Getting past phobias can happen more quickly than you expect

Is a phobia or fear restricting your life?
Fears are a natural part of life. Everyone fears something such as being robbed, or being hurt in an accident. This type of fear is not necessarily bad, as it may prompt someone to take precautions, such as locking doors or wearing safety belts.
No matter what fear or phobia you have (there are more than a thousand of them) you don't need anyone to tell you how restrictive they can be. You may have tried facing up to them in the past, but unless you were successful, you probably now have a strategy of avoidance. This in effect means that you will do anything to avoid being confronted by the thing, event or situation that the phobia is associated with.
There’s a difference between a fear and a phobia.
A fear is an unpleasant reaction we feel when confronted with real danger… it is an essential 'fight or flight' instinct, which makes us prepare to either run away from that danger, or stick around and fight it out.
A phobia, on the other hand, is an excessive fear of a thing or situation that does not rationally merit such an extreme reaction, but to which it has become attached in the mind/body of the phobic person.
Whenever a fear or phobia gets in someone's way, interfering with their lifestyle, or causing them to avoid something they would like to do, then it should be treated.

How do they get started?
Hypnotists proficient in phobia release view phobias as a learned response from an event or pattern of events. Sometimes phobias are displaced - detached from the original source of fear and attached to something else - the thing, event, or situation that now brings on a reaction.
Sometimes phobias can develop after experiencing a single traumatic event. The initial sensitizing event, or triggering incident, could be anything, provided it is connected to something frightening. All the circumstances of that event are encoded. When life presents a situation that feels like or resembles the structure of the feared pattern, an involuntary reaction happens.
In some cases, the client, as a child, might have imitated behavior of a close role model. A child can become terrified of thunderstorms, for example, because the mother acted terrified whenever a storm raged overhead. Children can form a learned behavior pattern, taking on and absorbing the response of an important figure.
If a person experiences a fear strongly and/or frequently, they may begin to fear losing control. They can become afraid to feel the fear; and go out of their way to avoid anything that might trigger it. When this happens, the fear has become a phobia.
Most fears develop during childhood, but fears can also develop during adulthood. Some fears that develop in adulthood are caused by chemical imbalances. Some are the results of repressed memories.
There are many possibilities. The neat thing about hypnosis is that the subconscious mind, when asked correctly, knows what the problem is, how it started, and how to repair it. Accessing the subconscious, which seems to remember tons more than the conscious mind, is the key.

Is there anything else that works?
There’s a method known as EFT, or Emotional Freedom Technique, that I - and many other practitioners -- have found very effective in conjunction with hypnotherapy. When artfully applied, EFT is a great gift for all of us. Click on the Emotional Freedom for more info. Suppressing symptoms with medication has not had happy outcomes for hardly anyone.