Phobias - The Terror Within

 

Phobias - The Terror Within

By Guy Baglow

 

Phobias are surprisingly easy to acquire and surprisingly easy to lose. And whilst they may seem strange or bizarre, they are quite common and easily explained.

WHAT IT FEELS LIKE TO HAVE A PHOBIA

Most people with a phobia are normal, happy, intelligent and well-balanced.

They have just got this phobia, this thing they feel powerless to do anything to change. So it's very frustrating because a part of them (the rational thinking part) knows that it doesn't make sense, that they are okay and probably quite safe with that thing or in that situation. But they nevertheless find that when they are exposed to that thing or situation, or even just thinking about it, another part of them (the irrational unconscious part) drives out rational thought and anxiety and panic floods in.

Have a can read through the science of phobias to see exactly how and why this happens.

Phobias will often start to affect self-confidence and self-esteem. Sufferers feel they are not understood, that others think they are stupid. And it can make them feel embarrassed and stupid. Like a slur on their sanity.

But phobias are a very human thing. It's to do with the way we are wired. And they rarely go any deeper than that: they are usually just a simple pattern-matching process rather than some dark Freudian psychosexual thing from childhood.

HOW PHOBIAS BEGIN

There are several ways to get a phobia. We may:

Learn it as a child from a parent (typically our mother) because we model their behaviour and thinking styles so strongly.

Suffer a traumatic incident or very emotionally upsetting event.

Learn it vicariously by being traumatized by someone else's trauma. For example, if a survivor of traffic accident recounts their ordeal very vividly, a listener with a very powerful imagination may develop a phobia.

Build it up slowly in our minds. Sometimes there is no specific event that sets up a phobia. Instead, there's a slow build-up of ideas reinforced by a series of small relatively minor incidents. Driving phobia and fear of flying can be slow-builds with something mild (like being stuck in a traffic jam or a bumpy flight) which normally would be okay but at the time the individual was perhaps a little more stressed that normal (background stress levels raised by other things like relationships or work) and this tipped them into a mild panic attack. This builds into a phobia.

At the start, it may take some time for people to recognise that they have a phobia. But then the panic starts to occur more frequently and consistently and a pattern emerges.

It's important to understand that anybody can get a phobia.

HOW PHOBIAS CONTINUE

The response that drives our phobias is our most instinctive survival response - the ancient "fight or flight" response. So when we are in danger we either prepare to stand and fight or to run away.

Sometimes the unconscious mind - which is responsible for survival - overdoes it and gets an idea that a particular things or situation is life-threatening and attaches the fight or flight response to it.

So it attaches feelings of discomfort, anxiety or terror to that object or situation to make the individual avoid it in future, thus keeping them "safe". And it is usually very successful at doing this so the phobic quickly finds themselves engaged in all kinds of avoidance behaviours.

So the phobic response is simply a protection mechanism that got glued to the wrong kind of thing - something that in reality may not be life-threatening at all. In fact, with another part of their mind - the conscious mind - the phobic will have always known this. But that hasn't helped because this isn't about being logical and rational - if it was then no-one would have a phobia.

No, this is about the irrational, illogical and creative unconscious mind which is a great virtual reality simulator - creating monsters in the mind which, of course, do not exist in the real world. Imagining things beyond the realm of probability, possibility or likelihood even.

When the protection mechanism gets glued to the phobic trigger, the unconscious mind creates a very strong pattern around that thing. And after that, whenever it recognizes a match to that thing - and it doesn't have to be a precise match - it will trigger those same feelings of anxiety and panic. This is why phobia tend to spread out and generalize - particularly agoraphobia and claustrophobia - as more a more situations are approximately matched, creating more and more reference templates for "life-threatening " situations. And every time panic occurs it just reinforces the idea the mind has got that this is "dangerous" or "life-threatening". This is why phobias get naturally worse over time rather than better.

SAFETY & AVOIDANCE STRATEGIES

Safety and avoidance behaviours are used by the sufferer to reduce the "threat" and to manage and conceal their distress and embarrassment.

As more and more situations are avoided, the sufferer's world starts to shrink. Resources, time and energy are used in planning and avoiding the particular things or situations around their phobia. Partners and friends may have to be heavily relied upon. Excuses are made to avoid certain activities. Situations and people may be manipulated. Jobs, invitations and trips may be turned down. And there is a loss of freedom and independence as the comfort zone shrinks.

