I’d like to point out that in many cases five or ten minutes can be enough to work through the fear and improve the life of the patient.
As an introduction, I’ll tell you a story of a successful recovery from a fear of spiders. This is a story which I personally like to recall from time to time.
One day in Paris
There’s a cafe called “L’Apostrophe” in Paris, on Colonel Fabien Street. Once a month it becomes a rendezvous point for local hypnologists and turns into a “Hypnocafé”. Professionals from the psychotherapy world gather there to learn about foreign specialists’ methods or just have a cup of coffee together.
This time on the second Tuesday of the month it was my turn to present at the meeting. My precursors were Jeffrey Zeig and Betty Erickson so I was in good company. I was invited by Jean Becchio, a brilliant specialist in “nouvelle hypnose”.
I was surrounded by a dozen colleagues, and we stumbled into the cafe a little late, slightly wet from the November rain: it turned out that a taxi in Paris is rather unpredictable, and sometimes it doesn’t arrive even if you call beforehand.
It also was a kind of a stressful test for mental equilibrium, but we managed to pass it. People were expecting us, and after a short presentation we could proceed to work.
Regina
A colleague from France volunteered to talk with me in front of the group. She was about 45 and quite skinny. Such people often describe themselves as being indifferent to life. “I don’t care if I’m free or I’m in captivity,” says the Russian proverb. But Regina turned out to be quite cheerful. The only problem she did have was her fear of spiders. One would wonder if there were any spiders in Paris at all. There are no tarantulas, no dreadful black widows or steppe spiders, no scorpions either.
“Yes, there are!” Regina objected. “They’re everywhere!”
“But you know that you are big, and they are small. They can do you no harm.”
“No, it’s me who is tiny, and they are giant!” Regina said and told me that when spiders are mentioned she freezes, begins to tremble, and her hands become cold.
“Your hands become cold, so where does the heat go?” – I asked. The tension and the heat happened to be in her stomach.
I wondered if she was aware of any ways to counteract spiders. One could use shaving foam, or just throw a towel over the spider and then throw it out of a window. Regina shook her head and made it clear that was not her way. It doesn’t work for her.
The black spider flew away with his web
That’s when we begin the active part of our work.
The first working phase. We try to find out where in the body is the thing that frightens her. Regina closes her eyes: “In my stomach.” What is there? “There is a black spider.” Regina makes a decision to let it go away. Regina is observing the process. The “spider” goes out through the top of her head together with its web.
The second working phase. “Where is the knowledge of how to deal with spiders?” The patient finds it to be somewhere at a distance in shape of a small sun. The decision is to let the sun settle inside the body. The patient is watching it going inside through the top of her head and settling in the solar plexus area.
Regina experiences warmth and peace.
We make a test. The patient imagines that she has a run in with a spider. She keeps calm, she knows several effective ways of action and easily imagines what her behaviour will be like if she actually meets a spider.
Before the session the patient felt cold, and now she feels warm. A phobia which had been haunting her all her life finally disappeared as a bad dream. At the end of the meeting Regina came over to thank me and confirmed that she was still feeling the warmth in her body.
My French colleagues felt puzzled: “We usually need ten years to analyse phobias, and here it takes ten minutes… This seems weird.” “You can spend ten years, but if you wish to have the time to live without phobias, I’d recommend you my method,” I said. I also found the reaction of my German friend interesting; his wife Tatiana told me about it. Uwe Pertz is a wise man so his words are even more valuable: “Why hasn’t it occurred to anyone else to do it? It seems so simple!”
When a person finds him or herself in some unexpected situation and is unsure how to act in order to save themselves or their family, he or she feels lost. This person feels like his or her body has absorbed some toxic substance which poisons everything around it. This substance has penetrated the body and reached the stomach, so there arises an unpleasant tension at every thought of the frightening situation. Let alone the discomfort which affects the head or triggers the feeling of anxiety in the chest. Those layers of disorder are more superficial.
At the moment of confusion, the body was open and defenceless, so the inner vacuum got filled with darkness. This moment has passed, and the body has closed but it is not the same any more: it’s “poisoned” by fear. That’s how a phobia develops.
