phobiaclinic

The harsh reality of life with an unusual phobia

Sun, 19 Jan 2025 14:09:08 GMT

Guy Baglow of the Mindspa Phobia Clinic comments in an article about the treatment of unusual phobias

Article by Emine Saner of The Guardian newspaper

21 November 2024

‘I can cope with someone eating one, although I might try to get as far away from them as possible.’

The news that a Swedish politician has rooms swept for the fruit prompted online mockery last week. But for those who face bizarre and irrational fears – from buttons to crumpets – the everyday struggle is far from amusing.

As ever when it comes to bananas, Sarah has been on high alert this week, after the revelation that a Swedish government minister, Paulina Brandberg, has a banana phobia severe enough that aides must ensure there are “no traces” of the fruit anywhere in her vicinity. “We will secure the conference so that there are no bananas,” promised the organisers of one event, in emails leaked to a Swedish newspaper.

While most of the coverage has been mocking, for Sarah, it is entirely understandable – she also has a banana phobia. She is so attuned to the threat that she can sniff out a banana, or a recently consumed one, in a room. “Then, I often have a strong disgust response,” she says. This usually involves feeling sick. “There’s also a hypervigilance, so I’ll be acutely aware of where they are and feel them drawing my attention.”

It wasn’t always the case. Like most babies and toddlers, Sarah loved bananas. Then, when she was about four, she went off them, seemingly overnight. Sarah, a neuroscientist, says she doesn’t remember any “adverse incident”, but adds: “Based on the theory of phobias, one would hypothesise that something had happened, that I’d interacted with one negatively, given it came on so fast.”

Banana-phobe Swedish minister’s staff insisted on ‘no traces in the room’

For those of us who have never interacted with a banana negatively, it can be hard to understand, which Sarah accepts. As a teenager, it was embarrassing, “because it’s a bit more of a comedy fruit”. At university, her housemates would prank her: “They’d hide them in my bed and leave little notes.” She laughs – she is able to see the funny side, even while barely disguising her disgust. “They were my friends; it’s gentle teasing.” At least the bananas were not unpeeled. If it had been a naked banana? “Oh my God,” she says, voice rising. “I can’t even imagine. I’d make them change the sheets.”

These days, Sarah largely has it under control. She can go to the supermarket and steer clear of the bananas, comforted by the fact the store is large and airy. It’s worse in a meeting room with a fruit bowl on the table, a banana squatting menacingly. “I’ll just sit far away from it. I can cope with someone eating one, although I might try to get as far away from them as possible. But when someone surprises me or I can’t escape, I might get more panicky.”

Once, she was on a flight and woke to discover everyone around her had been delivered their morning snack – a banana. Recently, she was on a bus and had to move away from a discarded peel. “Most of the time, you can avoid them. I’ve learned to find tactful ways of removing myself without making it obvious,” she says.

Sarah has published research on ways to treat other phobias, although she has no intention of trying to cure herself. “Even though it’s not necessarily practical to have a banana phobia, the thought of having to go through exposure therapy feels so horrific that I prefer to keep the phobia.” She has a scientist’s interest, though, and has tracked down stories about others with rare phobias. “There seem to be things that you would think are really unusual that come up a bit more prominently than chance – bananas seems to be one of them,” she says. “Buttons is another. It doesn’t seem to be completely random.”

The rational side of our brain tells us we’re being irrational, but we still can’t stop feeling that way

Fear of spiders or snakes is understandable from an evolutionary perspective, she says. With bananas, “I’ve speculated that they have quite a distinctive smell and texture, which seems to be entwined with a disgust response”. Perhaps our survival instinct, she suggests, is to avoid foods that are “mushy”, which might indicate they are rotten.

Sarah knows her banana phobia is odd, although its comic nature brings its own problems (nobody, surely, would put a spider in the bed of an arachnophobe). She doesn’t tend to tell people, even though it affects her. In her professional life, she worries that “it might make me seem ridiculous and less credible” (neuroscience, like politics, is still dominated by men).

