Fears and Phobias - How they work

One of the most common phobias that people get is the fear of flying, anytime that a holiday is booked they think about it perhaps months before hand and the level of fear that they go through can really inhibit their lives, and overwhelm them. A ten year old girl that had been bitten by a dog two years previously still gets the feeling of fear every time that she’s sees a dog, any dog.

We all know that not all dogs bite, but her subconscious mind has created a little safety system that it thinks is beneficial to that little girl. The thing is, her subconscious mind over- generalised when it included all dogs.

This is the way that we learn how to do things, experiencing something, and then learning from it.

Now, that feeling of fear inside that little girl is chemical, like adrenaline, that in an instant, turns on all her “fight or flight” systems, and prepares her to fight the beast or run like mad.
When she sees a dog, her subconscious mind brings up from her reservoir of experiences, all the pictures, sounds, and feelings of when she had been bitten. It’s like a computer program, a system, that has structure, and it works the same way, all the time.

However, all systems have structure, and if you change the structure, and the coding of the program, then the feelings will automatically change too. Mess up the pictures and the sounds, create new pictures and sounds that are more beneficial, and the initial over-generalisation can then be fine-tuned and corrected.