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How To Overcome The Grip Of A Social Phobia

One of the most common phobias is social phobia, a condition in which a person is scared of being in a social setting. A person with social phobia experiences unbearable fear that impacts important aspects of their life.

People with social phobia are very self-conscious and worried about what others may say or think about them. They are often afraid of speaking up, out of fear that they might be judged or berated. People with social phobia tend to look down on themselves or suffer from low self-esteem. They are often worried about being noticed by other people and find socializing to be very stressful.

A person with social anxieties may seem “shy,” but in the case of a phobia, this is taken to extremes. For example, if you have social phobia, you might be reluctant to make a crucial phone call because you are anxious about talking on the telephone. You make the call, but you are so nervous that you “freeze up” or forget why you called. Although it can happen to everyone sometimes, for someone with social phobia it may occur every time, until they find it near impossible to make any calls.

Imagine it is the evening before a big presentation at work and you find yourself in a panic. You dread the thought of being in front of a room with your boss and all your co-workers watching as you talk about a project or new idea. You can’t stop yourself from feeling very embarrassed and self-conscious. Even after the meeting, you keep overanalyzing everything you did and said. You worry that you humiliated yourself in front of your colleagues by stuttering or saying the wrong thing.

Or perhaps you would like to go to parties and make friends, but you avoid socializing because you are anxious about introducing yourself to new people. You find crowded parties daunting and the thought of meeting new people frightens you. You worry about saying the right thing, or that you’ll get laughed at. You might end up staying at home a lot because you are too scared to go out. These are only a few of the ways social phobias can affect our daily lives.

Social phobias are overblown fears that can keep you from reaching your professional goals or fully enjoying life. But even people who realize their fears are irrational may not be able to handle their fears. People with social anxiety disorder often want to socialize and make new friends, but are too scared to try. In spite of their conscious desires and hard work, they cannot control their fears because every phobia is seated in the unconscious level of the mind. Ericksonian hypnotherapy and Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) techniques are the most successful phobia treatments because they work at this unconscious level.

It can be difficult for people with social phobia to get help because they are reluctant to see a therapist or talk about their fear. This is another reason why hypnosis programs work well for them. The programs foster a confidence boosting, calm mind frame in a privacy, without being intimidating or overwhelming.

The first stage in a phobia program is stress relief. Hypnotic therapy is a powerful tool for eliminating your stress and anxiety. When you are de-stressed, hypnosis techniques will help shape positive ideas in your unconscious mind and extinguish your social phobia. NLP techniques are used to relieve your fears by targeting the thought process that produces a phobia.

In traditional hypnosis, specifically worded post-hypnotic suggestions are used to address each different phobia. The problem is, people have a tendency to resist being directly told what to do or think, so traditional hypnosis doesn’t work very well. A deeply rooted phobia calls for the use of NLP and Ericksonian Hypnotherapy.

Ericksonian hypnosis techniques are more effective than traditional hypnosis because they use suggestions that aren’t apparent to the conscious mind, versus direct suggestions. These suggestions are placed in conversation, in different stories and metaphors, to persuade the unconscious mind to follow a different line of thought. This is why Ericksonian hypnosis is far more effective than conventional hypnotic therapy and far more difficult for the unconscious mind to reject.

A program that includes Ericksonian hypnosis therapy and NLP techniques can treat any phobia, in any person. This is because various techniques are used together to maximize their success rate. People are frequently in awe of the apparently miraculous changes they see through hypnosis. Ericksonian hypnotherapy and NLP are ideal tools to help you build confidence and beat social phobia so you will be able to fully enjoy life.

Alan B. Densky, CH has developed many hypnotic techniques for overcomming shyness and social phobia. He also offers hypnosis CD’s for any phobia. His authority website offers a full list of hypnosis & NLP CD’s. Visit for Free self-hypnosis videos, downloads, and newsletters.

- Alan B. Densky, CH

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 7th, 2008 at 1:09 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.