Spiders, snakes, heights, confined spaces, flying, thunderstorms or even public speaking — everyone knows someone who has a phobia. Maybe you're a sufferer yourself. The Collins English Dictionary defines a phobia as an 'abnormal, intense and irrational fear of a given situation, organism or object'. Typical symptoms include dizziness, heart palpitations and a sense of terror. When the stimulus appears — sometimes it only needs to be thought of — the person responds automatically with a strong physical reaction. Some phobias can be hard to live with many limit people in what they can do.

There are various schools of opinion on how phobias are formed but NLP has no real interest in causes. The main focus of NLP therapy is on how problems are handled in the present. The event itself has long since passed into the mists of time, so it must be the way the person is representing it internally that's causing the difficulty. When they're exposed to whatever makes them phobic they associate back to a picture they have of the e memory, and experience all of the emotion again. It is a Visual (V) to Kinaesthetics (K).

When you're dissociated, though, and looking at events as an observer, you can't have the bad feelings. And that's the principle at the heart of the Fast Phobia Cure, which uses double-dissociation to distance people from the emotions they felt originally. Although it's called a 'phobia cure', the pattern can also be used with any trauma or fear where the response to a stimulus is instantaneous. But it's not suitable for situations where anxiety or dread builds up over a period of time.

Steps

This is a powerful technique, and it's important to follow all of the steps in the order shown.

Step 1: Imagine you're in a cinema. Choose a seat somewhere towards the back while you wait for the film to start. See yourself up on the screen in a still black and white picture just before the original phobic incident took place, or if you can't remember, one of the most intense episodes you ever had ...

Step 2: Now float back inside the projection room. (If you are phobic about heights, just walk there.) You are now in a safe, secure observer position and able to see yourself sitting in your seat in the cinema looking relaxed.

Step 3: Remaining in the projection booth, continue to watch yourself as you allow a black and white film of the phobic incident to run on the screen. When it reaches the end, stop the film and turn it into a still picture.

Step 4: Now leave the projection room and step into the still picture on the screen. Change the picture to colour and then run the film backwards as fast as possible – 1 to 2 seconds –experiencing it from inside. Repeat this process several times.

Step 5 : Try to access the phobic state by thinking about the stimulus. You should now have no trouble thinking about it. If some discomfort remains, do the process once again.