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Crisps, keyboards, pens​ – how do you treat an unusual phobia?

support • November 2, 2017

When you are plagued by unusual fears, people’s reactions can be the hardest thing to bear. One writer with a phobia of jewellery explores what can be done

Chris Evans, The Guardian, 12 June 2017

If a friend confided in you they had a fear of door handles or toenail clippings, would you laugh or sympathise? The instinctive reaction might be the former, but we can all get phobias of absolutely anything, and some can be debilitating. I have lived with my own fear of jewellery for as long as I can remember. If you were to place a metallic necklace or earring into my hands, it would send a shiver through my body, I’d feel instantly sick, have to throw the object away and wash my hands. The response from family, friends and colleagues has only ever been amusement or bemusement. I can live a normal life, despite consternation from some for not wearing a wedding ring, and have never got to the root cause.

Phobias are described as an overwhelming and debilitating fear of something. They are more pronounced than just fears alone. A dislike of rats, for example, is pretty common. But if it extends to musophobia (a fear of mice or rats), then it can be life-changing. “One person called our helpline who was so scared of rats they couldn’t even say the word ‘rat’ itself,” explains Trilby Breckman, a development manager at the charity organisation Triumph Over Phobia (TOP UK). “It was stopping her going out for fear of seeing one.”

Breckman cites similar stories, including a teenager with a phobia of crisps who struggled at social occasions. Another woman had a phobia of bananas, which caused problems at work and meant she couldn’t go to the supermarket without panicking. But it was other people’s reactions that caused the most discomfort. Breckman says that when a close relative found out, “she posted a photo on Instagram of herself with a banana milkshake captioned: ‘Look what I’m having!’ Ahead of a family holiday, she sent another saying: ‘I’ve already bought my bikini,’ and it had bananas on it.” Unfortunately, these kinds of responses, particularly on social media, can be quite common. The internet can be a useful tool, such as with phobia forums where phobics can share their stories and experiences – but, equally, it opens up a world of unhelpful reactions.

The problem with phobias is that they often don’t make sense. Outsiders question why the sufferer is afraid of birdseed, camels, red paint or jewellery. I’ve been asked so many times: “How can you be afraid of jewellery? Followed by, “It’s not going to hurt you.” But they don’t realise it’s a different part of the brain, the subconscious, where we have patterns and responses around spiders or whatever the phobia might be, which are triggered and make us feel uncomfortable.

Delving beneath the surface to reveal the deeper – and potentially darker – causes can be a disturbing but ultimately rewarding journey. The fast phobia cure is one common treatment method that targets the traumatic episode or experience that caused the phobia. It involves getting the phobic to reimagine the incident, but from a different perspective. “It’s like watching a film in the cinema, so they’re not inside the experience, but looking at it from a detached point of view,” explains Guy Baglow, the director of Mindspa Phobia Clinic . “The problem with phobias is that the person can keep replaying the scary memory in their mind, that is how it is sustained. By getting them to replay the memory in a disassociated way, the emotional response doesn’t trigger. You can then get them to replay the film again and change a few things. Rapidly it will then just become a normal memory reclassified as non-threatening.”

Baglow cites an interesting case of a woman who had a fear of spiders that stemmed from the second world war. “When she was a little girl, there was an air raid and she and her mum ran to the shelter in the garden. A loud bomb exploded nearby, she was absolutely terrified and screamed, and it was at that point that a spider dropped down in front of her face,” says Baglow. “Of course, the spider then became associated with that fear. So things that are in that emotional snapshot can also trigger the same response. It’s called pattern matching. We used fast phobia therapy to change how that memory was experienced and removed the phobic trigger.”

Another common treatment method is exposure therapy, part of the cognitive behavioural therapy approach. “We can recreate the panic sensation and symptoms people feel through exercises in the sessions, such as hyperventilation, which encourage them to breathe very quickly,” explains Linda Thorden, a cognitive behavioural therapist and clinical psychologist. “On some occasions, people with certain phobias, such as agoraphobia, think they are going to die when they have a panic attack. We try to demonstrate to them that they are not going to. We would then gradually encourage them to tackle the phobia itself through exposure and desensitisation.”


TOP UK holds weekly self-help groups, often run by former phobics. “There’s no secret tablet,” says Breckman. “People have to work at it. We had one guy who came to us for six weeks and never said a word. He just sat there. Then eventually he managed to say: ‘I’ve got a social phobia,’ and ran out of the room. But he came back the following week and within a year he was running the group himself.”

Some phobias can even be life-threatening – such as a fear of needles. “This can be a real problem if someone has cancer or high blood pressure and needs injections,” says Nicky Lidbetter, chief executive of Anxiety UK. “Over the years, hundreds of people have contacted us with very serious conditions, but not been able to access treatment because of their anxiety. They can’t cope with hospitals or medical procedures. So, actually, their phobia becomes bigger than the cancer, diabetes or high blood pressure that needs treating.”

