Phobialist.com lists over 500 different types of phobias, including such fears as the fear of the number 13 Triskadekaphobia to the fear of the colour yellow Xanthophobia. The five most common phobias in order are:

Arachnophobia – The fear of spiders.
Half of women and 10 per cent of men have, to some degree, a fear of spiders.

Social Phobia - Fear of being evaluated negatively in social situations.
Affecting about 3.7 percent of the population.

Aerophobia – Fear of flying.

Agoraphobia - Agoraphobia involves intense fear and avoidance of any place or situation where escape might be difficult or help unavailable in the event of developing sudden panic-like symptoms. Affecting about 2.2 percent of the population.

Claustrophobia - Fear of being trapped in small confined spaces.

The general difference between a fear and phobia is to say that a fear is a rational response to a situation and when the fear becomes irrational it is a phobia.

In reality the difference is mainly one of degree. Someone may have a fear of cats but still be able to be in the same room, but when it progresses to being unable to walk past a pet shop or watch them on television then the fear has said to have become irrational in context and is now a phobia.

Phobias can be debilitating for those that have them. They find they have no rational explanation for their fear, and their life can become subject to turmoil and upheaval as they attempt to do everything possible to avoid situations where the phobia will happen.

Someone who has a phobia of spiders may clean their house constantly to make sure there are none of them lurking under the sofas or kitchen cupboards and may begin to develop an obsessive compulsive behaviour of cleaning as well. This could also prevent them from going out and socializing. The effect on their family can be devastating as they become paranoid of anything or anyone that could bring spiders into the house.

The point here is that the phobic response can be both irrational and unreasonable even to the person who has the phobia. Yet they are unable to do anything about it.

Sheralin’s fear of spiders to her was completely irrational, even trying to imagine them would send her close to panic. As a child she had picked them up and played with them but as an adult she could not explain her fear. Another client while living in Australia with five of the most poisonous and dangerous spiders in the world had no fear or phobia when she lived there. Upon arriving in the UK and seeing spiders that were smaller and not dangerous developed an irrational fear of them and would run from the room if she so much as saw a small 1cm size spider. The only explanation she could think of as to why she became phobic of spiders in the UK and did not while living in Australia, was that she had never really seen the spiders in Australia move. They just stayed put in their surroundings and did not move. Even the Huntsman spider which can be as big as 7-8 inches across in diameter and can jump from walls did not frighten her. She even had one jump down her top and with little more than a reaction of lifting the bottom of her shirt open she brushed it away. But in the UK the mere act of seeing a spider move quickly across the room was enough to send her into uncontrollable panic.

Sheralin wished to address her phobia of spiders. It was not as though she was going to take a new job where working with spiders or being in situations where they often appeared required such a change, but as her husband did landscape gardening, there was always the background fear of finding one lurking in his shoes. Being a new mother, she decided that her fear of spiders should be banished so that she could be a model mother for her child.

To test Sheralin’s phobia I first needed to understand, when and where it occurred. Did she have the same response when just talking about spiders, or if she saw pictures in a book, or moving pictures on the TV or black and white pictures? Did the response vary with any of these scenarios or was it generalized throughout?

By testing different scenarios using the clients imagination and props we can begin to understand what some of the driving factors for the phobia might be (that is, what some of the components are that make the response intense) without actually having to put them in the real-life situation for their phobia to operate.

Phobias as we have said before seem to be an irrational response to a varyingly normal situation. Yet as we begin to delve into the patterns and components of what make up the phobic response with the person, we begin to see a rationality to it’s make up. That is, a pattern of effect begins to emerge. Certain criteria produce the response and others don’t. Diminishing the intensity of some of the components and increasing the intensity, like the colour on the TV screen or the brightness and contrast, produces similarly analogous responses in the client too. Sheralin is learning that her phobia has limits. She is learning that by the change of external stimulus she too has a change of response.

After understanding some of the effects of the external stimuli and how she responded, the map we had built up could now be used to build an internal map for her. One where she would have direct control over her response, Sheralin was going to be given the choice to choose and no longer partake in the experience of no-choice that she had had for many years.

Part of the reason for starting the change externally was to help break down the generalization that All spiders, in All situations caused her her phobia and to teach her that she could have a different response than what she thought she was capable of, without her having to try. It is often that, people do not believe that they will be able to change or respond differently to an intense situation. So providing a reference point of difference to their expectations helps to build and reinforce the change and learning that will come later.

Having worked with Sheralin on the external stimuli to her phobia we proceeded to map the same processes internally where she had significantly reduced responses, such as smaller image, black and white, picture only and not a moving picture. Knowing which components on the outside reproduced the phobic response in her and those which diminished the response we then set about building a new structure for how she could represent the response she wanted.

It is important too, that we don’t diminish the response and generalize it to ALL spiders either, but to also provide context. Coming face to face with a deadly poisonous spider and picking it up would not be an appropriate response. But having a sense of danger and fear is appropriate to keep her from a potentially dangerous situation in the right context. Change is context related.

Sheralin was asked to visualize the situation and then each of the component drivers that reduced the response was mapped across one at a time. Mapping across meant for Sheralin to make adjustments to her visualization i.e. reducing the size of the picture, then changing the colour to black and white, the moving the image into the distance one by one etc until we had produced the desired new response. In NLP this process is about changing the sub-modalities or components of what constitute the structure of an image. The constituent components (sub-modalities of images, sounds and feelings) and their ordering make up how we internally represent how to respond to events and stimulus.

After creating a response that was appropriate for Sheralin, testing how she responded to the old external stimulus of moving, in colour and bright images of spiders was the next step. Sheralin passed with flying colours and did not receive the old reaction to the spiders.
One week later Sheralin contacted me to say that she had been to London Zoo with her husband and had let a tarantula spider walk up her arm. Something she would never have considered contemplating let alone doing.

Phobias and severe fears do not have to be debilitating, there are ways that today, people can seek help to change their response to one that will provide them with greater choice, flexibility and enrich their quality of life.