Specific phobias can be categorised into five main types:

1. Animal: such as rats/mice, spiders, insects, snakes, flying creatures, dogs, cats and reptiles.

2. Natural Environment: such as water, thunderstorms, heights, fire, and the dark.

3. Blood / Injury /Needles: such as injections, the sight of blood, dentistry, surgical operations, or other invasive medical procedures.

4. Situational: such as flying, lifts, driving, tunnels, bridges, enclosed spaces (claustrophobia), or being sick.

5. Fears relating to a fear of being trapped and unable to get away and others such as illness, germs, choking, vomiting.

Complex phobias

As well as the specific phobias, there are complex phobias; social phobia / social anxiety, and agoraphobia (the fear of open spaces). These can also be very distressing and debilitating, in a wide range of situations.

What causes phobias?

Phobias are often caused in childhood, where the child experiences a real fear but the mind manages to detach (or repress) the feeling of terror from the situation that caused it.

This leaves the mind with a strong fear and nothing to attach it to. The mind doesn’t like it this way and will therefore symbolically attach this fear to a real object or situation that it does know about, be it a spider, an enclosed space, a lift or whatever it may find.

Sometimes however, phobias can develop after experiencing something.

The initial sensitising event, or triggering incident, may vary from witnessing, for example, an accident, visiting the dentist's office, or even just hearing about terrible disasters.

A child may model their behaviour on that of their role model who has a phobia in their own right and as a result this can lead the child to become phobic as well.

Some very common phobias are:

Dental phobia / fear of dentists
Flying phobia / fear of flying
Snake phobia / fear of snakes
Emetophobia / fear of being sick
Button phobia / fear of buttons
Spider phobia / fear of spiders
Commitment phobia / fear of commitment
Driving phobia / fear of driving
Social phobia / fear of public speaking

Symptoms

There will usually be strong avoidance behaviour connected with the phobia, which will run alongside intense feelings of anxiety, loss of control and panic.

Sometimes, confrontation with the phobia, can even lead to fainting, this is usually associated with blood, injury, or needle-type phobias.

Using hypnotherapy to treat phobias

Hypnotherapy can be extremely helpful in treating phobias, because it identifies the root cause of the problem which helped create the phobia. Hypnotherapy can help client's disassociate and desensitise themselves from the associated feelings and behaviours of the fear or phobia.

If you have a fear or phobia that is starting to control the way you live your life, then maybe the time is right for you to tackle it now.