Lucy Atkins writing in The Telegraph, Saturday 1 November 2008 “I could probably cure just about any phobia in five minutes” says Guy Baglow, psychologist and founder of the Phobia Clinic. As I lie back in his comfy Harley Street offices, it would be an understatement to say that I feel cynical. Still, my glossophobia — fear of public speaking — is the most common problem Baglow treats. It’s estimated that as many as 75 per cent of us suffer from it, hence the old joke that the average person at a funeral would rather be in the casket than doing the eulogy. Currently, Baglow’s schedule is packed with nervy City bankers riding out the credit crunch. “They’re terrified that if they can’t present themselves brilliantly they’ll be out,” he says. A phobia can develop over several years or strike suddenly. “It can happen to anyone,” says Baglow. His clients tend to be high-octane career people, hobbled by their fear of public speaking. One was a police chief, who, although confident when dealing with terrorists, had a paralysing dread of making a presentation. Then there was the top Texan salesman who was used to presenting material to hundreds but who froze on day one of a new job in front of only 20 people. His confidence plummeted and, like me, he ended up on Baglow’s couch. My own presentational nadir came 18 months ago when, at short notice, I had to introduce a famous writer to 300 people at a literary festival. The sea of faces triggered a powerful physical reaction: my limbs shook, my mouth dried up and my mind went blank. I was just about able to speak, waveringly, but feared that I might collapse at any moment. I have since, through dread, turned down interesting speaking and interviewing opportunities. “People go to enormous efforts to avoid what scares them,” says Baglow. “This can seriously hamper careers.” Sometimes the cause is deep-rooted. One City bigwig developed a sweaty back, neck and shoulders when giving speeches. During his treatment, it emerged that, in childhood, his father would stand over him threateningly as he recited his times tables. Baglow’s technique, known as the “fast phobia cure”, breaks these negative psychological associations and replaces them with new, calm and positive ones. I close my eyes, put on headphones and let Baglow’s hypnotic voice take me back to that awful literary event. I run through it in my head as if watching a black-and-white movie. We fast-forward my “movie”, then rewind it at high speed, several times. This “deconditioning” exercise removes negative emotions (there is no time to feel them), creating a sense of control. I then envisage a confident “future self’ before an admiring audience, and “fast-forward rewind” this scenario a few times. At the end of the two-hour session I feel weirdly confident: I could almost rush straight to Speakers’ Corner and let rip. “No one needs to live with a phobia,” says Baglow. He claims to have cured many phobias — about anything from tomatoes to sharks and, memorably, male strippers — in a couple of sessions. There is no need for Freudian analysis, tears or tearing out of hair, he says. Whether I am cured remains to be seen. But one client, a quaking banker with a public-speaking phobia, has just enrolled on a stand-up comedy course. There is hope for us all.
Chris Evans, The Guardian, 12 June 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