“The rational side of our brain tells us we’re being irrational, but we still can’t stop feeling that way,” says Dave Smithson, a spokesperson for Anxiety UK. Phobias tend to be learned – my arachnophobia probably comes from my mother, who probably got it from her mother, and so on. But they can also develop, at any age, due to trauma.

Smithson says Anxiety UK has a long list of reported phobias: “Things you just never would have imagined – shadows, animal skin, railways, fear of gravity. What would cause that? But it can happen. People have fears about all sorts of things.” What makes it harder for those with more unusual phobias is the fear of being ridiculed. “They don’t talk about it, they don’t seek help. People will organise their lives around not facing that fear.”

Because many people keep their phobias to themselves and few seek treatment, phobias are not a well-researched area of anxiety and their prevalence is tricky to ascertain. The most recent Adult Psychiatric Morbidity Survey for England, which is 10 years old, found that 2.4% of people had a phobia. In the US, an estimated 12.5% of adults experience a phobia at some point, according to the National Institute of Mental Health.

The “medicalisation” of a phobia is a relatively recent concept, says Joanna Bourke, a historian and the author of Fear: A Cultural History. “People have been frightened of things for ever, but ‘phobias’ is a late 18th-century concept,” she says. “Even such a thing as agoraphobia, which is the most researched of all the phobias – the fear of open spaces – is a late-19th-century invention. To some extent, they are culturally constructed. What we are afraid of reflects new technologies, new things in our environment.” Our ancestors may well have been afraid of spiders or heights, but they won’t have had a phobia about air travel.

Kate Summerscale details unusual phobias in The Book of Phobias and Manias. Although clowns have been disturbing for centuries, a phobia of clowns (coulrophobia) is a late-20th-century idea. Summerscale traces it to the conviction in 1980 of an Illinois

serial killer and children’s entertainer, then the popularity of Stephen King’s horror novel It.

Summerscale traces trypophobia – a fear of a cluster of small holes – to an image that spread around the internet in 2003, supposedly showing a maggot-infested breast. It was fake, but plenty of people have expressed their horror of clustered holes in everything from crumpets to, in 2019, the grouped camera lenses on the back of the iPhone 11 Pro. (Evolutionary psychologists have theorised that being averse to clustered holes or bumps could be our warning system against infectious disease.)

People can develop exaggerated fears of things that most of us are frightened of – death, illness – but one theory for specific, unusual fears is that it involves “some kind of displacement from something that’s unconsciously frightening”, says Bourke. An object such as a banana or a ball of cotton wool becomes a stand-in for the underlying fear.

Cognitive behavioural therapy, which can include gradual exposure to the fear, is widely used to treat phobias. Virtual reality has been introduced, too; one study found that “very brief exposure” therapy – so quick that the person isn’t even aware they have seen an image – may work.

Guy Baglow, the clinical lead at the Mindspa Phobia Clinic in London’s Harley Street , uses neurolinguistic programming (NLP) – a way of changing thinking patterns – to disrupt the association between an object and fear. Although NLP, which has been around since the 1970s, has its detractors – who say there has not been enough rigorous evidence for it – Baglow insists it can work quickly for phobias.

In 20 years, he has come across banana phobia only twice, he says. In one case, a woman had, as a child, accidentally electrocuted herself at the same time her eyes fixed on a bowl of bananas. “The bananas got associated with the shock,” he says. “The mind creates patterns so it can avoid things in future that might be dangerous or threatening.”

Baglow says one man had a tomato phobia associated with cruelty he experienced in childhood. “You can have a phobia of anything, because trauma can attach to pretty much any object or situation,” he says. “It’s the survival response gone slightly awry.” Phobias can have a significant impact, no matter how ridiculous they may seem to others. “Avoidance, which is one of the key definers of phobia, can lead to all kinds of behaviours and can really restrict people’s lives.”

Avoidance is Keir Gale’s main strategy, although it’s hard – he has a phobia of buttons, which is common enough to have been given a name: koumpounophobia. Buttons, once you start to notice them, are everywhere. “I have to avert my eyes if they’re obvious on

somebody’s clothing,” says Gale. He has had to explain to people why he can’t look at them. What happens when he encounters a button? “I feel nauseous. If I touch one, which you have to do from time to time, I have to wipe my fingers afterwards, because I feel like they’re dirty and greasy and generally unpleasant.” He experiences “a kind of crawling sensation in the skin”. Just the sound of buttons from a shirt or jacket sleeve clattering on a table makes him squirm. “Almost every sensory input is affected.”

