Hypnosis For Fears & Phobias
Can Hypnosis Help You Get Over Your Fears and Phobias?
Ellen has been trained in all facets of hypnosis for fear and phobias and has helped many people restore their peace of mind. Hypnotherapy for Fear and Hypnotherapy for Phobias have the powerful advantage of working directly with the part of the mind that has created and sustains the fear/phobia. Hypnosis uses different ways to persuade the unconscious mind to bypass the amygdala’s panic reaction by giving it a new and calming experience instead.
There are a few ways that hypnotherapy helps clients achieve this. Hypnosis first helps the client achieve a deep peaceful state of mind (hypnotic trance) to allow the person to see their situation more clearly and make decisions about their emotional state more readily without feeling judgmental.
One way is to help the client dissociate and/or emotionally detach from what they fear. Another way is to return to the original event that triggered the excessive fear and persuade the mind that there is no threat nor need for fear. As well, the hypnotherapist can train the mind to learn a new response and to be able to repeat it until it becomes automatic. The goal is to replace the fear by a more manageable feeling with an intensity that can be controlled. Another way is to help the person experience the feared object or situation by controlling their level of exposure, starting with an exposure from a distance and gradually approaching it. There are still other ways that facilitate a person to change their state from fear to calm all of which, including the above, occur in the safety of a hypnotic trance.
Solve Your Fears & Phobias With A Hong Kong Hypnotherapist
Over the years, Ellen McNally has helped many clients using Hypnotherapy for fear and phobias in Hong Kong. Hypnotherapy works to redirect the fear reaction away from the brain’s fight or flight response that gets triggered in the part of the brain called the amygdala. The mind created and entrenched this fear based on a negative experience where the person felt emotionally or physically threatened.
Even seeing a family member, particularly a parent having an extreme fear reaction can unconsciously teach a child to adopt that same survival mechanism. When the amygdala makes the connection that a person’s life is threatened, it sets off its alarm and the body’s fight and flight mechanisms take over.
It cannot be stopped by willpower. The response is immediate because the pattern of fear has already been established. Breaking this pattern and replacing it by a more relaxed physical and mental state is the objective of hypnosis for fear and phobias. There are several different hypnotherapeutic approaches that are effective in hypnosis for this. Usually, a combination of approaches is most effective depending on the person and on what triggers them.
Is There A Difference Between a Fear and a Phobia?
Hypnotherapy helps a person overcome their fear when they find themselves avoiding situations that most people feel comfortable with, meaning the object of fear is not threatening by itself. In a hypnotic trance, a person can discover the origin of their anxiety and fear and can begin to understand its dynamics. When fear becomes an unconsciously triggered and habitual pattern of response, it must be solved at an unconscious level as this is where the fear has been created.
While fear is a healthy response to a real or perceived threat, it is not always appropriate for a person to avoid the object or situation. One might fear being in a storm, seeing a rat or having a car accident. It presents a problem when avoiding it is not a real option. In such cases, the pressure of dealing with it can add greater anxiety to the fear.
A fear can also be psychological such as a fear of being embarrassed, a fear of being seen as unworthy, a fear of failing, a fear of being bullied, a fear of people in authority, a fear of intimacy or a fear of public speaking. All of these and other fears may threaten to expose a person’s nervousness or to expose them as not being “not good enough”.
Fears can result from a negative experience, from an experience in childhood or from a trauma. They can have a lasting impact and continue into adulthood. Left unresolved, they can result in anxiety, self-recrimination and lost opportunities for happiness and success. Fear can often cause a person to avoid important personal or professional experiences.
Hypnotherapy for fear and phobias can help a person become more confident and safe with objects or situations that previously created fear.
In hypnosis, a person can better recall what originally caused their fear and begin to understand how the mind created the unconscious link to fear. Hypnotherapy can help a person change their automatic fear to a more comfortable positive reaction.
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When a person avoids people or situations that create irrational anxiety and fear, we recommend they seek out Ellen for hypnosis for fear and phobias in Hong Kong.
By contrast, a phobia is a fear so intense that one can lose control of their feelings and bodily functions. It can be triggered by a thought or an image or even a word. It doesn’t need to even be close to the object of fear to be triggered. For example, the extreme symptoms of a phobia of flying can get triggered when trying to purchase tickets for the flight months before departure.
What Stimulates a Phobia?
A phobia can result from a trauma, such as being attacked by an animal or being trapped in a lift. It can also happen when we observe such an incident happening to others, such as when a child sees their parent having a phobic experience when flying. The objective of Hypnosis for fears and phobias is to reverse this process. It trains the person’s unconscious mind to respond with calm to what triggers their phobia.
The trigger that stimulates the phobia has an immediate physical response that sets off the fight or flight response. This response is telling us that our life is in immediate danger. And it feels very real.
The phobia can dramatically disrupt a person’s life when they can’t avoid what is triggering it. For example, common phobias in Hong Kong are the fear of lifts, of tunnels and of flying. Hypnosis for Fears and Phobias in Hong Kong can help a person switch off that fear at an unconscious level.
Types of Phobias
The most common phobias throughout the world are the following:
​Fear of Heights
Fear of Lifts
Fear of Snakes
Fear of Thunder
​Fear of Flying
Fear of Dogs
Fear of Being Alone
Fear of Open Spaces
​Fear of Enclosed Spaces
Fear of Storms
Fear of Seeing Blood
Fear of Spiders
​Fear of Insects
Fear of Needles
Fear of Germs
Fear of The Dark
In Hong Kong though, it makes sense that our city and geography is a hub for certain phobias. This city likely has the highest number of skyscrapers in the world. It is likely also that Hong Kong has a high number of people who fear lifts, and enclosed spaces, such as our buses, tunnels and MTR trains.
As well, because HK people are world travelers, with family and business connections spreading far and wide, there is likely a higher incidence of people with fear of flying. However, statistics for phobias are not available for Hong Kong.