Most of the actual systems of phobia treatments are based on the fact that people can understand that their fears are illogical. Curing the neurotic fear using Psychocatalysis also begins with realizing that “you shouldn’t be afraid,” but it doesn’t end there.
It is essential to work with the deeper layers of irrational fear. We need to trigger a process which reverses the original process that took place at the moment when the phobia developed, that is: to find something that got inside the body without an invitation, and remove it. Then there comes the phase of getting experience out of the situation, elaborating a sensible attitude to the fact that life sometimes challenges us…
Phobias can be cured fast but it is essential to pass both the phase of “the darkness getting out” and that of “the light coming in”. If this happens then a fear that has lasted for years can be treated within one session.
In many popular systems that work with fears, the patient is often just an extra player. But in Psychocatalysis the work is executed by the patient himself and the patient’s body in self-regulation mode. The task of the specialist is to make the patient do this work.
Within generally accepted therapeutic approaches certain manipulations are performed with the patient on the assumption that a recovery may occur. Psychocatalysis engages the patient in the whole process: that is why it is clear that you know you are actually cured, and not just hoping that you are.
The process is very calm and fast and doesn’t aggravate the patient’s state with any hysteria or mystification.
Psychocatalysis provides a fast and effective work-through of all the components of the background connected with phobias.
Before starting to give detailed practical suggestions, I’d like first to briefly describe the factors which can trigger the development of fears and explain what is going on in our brain at the moment when we are experiencing danger. I mention it in order to show how important it is to involve our inner sensations and not only the reason for the tension. I will also give a short description of other methods of phobia treatment and explain why they are less efficient than my method of Psychocatalysis. Those readers who are not that interested in these details can go straight to the part containing practical advice.
According to population studies, the majority of healthy individuals (60.7% of men and 51.2% of women) at some moment of their lives get serious psychological traumas accompanied by fear, desolation, or a feeling of helplessness.
On average, in a quarter of all cases the traumas take root and become chronic. (See.: В. Н. Краснов с соавт., 2007).
I’ve tried to find out how many people feel uncomfortable in their everyday life because of their fears.
The situation according to a survey taken on my site Psychocatalysis.ru, in 2011—2012, is the following:
– 59.2% of the surveyed admitted “feeling uncomfortable about certain aspects of reality”,
– 33.8% of people declared “having a certain phobia”.
The option “I’m not afraid of anything” was chosen by just 7%.
The most frequent fears of the modern metropolitan population are connected with health, traffic, and means of transportation. In addition to this short list, there is a long list of more exotic and rare fears.
For example, one can develop the fear of feathers after hearing the news about the bird flu.
It’s worth saying that mankind has experienced phobias since the dawn of time.
In the works by Areteus of Cappadocea (latter half 1st century B.C.) there’s a description of a case in which you can easily recognize what today would be called agoraphobia.
“Some patients don’t show anything unusual at home, but in less familiar atmosphere, you can notice at once the incapacity of their mind. One carpenter was like this. He measured the planks carefully, was a skilled woodworker, made reasonable arrangements with the customers, but all this was only when he was within his usual scope of activity. But every time he was going to the square, to the market or baths he put down his tools with a deep sigh, bent his back, started to shake and went into a state of sad agitation as he was losing sight of his workshop and his apprentices. After he turned back home, he calmed down and went about work again.”
(Каннабих Ю. 1994. p. 45).
Felix Platter (1537—1614) describes obsessive-compulsive disorders amongst other mental diseases:
“One woman, a correspondence clerk’s wife, can’t dismiss a fear of killing her husband, whom she loves very much by the way. Another woman, a cantiniere, feels the same kind of worry concerning her newborn baby; both of them would like to forget about these thoughts, but they can’t”
(Ibid., p. 93—94).
The number of phobias is almost immeasurable. There are people who try to classify fears and add new exotic names to the list… This list called the doctrine of fears, was named by one specialist as “the garden of Greek roots” (You can see it at Appendix I). In my opinion, such classification is more philological than bearing any practical value. The keys to working through these unpleasant states is the knowledge about the processes which go on in the mind when a person is afraid, rather than the terms used to name various conditions.
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