Similarly, emetophobia – a fear of being sick – can negatively affect people’s lives. One phobic (who wishes not to be named) says: “I couldn’t have children because I was terrified I might get morning sickness during the pregnancy.” Lidbetter mentions others who heavily restrict their diets or retreat from society altogether when there is a sickness bug around.

“Emetophobia can be very disabling. It often develops into obsessive compulsive-type symptoms as well, in terms of cleaning and checking, and trying to avoid any risk of contamination,” says David Veale, a consultant psychiatrist at the South London and Maudsley NHS trust and a specialist in emetophobia. As for the cause of the condition, Lidbetter and Veale explain it could be from a bad experience of being sick as a child or seeing a parent being violently sick.

Other treatment methods include hypnotherapy, mindfulness and flooding: a full-immersion behavioural therapy in which the patient has to endure the phobic object for a prolonged period (eg a room full of spiders) until they eventually calm down. There have also been new developments in virtual-reality therapy. “We are testing VR for emetophobia,” explains Veale. “It’s essentially putting the goggles on and seeing yourself vomit. It sounds nasty, but it’s about experiencing the triggers – the smells, sounds and sights.” However, some remain sceptical. “It’s a nice idea, but I think they’re getting too excited by their own technology,” argues Baglow. “We don’t need virtual reality because the brain is the best virtual-reality generator we have. Indeed, that is why we can get so frightened because our minds can create all sorts of disaster movies and ‘what if’ scenarios.”

Overall, the more that can be done to raise awareness, the better. “We need to get to a stage where everyone can openly talk about their phobia problems without being ridiculed or judged,” says Lidbetter. As for me, I’ve been convinced to try therapy, but am still deciding which path to take.

