lettuce wrote:I thought recently that hypnosis could be an excellent method to get rid of phobias. With my limited knowledge, I'd say that making a file to stop a single phobia, but I'm not too sure about making a file for phobias in general, since that would be much more practical if it worked. I'd personally love getting rid of my irrational fear of spiders, although it's a bit unmanly to not confront my fears.
Hypnosis is an excellent way to cure phobias. Unfortunately the approach of "one file to fit all" may not work with phobias. You see - a phobia is a trigger really - or rather the object of the phobias - say a spider - acts like a trigger and instills terror in the victim.
In fact the victim of the phobia has hypnotized himself to install the phobia. Something unique has happened to that person - an experience as a child, normally - has startled the person - given him a real fright and made it so that every time he now sees the object of that terror - he feels a quite devastating fear or terror and is quite often paralyzed with fear.
The reason he cannot by himself just think logically and remove the trigger is, that his mind has forgotten all about the primary motivating incident. It was so scary that it has been covered up and in a sense forgotten. But it's still there. The subconscious know all about it, but can't handle it. So every time the triggering object is there, the subconscious takes over and brings forth the terror.
To remove the phobia you need to find out what caused the fear in the first place. This is done by hypnotic regression - asking the subject to go back in time to the first incident that has to do with the phobia. Then several techniques can be used to remove the fear and to deal with the incident in such a way that it no longer has any potential for fear. This is quite effective and usually only takes one or two sessions with a hypnotist.
Since the reason for one person's arachnophobia is completely unique to that person, and the others who suffer from the same phobia have had different experiences to install the trigger in them, making a general file wouldn't be truly successful. You could probably help some completely, make the fear less of a problem to others, and completely not help yet others. It would be very random. Whereas one-on-one hypnotherapy has an almost 100% rate of success.