Miracle coach Liz Davies meets with Ray A-J to clear the stigma around phobias, and gives us some tips on how to cure them.
There’s a plague infecting hundreds of people around the world. An invisible parasite that’s latching onto its victims, draining them of all hope and courage. It’s everywhere. It’s dangerous… And worst of all, its carrying on unnoticed. What is this vicious sickness? One word: fear. I’m a phobia sufferer, and for most of us, finding a way out of the painful hold it has seems unreachable. It’s a difficult thing to get over. Luckily, phobia survivor Liz Davies has some solutions for getting over a phobia (and other mental illnesses).
Ray: So you help cure people of phobias, how does that work?
Liz: “I used to work in the NHS and a lot of what I did was cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) based. You previously mentioned how you combated your phobia by putting yourself in the situation that was scary, and that gradually made the fear reduce. That’s CBT.
“It’s about retraining your thoughts to reduce the amount of fear you feel when you’re exposed to your trigger. The response. It becomes a habit and then that fear grows because your brain thinks that the trigger is definitely scary, and so you need to stay away from it. But by gradually exposing yourself to, like, pictures of your stimulus, you can reduce your response because your fight or flight will gradually stop triggering, and you can then move up to the next level.”
Liz explains that she felt there was an easier way to treat phobias. There had to be a method that was quicker and less arduous or demanding than CBT. A little something called hypnotherapy.
Liz: “I had hypnotherapy myself. So hypnotherapy taps into the subconscious (where the root of the problem is) and takes you right back to the source memory so you can combat it. It’s almost like you’ve had a glass of wine, you’re taken back in a relaxed state to that memory. You can see it from an adult’s point of view, so it isn’t as scary as it was the first time.”
As it turns out, Liz once suffered from a phobia too. Hers was resolved with hypnotherapy.
Liz: “I had a phobia of spiders – I didn’t realise how extreme it was. It was serious. I’d spent my whole life being terrified of them. Every room I entered, I would scan for them. I just thought it was normal – my mum and sister were scared of them too. I remember saying, to me, a spider was scarier then an axe murderer.”
“Then I saw a hypnotherapist, after attending a talk on it (which blew me away), and he took me back to my first memory of spiders. It was vivid – I was a little girl and I had seen a spider in the bath tub. I could see it exactly how it was. I was curious about it, so I asked my mum what I was. She was terrified of them, so she screamed when she saw it. She never screamed. And that was what made me scared – my subconscious thought if my mum was scared of it, it must have been dangerous.
“That experience (hypnotherapy) changed my life really, because it taught me how easy it can be to release these fears. All you need to do is go back to it (your trigger) in a therapeutic way, to see it from an adult’s perspective and see it very differently. When I walked into rooms, I no longer scanned them. And so I too trained as a hypnotherapist. It was like learning magic; I was learning that we don’t have to have that fear or that worry.”
Liz spoke about energy and a sort of chakra system that can contribute to how we feel. She refers to Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT), which works on the basis that feelings can get stuck in your emotional lines, and if left unprocessed can lead to great distress – something that can fester and grow into a severe unhappiness.
Phobias can be cured via many methods such as the ones described above, and EFT (described in my Phobia column). As a miracle coach and hypnotherapist, Liz explains that she utilises these when freeing patients of their problems (whether that be a phobia, anxiety, or depression) in as little as two sessions. A patient can be of any age, and would pay £75 per session to cure their issue.
Despite all of the help available, there is still a stigma attached to the word ‘phobia’ and ‘mental health’. Perhaps with a little empathy and understanding, we can put a stop to this.
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