He has had what he describes as a revulsion, rather than a fear, for as long as he can remember – his mother would have to remove buttons from his clothing. Gale, who is retired, sometimes had to wear formal clothing for work, which was difficult. These days, he can wear trousers with a button fastening as long as it can be covered by a belt. “Duvet covers have always been a problem and I’ve tried to find ones with poppers. If I think my feet might touch them while I’m in bed, I get very anxious.” Buttons on upholstery are horrifying.

I fit it into my day – I anticipate the amount of extra time it’s going to take me so I don’t have to walk across grass

He is a little embarrassed about it, he says, adding that those who do know “don’t really have any idea how deep the impact is, so they don’t necessarily take precautions”. They don’t ridicule him, but there is certainly bewilderment. “Which is fair enough – I’m bewildered. For them, it’s nothing, but to me it’s very real. My mind won’t let me believe that other people aren’t bothered by them.” He suspects he is neurodiverse and that his phobia is related. I realise that, throughout our phone call, he hasn’t once uttered the word “button”. “I hate it. I don’t like having to say the word.”

Bettina Hunt, an author of romcom novels, has a phobia of grass. “I just don’t like what might be underneath it, like the mud and things coming out of it.” It’s hard to explain, she says – irrationality being central to many phobias – but it’s not merely a fear of dirt or grime. She can tolerate a lush green lawn, perhaps at a stately home, “but I wouldn’t want to walk on it”. The idea of sitting on grass is impossible. “Picnics? Absolute nightmare. I’ll do anything to avoid them. If I absolutely have to, then I will stand up.” She has never walked barefoot on a lawn. She has hated grass for as long as she can remember. She never wanted to go to the park, like other children, and avoided PE at school. Being made to do a wheelbarrow race, on her hands, her face close to the strands, as another child held her feet, remains a visceral and revolting memory. She has a patio, but has never been to the shed at the bottom of the garden, because it involves crossing grass. Hunt lives by a green, which the rest of her family cut across; she takes the long way round. “I fit it into my day – I anticipate the amount of extra time it’s going to take me so I don’t have to walk across grass.”

Polly Barrett has a balloon phobia, which has meant literally running away from the things. “When I see a balloon, I usually start to get really hot and sweaty. My breathing gets quite shallow and fast and I have the feeling of fight or flight,” she says. “Then comes extreme embarrassment, because it’s ridiculous.” Once, she was in a restaurant when someone sat at the next table with a toddler who had a balloon. The more Barrett tried to suppress her rising discomfort, the worse it got: “I ended up bursting into tears and running out.”

Her fear comes from the balloon’s potential to pop – she can’t handle the sight of a balloon waving around, or two balloons rubbing together – and is linked to her other phobia: sudden loud noises. She has experienced this for as long as she can remember. As a child, a noisy boom or loud music could make her burst into tears; even now, a surprising bang, like a car tyre blowing out, can provoke the same reaction.

Intriguingly, Barrett is a musician – her sensitivity to sound is obviously a benefit in making music, even if it comes with the potential for shock. When she works with sound engineers, she tells them she can’t handle the popping or squeaking that comes from tweaking equipment. Friends ensure no balloons are present at the parties to which she takes her children. These days, she is more open about it and people are understanding. “It’s only in the last couple of years that I’ve properly acknowledged and owned it, because for ages I was so embarrassed.” She thinks she should probably do something about it, “because I don’t know what it’s linked to in the rest of my psyche. If I got over this fear, maybe it would give me this whole new lease of life.”

A cause for celebration, perhaps – at which she may tolerate balloons and the popping of champagne corks.

How common is driving phobia?

