Reflective Journal Entries: Amazing Phobia Cure

From Lucy Waterhouse, with thanks

I have a returning client, L, who got in touch with me via facebook who I then had a chat with over the phone about her situation. She presented with a phobia of driving on motorways. He could pin point the time at which the phobia had been triggered, but couldn’t work out why it had been triggered, she simply reported that she had been driving down a road, not even a motorway, but an A road, with no place to come off for a few miles and had suddenly found herself gripped with panic.

She described a very phobic reaction, shortness of breath, a dissociation from her body, rapid heartbeat, burning hot ears and neck, dry mouth, nausea, every time she ‘tried’ to drive on a motorway especially, even for just one junction, knowing that she would only be on it for a few miles at the most. She said that her driving had become dangerous on motorways because she was driving so slowly that she was going to cause an accident and that because of this she was never going to go on a motorway again and that she basically waned help to avoid this fear spreading to driving I general around town as her job requires her to drive and she needs to be able to. I was really, for some reason, freaked out by this one, I don’t think I knew where to start. It was obviously a phobia from what she was describing but it didn’t seem to have an emotional trigger that either of us could identify, it had just apparently ‘happened’ though I know that this is not ever really the case, and that there must be something behind it, even though this information was not available to her. 

The first time I saw her I did some metaphor processing. I told her to describe her feelings as though she was coming down the slip road onto the motorway and to really allow herself to experience the feelings as they came up in describing it. She reported all the feelings as they happened and I could see the colour drain from her face then saw her go very red and she said that she felt a swirling feeling in her stomach. We identified that the very first thing that she had felt was the swirling in her stomach and that (Embedded command) “if we intervene at that exact point of the swirling stomach and take that away then none of the other feelings will emerge” I asked her to reach into her stomach, physically and pull out the feeling, and I did the action to show her what I meant, grabbing in my fist this feeling and letting it hover in front of me- she did the same. I told her that as soon as the swirling started when she is driving then she should safely and quickly reach into her stomach and pull it out and put it on the dashboard, open the window and throw it out onto the road. We gave the feeling a colour, a shape and a size then altered it to suit her and she said that she would be able to do that. I then put her into a trance and did a guided visualisation of going down onto the motorway, safely comfortably, happily, and driving several junctions, overtaking and doing so with comfort and ease. I left her with the instructions to pull the feeling out if it came back. I hada text two days later saying that she had been roped into driving a relative back from Halesowen to Coventry via the motorway and she had done exactly what I said and that the other feelings hadn’t materialised at all but that she had had to remove the swirling feeling a few times. She had taken the long route home to avoid coming back on the motorway and had regretted it because the road was badly lit and it took twice as long. The second time I saw her she was really excited and pleased as punch at her progress and had made several more short trips on the motorway in the two weeks since our previous session, always using the same technique, but had also discovered something else, that if she blasted a song out that she knew all the words to her singing away was really helping. 

She had been adamant that having music on in the car would have made things worse in our first session but I had done a NBG with her and told her that new coping mechanisms would make themselves apparent as time went on… this was apparently one of them… So I saw her again and reinforced what we had done in the first session but also did work with her about letting go of the fear as she no longer needed it, I thanked it for what it had done in keeping her safe but said that now whenever she exhaled whilst driving, more of the fear would be released, and that singing would make it disappear even more quickly! I said to her that she had all the resources she needed and I knew that motorways would be a doddle from now on because all those resources would become apparent to her. I had a message off her at the weekend, nearly a week after our second session and she had been on several motorway trips without any of the fear that she had felt before, even slightly longer trips, to Telford and Alton Towers and nothing had happened negatively. 

She said that she wanted one more session to help her with over taking as she was still plonking herself behind a lorry and sticking at about 50-60 mph because it felt comfortable but that she felt ready to take the next step! She was absolutely thrilled and signed off ‘thank you thank you thank you!’ I have to admit that even I was shocked at the efficacy of the work we had done, I mean I totally believe that hypnotherapy works, I have seen it work and it has worked on me, but I am still astonished when I am able to facilitate such a big change in someone so quickly! I am constantly amazed by this hypnosis ‘thing’ every time it works! It works because you are brave enough to tackle your own hesitations too and listen to the client and respond even when, as you say, you get a bit freaked out not knowing what to do. Fear is fear is fear and you know how to handle this. Great work.