, about 2 years old, when a dog tried to bite her face. It didn’t but the fear and the need for protection was learnt there and then. The thing is – are all dogs the same? Would all her life experiences of being okay between now and then be a better resource than the fear and panic created by seeing a dog, way over there?
Of course all dogs are not like that one and of course our whole set of life experiences would be a better resource and that’s what we did when we worked together, I’ll explain a little more in a minute.
Because this also reminded of one of my first clients, she had a phobia of spiders (notice the use of the word ‘had‘). She was convinced she first experienced this about 7 when she was chased by someone with a spider at school. Not sure what the spider was trying to learn at school? Anyway, with skillful questioning and empathy (well I am writing this and you weren’t there) we discovered this wasn’t the start of this phobia it actually occurred when she was about 3 and seeing her big, lovable Grandad coming down stairs as white as a sheet so scared because he had seen a spider. Her unconscious mind thought if my big lovable Grandad is scared of spiders then I have to be too!
So are these people still afraid are they living their life constantly thinking about what scares them? You can guess the answer ~ of course they’re not, no way. We’ve developed through hypnosis and NLP together with Time Line therapy (tm) Oh! I nearly forgot with ‘skillfull questioning and empathy‘ brilliant ways to let go of fears and phobias and, I know it may seem hard to believe, with a lot of laughter. Who says it’s a rule we have to be serious about creating great changes without a bit of fun and feeling good as you do it?
The thing is, when we let go of anything that holds us back we can use what we learn to pleasantly affect other areas of our life. We become more confident, at ease some may say be the real me and it never amazes me how far the ripples of our clients change spread because we know it will.
You are allowed to have the life you dream of.
Paul