Thu, 28 Dec 2023 17:12:06 GMT

Although it might feel like it, you are far from alone

Driving phobia, or vehophobia, is surprisingly common and affects millions of people worldwide. Estimates vary, but it’s thought that:

• Up to 20% of people experience some level of driving anxiety . This means that on a scale of 0-10 where 0 is completely fine to 10 is the most uncomfortable you could be (a panic attack), a fifth of drivers are operating at between 3 and 5.

• Up to 10% of people meet the criteria for a diagnosed driving phobia . So one in ten people are operating at a 6 or above. Most of our clients are at about an 8 or 9 on a regular basis before they come to us for help.

That means millions of people struggle with this fear, and it can range in severity. Some people might feel anxious only in specific situations, like driving on highways or in bad weather. Others might be too afraid to even get behind the wheel at all.

This is one reason that driving fear is the second most common phobia we treat. The other reason is that it is so life-restricting in its effect and sufferers just have to do something about it.

So if you're struggling with driving phobia, it's important to know that you're not alone and that it can be changed.

Crisps, keyboards, pens – how do you treat an unusual phobia?

Thu, 02 Nov 2017 15:35:15 GMT

When you are plagued by unusual fears, people’s reactions can be the hardest thing to bear. One writer with a phobia of jewellery explores what can be done

Chris Evans, The Guardian, 12 June 2017

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2017/jun/12/how-do-you-treat-an-unusual-phobia ?

If a friend confided in you they had a fear of door handles or toenail clippings, would you laugh or sympathise? The instinctive reaction might be the former, but we can all get phobias of absolutely anything, and some can be debilitating. I have lived with my own fear of jewellery for as long as I can remember. If you were to place a metallic necklace or earring into my hands, it would send a shiver through my body, I’d feel instantly sick, have to throw the object away and wash my hands. The response from family, friends and colleagues has only ever been amusement or bemusement. I can live a normal life, despite consternation from some for not wearing a wedding ring, and have never got to the root cause.

Phobias are described as an overwhelming and debilitating fear of something. They are more pronounced than just fears alone. A dislike of rats, for example, is pretty common. But if it extends to musophobia (a fear of mice or rats), then it can be life-changing. “One person called our helpline who was so scared of rats they couldn’t even say the word ‘rat’ itself,” explains Trilby Breckman, a development manager at the charity organisation Triumph Over Phobia (TOP UK) . “It was stopping her going out for fear of seeing one.”

Breckman cites similar stories, including a teenager with a phobia of crisps who struggled at social occasions. Another woman had a phobia of bananas, which caused problems at work and meant she couldn’t go to the supermarket without panicking. But it was other people’s reactions that caused the most discomfort. Breckman says that when a close relative found out, “she posted a photo on Instagram of herself with a banana milkshake captioned: ‘Look what I’m having!’ Ahead of a family holiday, she sent another saying: ‘I’ve already bought my bikini,’ and it had bananas on it.” Unfortunately, these kinds of responses, particularly on social media, can be quite common. The internet can be a useful tool, such as with phobia forums where phobics can share their stories and experiences – but, equally, it opens up a world of unhelpful reactions.

The problem with phobias is that they often don’t make sense. Outsiders question why the sufferer is afraid of birdseed, camels, red paint or jewellery. I’ve been asked so many times: “How can you be afraid of jewellery? Followed by, “It’s not going to hurt you.” But they don’t realise it’s a different part of the brain, the subconscious, where we have patterns and responses around spiders or whatever the phobia might be, which are triggered and make us feel uncomfortable.

Delving beneath the surface to reveal the deeper – and potentially darker – causes can be a disturbing but ultimately rewarding journey. The “fast phobia cure” is one common treatment method that targets the traumatic episode or experience that caused the phobia. It involves getting the phobic to reimagine the incident, but from a different perspective. “It’s like watching a film in the cinema, so they’re not inside the experience, but looking at it from a detached point of view,” explains Guy Baglow, the director of Mindspa phobia clinic . “The problem with phobias is that the person can keep replaying the scary memory in their mind, that is how it is sustained. By getting them to replay the memory in a disassociated way, the emotional response doesn’t trigger. You can then get them to replay the film again and change a few things. Rapidly it will then just become a normal memory reclassified as non-threatening.”

