What is it you are really afraid of?

Utilise the power of holistic, therapeutic therapy to get underneath your fear of spiders, or snakes, mice, planes, heights, whatever it is that you are scared of and replace fear with compassion, with understanding and ultimately freedom to live the life you truly desire.

I have a spider phobia. At its worst I almost threw myself out of a fast moving car, tried to create a flamethrower with hairspray and a clipper and moved out of home for almost a month. 

At its best I can calmly ask someone to remove the offending creature (by remove I mean kill, it needs to be dead) and be on top of the  hypervigilance that follows with awareness.

But as yet, it has not been cured. Hypnotherapy has most definitely made it into less flamethrower maniac and more manageable reasonable human being. But the fear is still there.

As a firm believer in hypnotherapy, in all its forms I know that solution focused therapy and rewind therapy are incredible tools for phobias, so why has it not worked completely for me?

I believe that it is because I don’t really have a phobia of spiders. My fear of spiders is simply an easy focus for a much deeper hidden fear, so I can do as much phobia work as I can find, until I get underneath the easy to understand fear and start working on my real fear it will never truly be lifted.

Before I go on I want to state that I am not saying that true phobias don’t exist, I highly recommend as a first step you find yourself a phobia hypnotherapist, because if nothing else it will almost certainly lower the fear response which is necessary to be able to work deeper if needed.

But if this sounds like a familiar situation, if you, like me continue to live with a phobia that causes you to behave in a way that seems to others totally crazy, or limit your life choices to avoid certain situations, perhaps looking with compassion and understanding at the deeper self may be the key to unlocking a freedom from fear and an ability to live your life with no limits.

This is not a new theory. Freud’s psychoanalytic theory of phobias states that a phobia is caused by an unresolved conflict between the id and the superego and psychoanalysts generally believe that this conflict happened in childhood and was either repressed or displaced into this object of fear.

My take and approach is somewhat more organic, holistic and as always utilises the structure of hooponopono to work through and feel, as opposed to analyse and pick apart.

Using myself as a case study here I really want to understand why I feel the way I feel and how I can change the response and reaction I have to spiders.

I have had rewind therapy to lower my response to spiders so am able to think through my encounters with a degree of detachment.

I can pretty much place the time when my fear of spiders started, and funnily enough it is the same for my older sister. We both recall an event, I must have been about 5, and she was 8. Our mum freaked out about something in the towel cupboard. We never saw it, but somehow knew it was a spider. I don’t recall what happened, who dealt with it. Maybe it was our father who we were still living with at this time, but in my mind it was something monstrous that somebody else had to deal with.

Sitting here writing this I can actually still experience that feeling in my body. It is in my chest. 

I sit with the feeling. I name the emotions and stories I attach to these emotions. 

Danger-there is something dangerous, an unseen danger that I need protecting from.

Fear-this thing will scare me, and being scared is bad, stay away from things that are scary.

Shame- there is no memory of reassurance, that it was ok for my mum to be this scared, there is a feeling of belittlement, of control/power.

None of these are necessarily true, or perhaps they are all true. The point here is when I remember this event this is what I remember. These are the stories that I attached to the spider, these are the feelings that I attach to the spider. This is what my brain, body and soul reacts to when I see a spider.

Keeping all this in mind I can then think about times that I have also experienced these feelings, that have nothing to do with spiders that my brain and body matches up.

Times when I have been in very real danger and my body has told me that fear is bad, so I have repressed those feelings, the shame I have felt at being scared so not asked for help.

I also wonder about the confused message I carry here around fear and danger. There is this sense that there is hidden danger, yet a strong message I am creating that fear is bad, is weak. That asking for or needing help is shameful.

Yep, all this from a spider in a cupboard that I never even saw!

It is incredible how the mind works, it is incredible how just in this short exercise I am unravelling a whole load of stories, beliefs and fears that I am attaching onto a spider.

The danger in my life at that time was real, but it wasn’t the spider. The spider wasn’t dangerous. This practice is not about unearthing what that danger was, or the other dangers I experienced, this is simply about finding compassion and understanding.

So coming back to my here and now spider phobia. What I can tell you is that I can now imagine myself using this understanding to regulate my nervous system response when I next see a spider. Until I have this experience I can’t tell you how effective this particular session has been. But what I do know is as I have worked through my different scenarios with love, compassion and forgiveness I am more able to understand myself, unravel the fear/stress fight/flight response I have to spiders.

I feel calmer thinking about my spider phobia  just by going through this process for the purposes of this blog.

I am a work in progress, I have most definitely shifted my fear from a 10 to a 3, with the added benefit of shifting my self-love up from a 4 to an 8.

If you have a phobia that is impacting your life and would like to get underneath it, would like to be able to regulate your nervous system so you can make choices based on what serves you best then get in touch.

This work can be done online or in person. I will make no big claims about curing your phobia, but you will certainly understand yourself better, be able to regulate your nervous system better, be more mindful and compassionate to yourself. 

Utilise the power of hypnosis, somatic therapy and counselling to improve your experience of life today. 

Email me to book your appointment persephonetherapies@gmail.com