Trauma & Phobias
Treating Trauma & Phobias
Have you ever wanted to do something profoundly, but you simply couldn’t? It’s like your body says yes, but your mind won’t let you move. These are some of the feelings that come with trauma & phobias. These mental hindrances limit the activities we can perform, but what if I told you that you could break through these mental hindrances? With our therapy protocol you could remove your trauma & phobias and live life to its fullest.
A Phobia can be described as a persistent and irrational fear or dread of performing an activity or object when individuals have any phobia express a strong desire to avoid a specific situation, activity, or object. A Phobic response to a stimulus is a learned response, we are born with just two fears. the fear of falling and loud noises, everything else is a learnt response and so, as we aren’t born with any particular phobias, but we develop them as we grow, and they affect us differently. To some individuals, phobias can be paralyzing, and in others, it can kickstart high levels of anxiety. Phobias can exist in the lives of people who would otherwise be mentally and emotionally stable.
Trauma can happen to anyone or be caused by any number of events. Experiencing the loss of a family member or personal relationships, the loss of a job, divorce, assault, natural disasters, domestic violence and more can result in various types of trauma. Trauma can affect a person of any age, social or economic demographic, from children, working adults to the elderly. If left untreated, a person may develop problems such as depression, posttraumatic stress disorder, anxiety and more which affects their ability to function later in life. Trauma will deeply affect a person’s mental health, and a poor one may result in personal and financial hardships to lifelong health issues. At worst, it can result in addiction, destructive behaviour and suicidality.
Phobias can be seen as symptoms or as a long-term consequence of PTSD. Even if the PTSD is gone, a phobia can remain as a reaction to a stimulus that reflects danger. Many phobias are irrational because the memory of what caused the fear in the first place didn’t get stored completely; only something about it kept stored in the right amygdala as a reminder of something threatening and undesirable. That’s why phobias are defined as irrational because they seem to come out of nowhere; but they always come from some previous negative experience, either traumatizing or very scary.
Trauma is a whole injury that is not as selective as a phobia. In that sense, phobias are more adaptive than trauma. Trauma (PTSD or C-PTSD) is maladaptive since it affects so many processes of the system’s functioning. It has the negative valence of bad memories in the right amygdala as well, but it also affects other parts of the brain. Phobias can also be symptoms of traumatization and of trauma since they carry avoidance as PTSD does, but PTSD has many other symptoms that people with phobias don’t present. Phobias can be part of other consequences of PTSD or C-PTSD, or can present alone without PTSD.
How Can Our Therapy Help You?
We use a combination and sometimes all of the techniques which include Thought Field Therapy, VCART ( Visual Coding And Reprocessing Technique using strobe lighting ) NLP and sometimes Hypnotherapy to treat Phobias and anxiety disorders successfully.
Trauma and Phobias get stuck in the brain, that’s why something that happened years ago you can still feel when its triggered, it will feel like it is happening in the now.
Everything that happens in our day goes into the righthand side Amygdala then, through the process of REM at night, all our experiences are processed across to the left hand Amygdala where our experiences fade away without hardly any emotional attachment. However, if your brain experiences an event as a threat then it gets stuck in the Anterior Cingulate Cortex part of the brain (The sorting office part) and therefore isn’t processed, causing trauma or phobia.
Causes of Phobias
Phobias are strictly a matter of the mind, but they rarely have a single cause. When developing a certain phobia, there could be several factors involved. Phobias could be developed due to a traumatic event or a bad experience that makes the brain want to protect the body from such experiences in the future. Phobias could also be a learned response. Genetics and mental health conditions also influence the type and degree of phobias an individual develops.
Most people that have a phobia will usually recognize their fear or phobia as being unrealistic or irrational. However, they still find themselves unable to face or confront it. When a person with a phobia actually encounters or even thinks about being in the presence of the object or situation that he/she fears, he/she experiences immediate anxiety.
Classic physical symptoms of a phobic response are a racing heart, trembling, excess sweating, shortness of breath, maybe some chest or abdominal discomfort, and emotionally there can be an intense fear of losing control, maybe a feeling like they are going to faint, and fear of total embarrassment.
Many people that have a phobia will tend to build their whole life around it. When this limits a person’s ability to enjoy life, it is time to seek professional help.