Baglow cites an interesting case of a woman who had a fear of spiders that stemmed from the second world war. “When she was a little girl, there was an air raid and she and her mum ran to the shelter in the garden. A loud bomb exploded nearby, she was absolutely terrified and screamed, and it was at that point that a spider dropped down in front of her face,” says Baglow. “Of course, the spider then became associated with that fear. So things that are in that emotional snapshot can also trigger the same response. It’s called pattern matching. We used fast phobia therapy to change how that memory was experienced and removed the phobic trigger.”

Another common treatment method is exposure therapy, part of the cognitive behavioural therapy approach. “We can recreate the panic sensation and symptoms people feel through exercises in the sessions, such as hyperventilation, which encourage them to breathe very quickly,” explains Linda Thorden, a cognitive behavioural therapist and clinical psychologist. “On some occasions, people with certain phobias, such as agoraphobia, think they are going to die when they have a panic attack. We try to demonstrate to them that they are not going to. We would then gradually encourage them to tackle the phobia itself through exposure and desensitisation.”

TOP UK holds weekly self-help groups, often run by former phobics. “There’s no secret tablet,” says Breckman. “People have to work at it. We had one guy who came to us for six weeks and never said a word. He just sat there. Then eventually he managed to say: ‘I’ve got a social phobia,’ and ran out of the room. But he came back the following week and within a year he was running the group himself.”

Some phobias can even be life-threatening – such as a fear of needles. “This can be a real problem if someone has cancer or high blood pressure and needs injections,” says Nicky Lidbetter, chief executive of Anxiety UK . “Over the years, hundreds of people have contacted us with very serious conditions, but not been able to access treatment because of their anxiety. They can’t cope with hospitals or medical procedures. So, actually, their phobia becomes bigger than the cancer, diabetes or high blood pressure that needs treating.”

Similarly, emetophobia – a fear of being sick – can negatively affect people’s lives. One phobic (who wishes not to be named) says: “I couldn’t have children because I was terrified I might get morning sickness during the pregnancy.” Lidbetter mentions others who heavily restrict their diets or retreat from society altogether when there is a sickness bug around.

“Emetophobia can be very disabling. It often develops into obsessive compulsive-type symptoms as well, in terms of cleaning and checking, and trying to avoid any risk of contamination,” says David Veale, a consultant psychiatrist at the South London and Maudsley NHS trust and a specialist in emetophobia. As for the cause of the condition, Lidbetter and Veale explain it could be from a bad experience of being sick as a child or seeing a parent being violently sick.

Other treatment methods include hypnotherapy, mindfulness and flooding: a full-immersion behavioural therapy in which the patient has to endure the phobic object for a prolonged period (eg a room full of spiders) until they eventually calm down. There have also been new developments in virtual-reality therapy. “We are testing VR for emetophobia,” explains Veale. “It’s essentially putting the goggles on and seeing yourself vomit. It sounds nasty, but it’s about experiencing the triggers – the smells, sounds and sights.” However, some remain sceptical. “It’s a nice idea, but I think they’re getting too excited by their own technology,” argues Baglow. “We don’t need virtual reality because the brain is the best virtual-reality generator we have. Indeed, that is why we can get so frightened because our minds can create all sorts of disaster movies and ‘what if’ scenarios.”

Overall, the more that can be done to raise awareness, the better. “We need to get to a stage where everyone can openly talk about their phobia problems without being ridiculed or judged,” says Lidbetter. As for me, I’ve been convinced to try therapy, but am still deciding which path to take.

Lucy Atkins tries a quick cure for glossophobia

Thu, 02 Nov 2017 15:18:33 GMT

Lucy Atkins writing in The Telegraph, Saturday 1 November 2008

“I could probably cure just about any phobia in five minutes” says Guy Baglow, psychologist and founder of the Phobia Clinic . As I lie back in his comfy Harley Street offices, it would be an understatement to say that I feel cynical. Still, my glossophobia — fear of public speaking — is the most common problem Baglow treats. It’s estimated that as many as 75 per cent of us suffer from it, hence the old joke that the average person at a funeral would rather be in the casket than doing the eulogy.

