Cognitive Behavioral Therapy or CBT combined with hypnosis can enable clients to confront their fears and phobias in a safe space, using imagery-based scenarios to walk the client through positive outcomes.
Combating fears and phobias relies on incremental exposure to the fear, phobia, object, situations, people, animals, insects etc., whether this is through visualization or real-life encounters and engagement. Healthy fears and paranoia can alert us to unseen dangers and can be regarded as feedback from the unconscious or our body senses making us feel uneasy.
Fears and phobias can be totally irrational where the client has developed ingrained cognitive distortions around how they perceive an encounter with the feared situation or object. Socratic disputation or challenging the basis of why the client thinks as they do can start to dismantle or unpick irrational associations from past experiences.
Fears, phobias and anxieties still need to be heard and respected as they may hold within themselves, grains of truth. Therapy can sift out the imaginary, unfounded aspects of fears. Fears can hold warnings and doubts, which are well worth unearthing to reveal useful truths that can help decision making or set a plan in motion.
Another aspect of this approach is to honor our intuitions and instincts and learn to be true to ourselves. Is there a way forward for what we really want for ourselves or are we under pressure to do things that most benefit others?
The process of naming and fully articulating fears robs it of its power and by placing it in context, within a broad perspective, a fear no longer becomes so scary.
Session outline
- Agree SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, Time-bound)
- Explore the context, thoughts, feelings, perceptions and physical reactions around the specific fear and or the phobia.
- Under hypnosis the client is guided through imagery based tolerable scenarios involving confronting the clients’ fear or phobia.
- CBT encourages the client to enact practical life exercises in the real world that challenge a client’s fears and build confidence to address these issues in a persistent and consistent way.
- A session will then reflect on the thoughts, feelings, perceptions and outcomes of these CBT assignments.
Disclaimer
Some fears are valid and invaluable for our survival, whether that is a poisonous snake or spider or a toxic person or situation, so research, self-reflection and evidence is needed for sound decision making for action.