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Using Hypnosis To Bust Phobias
As an alternative to medication what’s not to like?
Following a Medium piece I wrote last year on a practical guide to self-hypnosis(Six Steps to Self Hypnosis), let’s see how it can be used to effectively manage anxiety, such as phobias. A phobia is simply an irrational fear targeted at specific thing or situation. The fear must be irrational. A fear of a highly poisonous spider crawling up your arm is not phobic, when this particular creepy crawly could do you serious harm. It is perfectly rational and sensible to be afraid and anxious. However to be afraid of all spiders whether they can harm you or not is more irrational and can, therefore, be considered a phobia.
Big Pharma does very well out of nudging the medical profession to prescribe an assortment of drugs to manage anxiety states (anxiolytics). As my recent article on Pregabalin argued (Pregabalin[Lyrica]: a Poison Prescription), sometimes the cost of taking such highly addictive medication comes at too high a price. As a qualified forensic psychiatric nurse and then managing a local authority mental health residential service, I’ve spent the whole of my professional life administering a variety of psychiatric drugs to my service users. Most included some form of anti psychotic medication, with so called mood stabilisers, anti-depressants and anxiolytics thrown in. There…