Currently, Baglow’s schedule is packed with nervy City bankers riding out the credit crunch. “They’re terrified that if they can’t present themselves brilliantly they’ll be out,” he says.

A phobia can develop over several years or strike suddenly. “It can happen to anyone,” says Baglow. His clients tend to be high-octane career people, hobbled by their fear of public speaking. One was a police chief, who, although confident when dealing with terrorists, had a paralysing dread of making a presentation.

Then there was the top Texan salesman who was used to presenting material to hundreds but who froze on day one of a new job in front of only 20 people. His confidence plummeted and, like me, he ended up on Baglow’s couch.

My own presentational nadir came 18 months ago when, at short notice, I had to introduce a famous writer to 300 people at a literary festival. The sea of faces triggered a powerful physical reaction: my limbs shook, my mouth dried up and my mind went blank. I was just about able to speak, waveringly, but feared that I might collapse at any moment. I have since, through dread, turned down interesting speaking and interviewing opportunities. “People go to enormous efforts to avoid what scares them,” says Baglow. “This can seriously hamper careers.”

Sometimes the cause is deep-rooted. One City bigwig developed a sweaty back, neck and shoulders when giving speeches. During his treatment, it emerged that, in childhood, his father would stand over him threateningly as he recited his times tables.

Baglow’s technique, known as the “ fast phobia cure ”, breaks these negative psychological associations and replaces them with new, calm and positive ones.

I close my eyes, put on headphones and let Baglow’s hypnotic voice take me back to that awful literary event. I run through it in my head as if watching a black-and-white movie. We fast-forward my “movie”, then rewind it at high speed, several times. This “deconditioning” exercise removes negative emotions (there is no time to feel them), creating a sense of control. I then envisage a confident “future self’ before an admiring audience, and “fast-forward rewind” this scenario a few times. At the end of the two-hour session I feel weirdly confident: I could almost rush straight to Speakers’ Corner and let rip.

“No one needs to live with a phobia,” says Baglow. He claims to have cured many phobias — about anything from tomatoes to sharks and, memorably, male strippers — in a couple of sessions. There is no need for Freudian analysis, tears or tearing out of hair, he says.

Whether I am cured remains to be seen. But one client, a quaking banker with a public-speaking phobia , has just enrolled on a stand-up comedy course. There is hope for us all.

Find out more: Glossophobia treatment at the Mindspa Phobia Clinic

The Fast Phobia Cure *

Thu, 02 Nov 2017 00:00:00 GMT

The Fast Phobia Cure (also known as the Rewind Technique or, in Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP), as “The Visual-Kinaesthetic Dissociation Technique”) is an advanced tool to decondition phobias and trauma (such as PTSD). Its efficacy has been assessed in many academic papers such as the work by Gray & Liotta . It’s safe, gentle and without the drugs, scare tactics, psychological archaeology and exposure used by the older and less effective phobia treatments.

The Fast Phobia Cure* is now widely accepted as the most reliable and effective treatment for all kinds of phobias, even long-standing and severe ones. It’s probably the single most reliable and effective tool in psychotherapy today and is being used more and more as a front-line treatment for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder including trauma caused by accidents, assaults, war and witnessing critical incidents.

If you have ever seen someone being almost instantly released from their phobia on TV and thought “Wow, how did they do that?” you can bet the therapist used The Fast Phobia Cure.

So how does it work?

A phobia is driven by a pattern-matching process whereby the unconscious mind creates “fear templates” around “dangerous” things or situations to try and keep you safe from the imagined threat in future. It then broadly matches these patterns to more and more situations as a phobia develops.

What Fast Phobia Cure does, in a very creative way, is interfere with those patterns – it subtly changes the templates by changing the way we experience the memories – so when the unconscious mind tries to match the patterns, they don’t match anymore and the anxiety is no longer triggered. The templates (memories) will still be there, they will just feel different. The emotional tag will be gone. The phobia just won’t work anymore.

