Phobias are created by our anxious minds in reaction to bad experiences in certain situations.  They are manufactured fears that can be undone through desensitization.   

Phobias are terrifying and confining. In the worst cases you become a prisoner in your own home, in most cases you dramatically alter your day to avoid that which you fear.

Phobias can affect your work performance, your family life, your friendships and overall happiness in dramatic ways. Some phobia sufferers open their eyes one day and realize that they are friendless, their career is in shambles, and they are cut off from their family.

They wonder how they got to this point? The answer is they didn´t confront their fear! 

Confronting your fear is what will help you escape from the cycle of avoidance. Avoiding things that frighten you, whether it´s dogs, germs, elevators, driving or confined spaces, is what is fueling the phobia and keeping it alive. 

Phobia sufferers are acutely sensitized to a particular stimulus. This sensitization usually happens in response to a panic attack in a place or at a time where that particular stimulus was associated with the excessive worry.

It might not even be that the stimulus that is now the source of your phobia caused your panic attack, indeed it is likely it is not, but rather it is what you associate with the panic attack occurrence. Reflecting on the panic attack gave you the opportunity to associate it with the color you were wearing, the crowd of people you were in, or being by yourself. 

As you thought about the panic attack more often, a causal link formed in your mind between panic attacks and being alone or being in elevator or whatever. The anxiety you felt reinforced that feeling, whether it was true or not. 

So now you´ve got a phobia and you realize you caused it. This is not the time to beat yourself up about it. The great thing about knowing you caused it is that you can undo it as well! 

The mind is a powerful tool and you desensitize yourself to your phobic situation just as you sensitized yourself to it. You can unlearn the causal connection you´ve created between anxiety and a given situation through desensitization. 

The process of desensitization requires you to expose yourself to your anxiety producing situation in incremental steps over time. Most people begin this process through imagery desensitization, where you imagine or visualize yourself in your phobic situation in incremental steps.

The key of course to this process is that you begin these exercises in a relatively relaxed state. If you begin at too high a level of anxiety, it will prevent you from being able to expose yourself even in your mind. That´s why learning relaxation exercises is so crucial to so many problem solving techniques for anxiety sufferers. 

Once you have formed a mental picture of your phobic situation and worked on exposing yourself in your mind in small steps, it´s time to move onto real life desensitization, where you confront your phobia for real. 

Your mental imagery should have prepared you to deal with this more difficult situation.  Remember, you have the power to cut the causal link between the situation and your reaction to it.  Do it in small steps and you will achieve success.

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Tagged with: Agoraphobia • Anxiety Disorder • Anxiety Symptoms • Anxiey Attacks • Generalized Anxiety Disorder • Obsessive Compulsive Disorder • Panic Attacks • Social Phobia

Filed under: Social Phobia

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