THERAPY FOR PHOBIAS
Do you have an Overwhelming Fear or Anxiety of a particular object, place, situation, animal or activity? If so we can help you overcome both longstanding and more recent Phobias with effective and short term therapy – often lasting only two or three sessions. Contact us on 0800 0614548 to arrange treatment now.
WHAT IS A PHOBIA?
You probably have good knowledge of phobias already as they are one of the most common psychological problems people experience.
Phobias are when you experience a significant level of fear or anxiety around a particular object, place, situation or animal. Whilst this list of things that trigger phobias isn’t exhaustive it hopefully demonstrates that you can have a phobia about nearly everything. The key part to phobias is that they produce high levels of distress that you realise are unnecessary. This can often result in particular consequences to your life – usually noticing that you have to avoid certain things, which can in many cases have an unwanted impact.
You might be experiencing one of two types of phobias – called either simple phobias or complex phobias. Simple phobias (sometimes also called specific phobias) are when you feel anxiety of fear in response to a specific object, animal, situation (such as heights, water etc), body experience (such as being sick, blood or having an injection). Complex phobias are when your anxiety is triggered by certain circumstances you might find yourself in – for example Social Phobia or Agoraphobia (a fear of not being able to escape to safety, sometimes with panic attacks.) We have written pages for both of these types of phobias which you can access by clicking on the words above.
WHAT TREATMENTS WORK WITH PHOBIAS?
Psychological therapy for phobias is usually very effective. Most research has been carried out using Cognitive and Behavioural types of therapy to treat specific phobias. Whilst other types of therapy may be useful to some people they have not generally been researched to such a rigorous level.
Usually treatment approaches focus on gradually exposing you to the thing that causes you anxiety whilst changing the way you think about it and cope with it. These types of treatments can be effective in very short spaces of time – in many cases three sessions, with a slightly longer middle session may be all you need.
It is important to remember that treatments for phobias are not designed to ‘make you like’ the thing that triggers your phobia – but to be able to manage it and reduce the affect it has on your life.
Medication is not usually recommended in the treatment of phobias – however in some cases it may be helpful to consider a combined approach and we would be able to advise you on this.
HOW EFFECTIVE ARE TREATMENTS WITH US?
We offer Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, which is Recommended by the National Institute for Clinical Excellence (NICE) as a highly effective treatment for Anxiety problems. Our treatments are delivered by skilled health professionals with many years in practice – often in the NHS or in academic institutions.
As well as only delivering clinically recommended treatments, to the best of our knowledge we are the only independent psychological therapy provider to routinely collect, monitor and publish data on the effectiveness of therapy that our team offers. Why not take a look at how effective our treatments have been for clients so far?
