Breaking Free from Phobias: How Hypnotherapy and Psychotherapy Can Help

Phobias are more than just intense fears; they can feel all-encompassing, affecting daily life and holding you back from experiences others may take for granted. Whether it’s the fear of flying, escalators, animals, or something else entirely, phobias can cause significant distress. But did you know that beneath these specific fears often lies a broader pattern of anxiety? This pattern is key to understanding—and ultimately overcoming—phobias.

How Phobias Form

Phobias develop when the brain learns to associate a particular situation, object, or activity with overwhelming fear or anxiety. Often, this response is deeply rooted, shaped by past experiences, learned behaviours, or even external influences like media or others’ fears. Once the fear sets in, the brain essentially creates a neural pathway that keeps triggering the anxious response whenever the feared object or situation arises. This cycle can feel impossible to break on your own.

But there’s good news: your brain is capable of change. It can unlearn these patterns and replace them with healthier, more adaptive responses.

Rewiring the Brain with Hypnotherapy

Hypnotherapy is a powerful tool for addressing phobias because it taps into the subconscious mind, where these deep-rooted fears reside. When you’re in a state of hypnosis, your mind becomes more open to suggestion, allowing new, positive neural pathways to form.

This isn’t about forcing change or suppressing fear. Instead, hypnotherapy gently encourages your brain to adopt new patterns—helping you build resilience and reduce the anxiety that fuels your phobia. By guiding your brain to reframe its responses, hypnotherapy creates space for you to face formerly terrifying situations with a sense of calm and control.

Combining Hypnotherapy with Psychotherapy

Psychotherapy works alongside hypnotherapy by helping you understand the broader anxiety that often accompanies phobias. Together, these therapies offer a holistic approach to not only address the specific phobia but also manage the anxiety that’s often at its core.

By exploring the root causes and working through anxious thought patterns, psychotherapy supports long-lasting change. Combined with hypnotherapy, this approach helps you regain control, empowering you to navigate life without fear dictating your actions.

Time to Reclaim Your Freedom

Living with a phobia can feel isolating and limiting, but you don’t have to face it alone. Through hypnotherapy and psychotherapy, I help clients break free from the grip of fear—whether it’s fear of flying, escalators, animals, or anything else that’s been holding them back. Together, we can rewire your brain, reduce your anxiety, and help you face life with newfound confidence.

If you’re ready to take the next step, I invite you to book an appointment. Let’s work together to create lasting change so you can move forward, free from fear.

Rediscover Your Calm: A Strategic Approach to Overcoming Anxiety and Depression

Are you feeling overwhelmed, stressed, or burnt out? These are common feelings that often lead people to seek help from mental health professionals. But when you dig deeper, anxiety and depression are often at the root of these experiences, no matter what label you give them. Understanding how these challenges manifest and how a strategic approach can effectively address them is crucial in choosing the right therapy for you.

Contrary to popular belief, anxiety and depression aren’t hereditary or fixed conditions. They’re learned processes—patterns of thinking and reacting that we pick up as we grow, often from those around us. If you were raised by an anxious parent, you might have unconsciously adopted their anxious responses. Over time, these responses can become so ingrained that they feel like the only way to react to certain situations. But here’s the good news: just as we learned these patterns, we can unlearn them and create new, healthier ways to respond.

Strategic Hypnotherapy works on the premise that learning a new response is similar to learning any new skill. Think about how you learned to ride a bike—you didn’t just hop on and start cycling perfectly. You learned each step, practiced them, and eventually, it became second nature. In the same way, you can learn the steps to respond differently to anxiety or depression. Hypnotherapy helps by reinforcing these new, more helpful responses in your subconscious, making them feel natural and automatic.

Anxiety is often rooted in future-based thinking. If you struggle with anxiety, you might find yourself fixated on worst-case scenarios, constantly worrying about things that haven’t happened and may never occur. With a strategic approach, we help you learn to distinguish between thoughts that are useful and grounded in the present and those that are simply unhelpful fears about the future. This process empowers you to live more fully in the moment, with a greater sense of control and calm.

