Get a (Past) Life: do you ever get the feeling you’ve been here before?
Hope for Eight Million IBS Sufferers: leading medical specialists acknowledge hypnotherapy’s leading role in the successful treatment of this debilitating condition
Hypnosis and Hypnotherapy: what exactly are they?
Panic Attacks: are they a response to our primal instincts?
Who Do You Think You Are? Warrior Settler or Nomad: find out in this intriguing and amusing article
Obsessive Compulsive Disorder: why some people have to do certain things over and over and over….
Anorexia Nervosa: how this life-threatening condition is rooted in childhood
Eating Disorders: Bulimia; binge eating; compulsive overeating; why these conditions are so often about feelings of insecurity
Fears and Phobias: whatever it is – someone’s frightened of it. But they don’t need to be
An A-Z of phobias (almost)
What’s the difference between a fear and a phobia? Most of us have irrational fears of something, be it spiders, enclosed spaces, cats, Russell Brand (on second thoughts, that’s not irrational at all) and the fear can vary from mild “I’d rather not stroke Tiddles thank you” to “If that cat comes any closer I’ll have a panic attack”. It’s at this upper end of the response scale that a fear becomes a phobia.
We’ve all heard of claustrophobia (fear of enclosed spaces) and its opposite, agoraphobia, but what about cyberphobia (fear of computers) or cenophobia (fear of empty rooms)?
But it’s not funny if you do happen to be one of the millions of people in the UK who suffer inconvenience and even abject misery because you can’t face something most people would consider perfectly ordinary.
Thankfully, help is available through various means and one proven method is Hypnotherapy. One of the odd things about fears and phobias is that the object of the fear is often not the real cause. For example, if a child suffers a trauma in a particular location, it may be the location, or something else connected to the location, which becomes the object of the fear or phobia.
In Hypnotherapy, we would discover the real cause of the fear or phobia by using hypnosis to regress the adult to childhood, to the memory of the actual event, thereby exposing it and neutralising its potency. Another method is to give the sufferer, again in hypnosis, strategies to cope with the fear or phobia when it arises, enabling them to be in control of it. Either way, it is possible to help most people overcome their fears and phobias, however strange these may appear. The following A-Z may contain some pretty unlikely examples, but you can bet your life that someone, somewhere will be suffering from a fear of it.
Automatonophobia – ventriloquist’s dummy
Belonephobia – pins and needles
Cacophobia – ugliness
Dendrophobia – trees
Ephebiphobia – teenagers
Felinophobia – cats
Genuphobia – knees
Hippopotomonstrosequippedaliophobia – long words (honest)
Iatrophobia – doctors
Jordanophobia – celebrities with no talent (I made that one up)
Kainophobia – novelty or anything new
Lygophobia – being in a gloomy place
Merinthophobia – being tied up
Necrophobia – dead things
Obesophobia – gaining weight
Phobophobia – phobias
Quangophobia – pompous people on non-government committees (I made that up too)
Rhytiphobia – getting wrinkles
Selachophobia – sharks
Technophobia - technology
Urophobia – urine or urinating
Venustraphobia – beautiful women
Wiccaphobia – witches and witchcraft
Xanthophobia – colour yellow
Y-phobia – missing one letter in your a-z
Zoophobia – animals
Copyright: Adrian Walker 2008
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