Eventually these "solutions" become part of the problem: the avoidance and control behaviours become the handicap on living. Professional help is often sought as this point.

HOW PHOBIAS ARE CURED: THE FAST PHOBIA CURE

The key to curing phobias is to work with, rather than against the unconscious part of the mind that created the phobia, allowing it to re-evaluate these objects or situations as non-life threatening. And it can be given this opportunity by engaging the very same imagination and creativity that it used to create the phobia in the first place. A bit like a Sumo wrestler using his opponent's own weight to overcome him.

This is what a remarkable treatment called the Fast Phobia Cure does: it allows the mind to review the trigger object or situation from a position of calm detachment so that the thinking mind can go to work on these things and re-evaluate them as non-threatening. This de-conditions the pattern that drove the phobia. So it won't trigger again. The phobia won't work anymore. The cause - the pattern - is gone. And without the cause there are no symptoms.

 

 

The Science Of Phobias

Here's how phobias work.

There are two parts to your mind - one that thinks, and one that feels.

The thinking part is the conscious, rational mind that you are using now as you read this.

The feeling part is the unconscious, emotional mind. It takes care of automatic tasks like regulating the heart, controlling pain and managing our instincts.

It's the unconscious mind that is programmed to act instinctively in times of danger. It reacts very fast - making you run or fight - rather than allowing your thinking mind to philosophize while you are attacked by a tiger. This has great survival value.

The unconscious mind is also a very fast learner. The same emergency route that can bypass the rational mind in times of danger can also stamp strong emotional experiences (traumatic ones) in the unconscious mind. This makes evolutionary sense - it ensures that we have vivid imprints of the things that threaten us.

And just as we have two minds, so we have two memory systems: one for the facts and one for the emotions that may or may not go with those facts.

Sometimes, when a person experiences a very traumatic event, the highly emotional memory of the event becomes trapped - locked in the emotional brain - in an area called the amygdala which is the emotional storehouse. There is no chance for the rational mind to process it and save it as an ordinary, non-threatening memory in factual storage (in the hippocampus). Like the memory of what you did last weekend.

Instead, the emotional brain holds onto this unprocessed reaction pattern because it thinks it needs it for survival. And it will trigger it whenever you encounter a situation or object that is anything like the original trauma. It doesn't have to be a precise match.

This is pure survival again. You only need to see part of a tiger through the bushes for the fear reaction to kick in again - for the "fight or flight" response to trigger - you don't have to wait until you see the whole tiger or identify it exactly as the tiger that attacked you before. In fact, it probably only has to be something orange and black moving through the bushes. This is why the pattern matching process is necessarily approximate, or sloppy. You err on the side of safety. You don't have to have all the details to know if something is dangerous.

This is the basis of a phobia: a fear response attached to something that was present in the original trauma. The response is terror, shaking, sweating, heart pounding etc. And because of the sloppy pattern-matching it can get stuck to literally anything - animal, mineral or vegetable. It may not even be glued to the thing that caused the trauma. So a child attacked in a pram by a dog may develop a phobia of prams rather than of dogs.

It is because phobias are created in this way, by our natural psycho-neurology, that they are so common. It's the way we are wired. Approximately 10% of people have a phobia. It's a very human thing. And it's precisely because they are created by the unconscious mind that they seem so irrational. Of course they are - the rational thinking brain hasn't had a chance to go to work on them.

Many traditional phobia treatments, including drugs, attempt to deal with the phobia by calming things down after this response pattern has triggered. They treat the symptoms, not the cause.

To treat the cause, this trapped traumatic memory has to be turned into, and saved as, an ordinary unemotional memory of a past event. The emotional tag, the terror response, needs to be unstuck from that object or situation.

This is exactly what a remarkable therapy called the Fast Phobia Cure does. It allows the phobia sufferer to review the traumatic event or memory from a calm and dissociated, or disconnected, state. The rational mind can then do its work in turning the memory into an ordinary, neutral, non-threatening one. And store it in factual memory where it should have been to start with. This happens very quickly because the mind learns fast. It learns the fear response quickly and it learns (or relearns) the neutral response just as quickly. And when that happens the phobia is gone.