Depression, on the other hand, tends to be tied to past-based thinking. If you’re dealing with depression, you might spend a lot of time replaying past events, focusing on what went wrong and how you’ve been affected. Unfortunately, we can’t change the past, but we can change how we relate to it. A strategic approach helps you learn how to let go of the past and move forward, building a future that reflects the life you truly want to live.

If you’re ready to break free from the cycles of anxiety and depression and start creating the life you desire, I invite you to take the first step. Book a free 20-minute consultation today, and let’s explore how Strategic Hypnotherapy can support you in this journey. Your path to calm, balance, and a brighter future begins here.

Stop Overthinking by Asking for What You Need

If you are an overthinker then you are familiar with having thoughts whirl around your head as you work through all the ‘what ifs’, including many that are almost completely impossible, and none of which are good outcomes, because you don’t spend your time creating positive scenarios do you?

This makes you spiral as you imagine outcomes that are worse than anything that could actually happen, and means that you are in a state of anxiety about things that you have created in your own mind.  The good news is that you can stop this pattern with a simple step.  Identify what you need and ask for it.  And you can, can you not? I will illustrate what I mean with an example.

A friend of mine noticed that her partner was quite distracted and wasn’t making plans to do anything together with her as they discussed what events they had coming up over the next few weeks.  In her overthinking mind she started to worry that he was not happy with their relationship, found spending time with her to be a chore, and wasn’t giving her priority in his life. This then spiralled into her thinking about what would happen when their relationship ended, whether she would feel able to meet other people with a view to a relationship with someone else, how she would tell their children, what their finances would look like, who would get the dog, etc.  Over the course of a few days she became more and more distressed as she thought about this scenario, and became more withdrawn from communication with him as she tried to protect herself from the pain of rejection.

Except that he hadn’t rejected her.  When we spoke about this I suggested that she think about what she needed – did she need more information, did she need a conversation, did she need a break?  At the heart of it she needed to know whether he was unhappy in their relationship.  After some encouragement she asked him.  And discovered that he was really happy with his relationship with her, was completely unaware of her thoughts and feelings that things were falling apart, and had been distracted because he was exhausted after finishing a big project at work.  He had taken her quietness as her understanding that he needed some down time to recover, and had been completely oblivious to her distress.  Sound familiar?  If she had asked for what she needed earlier in the process, she would have saved herself a lot of distress and worry, and understood what he needed and how it impacted her.  Her sleep would definitely have been better!

Sometimes what you need is not an answer from a person but a piece of information for a work project, or a decision from a business about a contract.  Recognizing that this is what is needed can be enough to stop the overthinking as it helps you to understand what is within your control and what is out of your control.  If you can’t make a decision about something until you have that piece of information, then no amount of rumination at 3am is going to change the outcome.

Next time you find yourself stuck in the overthinking loop, try asking yourself ‘what do I need’ as a pattern interrupter, and say it out loud to help you move forward.

Interrupt your Overthinking  – ‘Blink VuMu’

Are you a prize winning overthinker?  This is a helpful technique to interrupt that pattern when you identify that you are over-cooking a thought, or thought process.   It is called ‘Blink VuMu’  not just because it is an usual name, but because the name is the pattern to follow (see the bolded letters as your clues!):

Step 1) Blink wildly for 5 seconds (count back from 5-1)

Step 2)  Get curious – How am I doing this?

Step 3) Ask yourself the following questions

       Q1) Is this Valid? YES/NO

       Q2) Is this Useful?  YES/NO

       Q3) If not, what would be the Most Useful response I could offer right now?

•            The value of this question set is that you can recognise that a reaction can be both valid and not useful.

•            The first question allows you to say “YES” and validate your response. However, even as you do this, you have already stepped away and are analysing from a more dissociated position.

•            The second question is more likely to get a “NO” response as you recognise the contextual value of your reaction.

•            The third question starts you down a line of becoming more strategic and re-framing your thoughts, looking at it from different perspectives and breaking the pattern in a useful way.

As you practice this technique you are creating a new neural pathway, and a new habit, which will give you a more strategic outlook as you create your future.  Give it a try!