By Mindspa Phobia Clinic January 19, 2025
Guy Baglow, clinical lead at the Mindspa Phobia Clinic, was interviewed in an article about the treatment of unusual phobias.
A glossary of terms related to Glossophobia and therapy to overcome it
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Understand glossophobia (public speaking fear) and treatments to overcome it with this useful glossary, including CBT, stage fright and exposure therapy.
A microphone on an empty stage waiting for the speaker
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Avoidance by people with glossophobia reinforces fear. Avoiding public speaking may give temporary relief but limits career growth and strengthens anxiety.
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Glossophobia is a specific fear of public speaking, but is it a form or social anxiety or should it be treated as a distinct issue?
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Lucy shares how the "Fast Phobia Cure” helped her conquer her glossophobia and overcome her fear of public speaking at the Mindspa Phobia Clinic.
By support November 2, 2017
The Fast Phobia Cure (also known as the Rewind Technique or, in Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP), as “The Visual-Kinaesthetic Dissociation Technique”) is an advanced tool to decondition phobias and trauma (such as PTSD). Its efficacy has been assessed in many academic papers such as the work by Gray & Liotta. It’s safe, gentle and without the drugs, scare tactics, psychological archaeology and exposure used by the older and less effective phobia treatments. The Fast Phobia Cure* is now widely accepted as the most reliable and effective treatment for all kinds of phobias, even long-standing and severe ones. It’s probably the single most reliable and effective tool in psychotherapy today and is being used more and more as a front-line treatment for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder including trauma caused by accidents, assaults, war and witnessing critical incidents. If you have ever seen someone being almost instantly released from their phobia on TV and thought “Wow, how did they do that?” you can bet the therapist used The Fast Phobia Cure. So how does it work? A phobia is driven by a pattern-matching process whereby the unconscious mind creates “fear templates” around “dangerous” things or situations to try and keep you safe from the imagined threat in future. It then broadly matches these patterns to more and more situations as a phobia develops. What Fast Phobia Cure does, in a very creative way, is interfere with those patterns – it subtly changes the templates by changing the way we experience the memories – so when the unconscious mind tries to match the patterns, they don’t match anymore and the anxiety is no longer triggered. The templates (memories) will still be there, they will just feel different. The emotional tag will be gone. The phobia just won’t work anymore. This can all be done very quickly because the brain learns very fast. It learned to be phobic very fast. Teaching it how not to be phobic can be, and is necessarily, equally fast. It does not take long-term treatment. The mind can then start to generalise outwards, but this time in a very positive way, as it begins to associate more and more situations with feelings of calm and control. One of the great things about The Fast Phobia Cure is that it is non-intrusive: the therapist doesn’t need to know the precise details of the traumatic memories or phobic encounters because the sufferer brings their content (their experiences) to the process. The methodology of the Fast Phobia Cure was first developed by Richard Bandler, one of the founders of Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP) – the new science of excellence and personal change. It is so effective at detraumatising memories that it is being used more and more as a front-line treatment for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder including trauma caused by accidents, assaults, war and witnessing critical incidents.
By Mindspa Limited October 27, 2017
Phobias are not the same as normal fear responses. It is normal, for example, to experience some fear when on a precipice or in the presence of a snake. But not to be terrified at the thought of a high place or snake. It is the overwhelming terror that distinguishes a phobia. If you have a phobia you will be able to induce some of the common fear responses – shortness of breath, sweating, dizziness, nausea, increased heart-rate, flushing, shaking – just by thinking about the trigger. You are likely to have only one phobia. You may have other fears, but probably only one phobia. People generally seem to have the capacity for one proper phobia.
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Our clients bring with them some very interesting examples of phobias. These phobias fall into two types: Specific or Simple phobias These are phobias linked to a specific object or situation. Examples are spiders, snakes, bees, worms, frogs, birds, dogs, cats, hedgehogs, goldfish, sharks, vomiting, driving , flying clowns, balloons, thunder, needles, blood, dentists, beards, buttons, velvet, feathers, lifts and marbles. Specific phobias can also be generalised – for example to all slimy green reptiles rather than just frogs. This seems to happen when the original traumatic event can’t be recalled. Non-specific phobias These phobias produce a more general anxiety or terror linked to social or performance situations and are often accompanied by panic attacks. Agoraphobia (open spaces), claustrophobia (confined spaces) and social phobia (public speaking, being the centre of attention) are non-specific phobias.
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Most people know the technical, scientific name for their phobia. This may give them some comfort: it has a name so they know they are not the first person in the world to have the phobia. But whatever the phobia, someone else has it whether or not it has been given a Greek/Latin name. And knowing its name probably hasn’t helped them deal with it. In fact, just the opposite: we know that some phobics experience anxiety at the mention of the scientific name. A person with a phobia of long words won’t be helped by knowing they have hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia. So we rarely use these names in our clinics and we haven’t listed them here.
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There are two parts to your mind – one that thinks, and one that feels. The thinking part is the conscious, rational mind that you are using now as you read this. The feeling part is the unconscious, emotional mind. It takes care of automatic tasks like regulating the heart, controlling pain and managing our instincts. It’s the unconscious mind that is programmed to act instinctively in times of danger. It reacts very fast – making you run or fight – rather than allowing your thinking mind to philosophise while you are attacked by a tiger. This has great survival value. The unconscious mind is also a very fast learner. The same emergency route that can bypass the rational mind in times of danger can also stamp strong emotional experiences (traumatic ones) in the unconscious mind. This makes evolutionary sense – it ensures that we have vivid imprints of the things that threaten us. And just like we have two minds, so we have two memory systems: one for the facts and one for the emotions that may or may not go with those facts. Sometimes, when a person experiences a very traumatic event, the highly emotional memory of the event becomes trapped – locked in the emotional brain. In an area called the amygdala – the emotional storehouse. There is no chance for the rational mind to process it and save it as an ordinary, non-threatening memory in factual storage (in the hippocampus). Like the memory of what you did last Sunday. Instead, the emotional brain holds onto this unprocessed reaction pattern because it thinks it needs it for survival. And it will trigger it whenever you encounter a situation or object that is anything like the original trauma. It doesn’t have to be a precise match. This is pure survival again. You only need to see part of a tiger through the bushes for the fear reaction to kick in again – for the “fight or flight” response to trigger – you don’t have to wait until you see the whole tiger or identify it exactly as the tiger that attacked you before. In fact, it probably only has to be something orange and black moving through the bushes. This is why the pattern matching process is necessarily approximate, or sloppy. You err on the side of safety. You don’t have to have all the details to know if something is dangerous. This is the basis of a phobia: a fear response attached to something that was present in the original trauma. The response is terror, shaking, sweating, heart pounding etc. And because of the sloppy pattern-matching it can be stuck to literally anything – animal, mineral or vegetable. It may not even be glued to the thing that caused the trauma. So, a child attacked in a pram by a dog may develop a phobia of prams rather than of dogs. It is because phobias are created in this way, by our natural psycho-neurology, that they are so common. It’s the way we are wired. Approximately 10% of people have a phobia. And it’s precisely because they are created by the unconscious mind that they seem so irrational. Of course they are – the rational thinking brain hasn’t had a chance to go to work on them. Many traditional phobia treatments, including drugs, attempt to deal with the phobia by calming things down after this response pattern has triggered. They treat the symptoms, not the cause. To treat the cause, this trapped traumatic memory has to be turned into, and saved as, an ordinary unemotional memory of a past event. The emotional tag, the terror response, needs to be unstuck from that object or situation. This is exactly what the Fast Phobia Cure* does. It allows you to review the traumatic event or memory from a calm and dissociated, or disconnected, state. Your rational mind can then do its work in turning the memory into an ordinary, neutral, non-threatening one. And store it in factual memory where it should have been to start with. This happens very quickly. The mind learns fast. It learned the fear response quickly and it learns the neutral response just as quickly. And when that happens your phobia is gone. You are free.
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