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Fears And Phobias

General

Deborah Lindsey shares her opinion about three major fears and phobias

Important Note: This article was written prior to 2010 and is now outdated. Please use my newest advancement, Optimal EFT. It is more efficient, more powerful and clearly explained in my free e-book, The Unseen Therapist™.  Best wishes, Gary

Hi Everyone,

Phobias often vanish quickly with EFT, although in some cases sophisticated uses of EFT are necessary. To help with these more difficult cases, Deborah Lindsey shares her thoughts on how to get to the bottom line quickly.

Hugs, Gary


By Deborah Lindsey

Over the course of my years as an EFT professional and trainer, I have noticed a trend that I think might be of use to other EFT practitioners. It is particularly useful for anyone working with phobias.

In my experience, I find that phobias will always boil down to one of the three great fears: fear of pain, fear of shame, and fear of death. If you can identify the underlying fear and add it into your setup statement, you can move through phobias very quickly.

Now often people will say, but what about…?  And then they’ll offer something like the fear of being alone (which is ultimately a fear of death) or the fear of embarrassment (which is shame) or the fear of getting fired (which is a fear of death) or the fear of being yelled at (shame and pain). Many people claim that they aren’t afraid of death, they are afraid of leaving people behind or of not getting everything done (both of which are simply a repressed fear of dying). In my experience, all fears can be drilled down to one of these three.

As an example, I will use “Dave’s Fear of Water” from the EFT course, which is a wonderful example of how to eliminate a phobia. If you watch the video, you will notice that when Gary asks Dave what it is he is afraid of he says, ‘Fear, absolute fear that I will go under and drown.” Later he says something like, “I just know that I will go down and never come back up.” In both cases, he has transferred a fear of death onto water in what can be called an improper reference. Water is actually a life-giving substance, but to him water was deadly. And yet, we quickly see that it wasn’t really water he was afraid of, it was death. (We presume he was able to shower and bathe and even drink water prior to the tapping). It was the idea of going under water and not being able to breathe that he was afraid of, which was ultimately his fear of dying.

In a situation like this, if you tap on: Even though I’m afraid I’ll die if I get in the water… you will find that you move through it very quickly.

In another example, I worked with a client who had a severe fear of spiders. When I asked her my favorite question, “Do you remember when this all started?" She remembered that when she was a little girl there was an old man at church who was in a wheelchair. He was very scary to her. And then when she asked someone what happened to him they told her he was bitten by a spider. Now we can presume that it was an adult just placating a child, but to her it was true and from that moment she was afraid of spiders. She had made an improper reference between spiders and (ultimately) death. To her, spiders meant getting old (dying) and being crippled (pain, shame, and death).

So in this situation you could tap on, Even though I’m afraid I’ll be crippled and die if I get bit by a spider…

While the fear of death is heavily implicated in phobias (you can almost always find it), the fear of shame and pain are also very powerful. In my experience, virtually all cases of fear of public speaking have the fear of shame as the underlying issue. I also have one client who is afraid to go into stores or restaurants. For him, it is a fear of what other people think about him (shame) and what they might do to him (pain and death).

Some issues tend to have fairly predictable fears related to them. For instance:
Claustrophobia is often a fear of not being able to breathe which is a fear of dying.
Fear of flying is often a fear of dying and a fear of pain.
Fear of snakes is often a fear of being bit, which is a fear of pain and death.

So in my experience, if you can relate the fear to these three great fears, then incorporate it into your EFT Setup statement, you will move through phobias quite easily. In so doing, you will find that you get to the core issue quite quickly and have amazing results with even the stickiest phobias.

Hope this helps!

Deborah Lindsey

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