This can all be done very quickly because the brain learns very fast. It learned to be phobic very fast. Teaching it how not to be phobic can be, and is necessarily, equally fast. It does not take long-term treatment. The mind can then start to generalise outwards, but this time in a very positive way, as it begins to associate more and more situations with feelings of calm and control.

One of the great things about The Fast Phobia Cure is that it is non-intrusive: the therapist doesn’t need to know the precise details of the traumatic memories or phobic encounters because the sufferer brings their content (their experiences) to the process.

If you have a phobia you want to get rid of then you can experience The Fast Phobia Cure for yourself in our Phobia Cure program.

The methodology of the Fast Phobia Cure was first developed by Richard Bandler, one of the founders of Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP) – the new science of excellence and personal change. It is so effective at detraumatising memories that it is being used more and more as a front-line treatment for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder including trauma caused by accidents, assaults, war and witnessing critical incidents.

Fear or Phobia?

Fri, 27 Oct 2017 00:00:00 GMT

Phobias are not the same as normal fear responses.

It is normal, for example, to experience some fear when on a precipice or in the presence of a snake. But not to be terrified at the thought of a high place or snake. It is the overwhelming terror that distinguishes a phobia.

If you have a phobia you will be able to induce some of the common fear responses – shortness of breath, sweating, dizziness, nausea, increased heart-rate, flushing, shaking – just by thinking about the trigger.

You are likely to have only one phobia. You may have other fears, but probably only one phobia. People generally seem to have the capacity for one proper phobia.

Types of Phobia

Thu, 19 Oct 2017 17:32:17 GMT

Our clients bring with them some very interesting examples of phobias. These phobias fall into two types:

Specific or Simple phobias

These are phobias linked to a specific object or situation. Examples are spiders, snakes, bees, worms, frogs, birds, dogs, cats, hedgehogs, goldfish, sharks, vomiting, driving , flying , clowns, balloons, thunder, needles, blood, dentists, beards, buttons, velvet, feathers, lifts and marbles.

Specific phobias can also be generalised – for example to all slimy green reptiles rather than just frogs. This seems to happen when the original traumatic event can’t be recalled.

Non-specific phobias

These phobias produce a more general anxiety or terror linked to social or performance situations and are often accompanied by panic attacks.

Agoraphobia (open spaces), claustrophobia (confined spaces) and social phobia ( public speaking , being the centre of attention) are non-specific phobias.

Phobia Names

Thu, 19 Oct 2017 17:26:17 GMT

Most people know the technical, scientific name for their phobia. This may give them some comfort: it has a name so they know they are not the first person in the world to have the phobia. But whatever the phobia, someone else has it whether or not it has been given a Greek/Latin name.

And knowing its name probably hasn’t helped them deal with it. In fact, just the opposite: we know that some phobics experience anxiety at the mention of the scientific name. A person with a phobia of long words won’t be helped by knowing they have hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia.

So we rarely use these names in our clinics and we haven’t listed them here.

The Science of Phobias

Thu, 19 Oct 2017 10:36:49 GMT

It's official, I have a blog and I know how to use it.

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 philosophise 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 like 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 – 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 Sunday.

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 be 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. 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 the Fast Phobia Cure* does. It allows you to review the traumatic event or memory from a calm and dissociated, or disconnected, state. Your 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. The mind learns fast. It learned the fear response quickly and it learns the neutral response just as quickly. And when that happens your phobia is gone. You are free.

The misery of weird phobias

Wed, 01 Mar 2017 00:00:00 GMT

Having a fear of buttons may sound hilarious, but in reality it can be debilitating. Patients need to be taken more seriously, by both the media and doctors, say experts

Serena Bergman in The Guardian, 5 December 2016

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2016/dec/05/the-misery-of-weird-phobias-in-the-office-there...

Andy, a 32-year-old IT consultant, is used to people laughing at him when he tries to explain his crippling fear of buttons, specifically those on shirts and jackets.

“I’ve worked in corporate environments, full of people in suits, and there are buttons everywhere you look. This situation is to me what other people may feel being locked in a burning building, or drowning and not be able to swim to the surface,” he says, his voice audibly shaking at the mere thought of rooms full of shirt buttons.

Andy’s condition is called koumpounophobia. It is not as common as some phobias – but still affects around one in every 75,000 people. Sufferers report losing contact with family and friends because they are unable to attend weddings and funerals, or abandoning their careers and doing jobs that allow for remote working or casual clothing.

Phobias are irrational fears which are classified as either simple – of a particular object, such as in Andy’s case – or complex, when they pertain to a circumstance or situation. Because of the ridicule sufferers are often met with, people tend to suffer in silence and phobias go untreated. “I thought I’d be laughed out of a GP’s office,” says Andy. “I knew this was a real thing, but didn’t know how to explain it without feeling like an idiot.”

Another reason many people don’t seek help is because of what the treatment entails. The NHS offers cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) to people with phobias, which includes “exposure” to the object of the fear. A person develops a phobia when their brain has learned to respond to certain non-dangerous situations (such as seeing a small spider) with a “fight-or-flight” response, which causes symptoms that include panic attacks, palpitations, hysterical crying, and the urge to run. Exposure can work because if patients slowly learn to respond to seeing, say, a spider in a calm way – eventually even holding one in their hands – they can essentially “rewire” their brains. But the thought of facing a phobia in such a way can, understandably, be terrifying.

Around 10 million people in the UK suffer from phobias, yet research into causes and treatments is incredibly limited compared with other mental health conditions. Nicky Lidbetter, chief executive of Anxiety UK, has herself suffered from phobias and is a keen supporter of CBT treatment, but argues it needs to be improved and that further research is crucial.

“I remember when anxiety used to be bundled in with depression, despite being a very different condition. We worked hard to raise the profile of anxiety as a separate disorder that could be just as crippling. This is what we need to do with phobias,” she says. “Because they often seem comical and irrational, the media doesn’t take them seriously and I think this mentality has seeped into the medical world, which is why there’s so little funding and research.”

Amy is a 25-year-old marketing manager based in Leeds. She says: “I knew that if I told a doctor I was scared of heights they’d make me go on a rollercoaster or something. Just seeing a long flight of stairs was making my heart race. I’d start to shake, and couldn’t stop myself from running away.” Amy eventually sought help when she and her boyfriend were looking to move in together and it became too limiting to find a ground-floor or basement flat.

Her treatment involved various exercises, such going up in a lift every day and getting off one floor higher each week. She is now able to manage her phobia, although it hasn’t disappeared.

CBT and exposure therapy has been proven effective in a lot of cases, but some experts disagree with the way it is applied across-the-board to all patients. Guy Baglow is the director of Mindspa Phobia Clinic in Harley Street, London . “CBT is about correcting thinking patterns, and it works really well for a lot of conditions, but I don’t think it’s effective in treating phobias,” he says. “We deal with a lot of clients who have had exposure therapy, and it has actually reinforced the patterns we want to break. CBT tackles the conscious mind, trying to teach us to reason against our phobias, but most people know their phobias are irrational to begin with, so this doesn’t feel helpful.”

Despite being overwhelmed at the prospect of exposure, Andy did eventually see his GP, who referred him to a counsellor. “She was really friendly but I had to wait a month for a half-hour phone consultation, and then all I was going to have was one 45-minute session every two weeks. By this point I was too terrified to leave the house.”

Even at home, Andy was in a constant state of alert. TV and movies were impossible, in case a close-up of a button appeared onscreen. He needed urgent help. “I moved back in with my parents and spent hundreds of pounds on intensive private therapy, but after a couple of sessions they tried to make me look at some pictures of shirts, and I started panicking. I couldn’t get the image out of my head for weeks and it made me constantly terrified. I couldn’t go back.”

More recently, though, life has become a little easier, and he recently bought his first ever pair of button-fly jeans. “I’m so lucky to have had the support system I do, because without my family I really think I might have considered taking my own life,” he says. “Looking back, it’s so tragic to realise that while my friends were joking about my weird little quirk and playing pranks on me, on the inside I was battling my own brain every minute of every day. It was so exhausting and stressful, I can’t imagine anyone would find it funny if they knew what it was really like.”

Names have been changed.