This post tells about something about treatment of phobias

1. The legendary fast phobia
cure
A man with a spider phobia walks into a room. His phobia means
that he can’t even look at a picture of something that looks like a
spider without having a panic attack. So he unconsciously scans
the room for spiders as he sits down in a comfortable chair
opposite a therapist. Twenty minutes later he is standing in the
middle of the room with a spider on his hand and a smile of his
face.

2. A remarkable therapist? Probably not. A fluke? No: this kind of
thing happens all the time. A remarkable treatment? Yes: the man
has just experienced the Fast Phobia Cure.
WHAT EXACTLY IS THE FAST PHOBIA CURE?
The Fast Phobia Cure is probably the single most reliable and
effective tool in psychotherapy today. It is reckoned to be about
90% successful on most phobias because it does what it says — it
cures phobias fast. The twenty minute example above is quite
typical. And it does this without the scare tactics, psychological
archeology, drugs and exposure used by the older and less
effective phobia treatments.
HOW IT WORKS
Most of us have experienced traumatic and upsetting events in our
lives. When we look back on these events, they are never pleasant
memories but they don’t upset us to the extent they did at the
time.
For the phobic, it’s different. Very different. When they recall their
trauma, they feel pretty much the same as they did at the time it
first happened, even if that was decades ago. They have vivid and
affecting memories of the event.

3. It is these kinds of memories — held in the emotional part of the
brain — that drive and maintain phobias. Such memories are so
strong and present that just recalling them can bring on fear
responses. That is, the phobic is associated into these memories so
it’s almost as if they are in the situation again, experiencing similar
responses — panic, pounding heart, shaking, sweating and an
overwhelming desire to run.
For the rest of us, our traumatic memories are disassociated —
they are more factual and carry less emotion — because they have,
over time, been processed by the logical, thinking part of the mind.
For the phobic, this disassociation hasn’t happen. But it needs to.
The Fast Phobia Cure is a process of rapid dissociation. It allows
the sufferer to experience the traumatic memories from a calm
and dissociated, or disconnected, state. The other part of the mind
— the unemotional, rational, thinking mind — can then go to work
turning the memories into ordinary, factual, neutral, non-
threatening ones. Like the memory of what you had for breakfast.
With the emotional tag unstuck from the phobic encounters, the
phobia is de-conditioned. It’s gone.
THE MECHANICS
The way to achieve this dissociation is to have the sufferer imagine
watching themselves from a remote, third person or detached
position going through the traumatic event.

4. The classic scenario is to have them imagine themselves in a movie
theatre watching an old black and white movie of them going
through the experience at very high speed (like watching a video
on fast forward). The dissociation can be increased by having them
imagine being in the projection booth watching themselves sitting
in their cinema seat watching the film of their younger self going
through the experience. This creates the distance and comfort for
dissociation to occur.
They are then asked to step into the safe time at the end of the
movie and imagine physically rewinding through the experience at
very high speed. This step is repeated several times. It creates
dissociation because the mind has never experienced the
traumatic event backwards and thus has no prepared fear
response for it, so they experience it in calm. The memory is
recoded by the brain and saved with less emotional charge
attached to it.
These steps are the core of the Fast Phobia Cure. They are run on
the key traumatic memories around the phobia — typically three
or four such memories are used — in a process that can take as
little as five minutes.
VARIATIONS
Variations of the Fast Phobia Cure can involve changing the
cinema scenario to just watching a television screen, or having

5. them imagine witnessing the event as a bystander, from a
helicopter or birds-eye view, or seeing it played out on a stage. Or,
once the memory is more comfortable, having them watch a
“director’s cut” by adding their own soundtrack (light or silly
music is often used) and changing something about the way it
looked in a creative and humorous way.
MEASURING AND TESTING THE CHANGE
Before, during and after the Fast Phobia Cure is run, the individual
is asked to rate their level of discomfort around the traumatic
memories. Very high levels of discomfort fall rapidly to zero or
thereabouts when the Fast Phobia Cure is run. Such rapid change
is often a shock and a delight to the subjects.
The final step is to test the new responses by searching out the old
trigger (going on a spider hunt with the man in the example
above). Again, subjects are usually surprised by how keen they are
to do this and by the feeling of not being scared around the old
trigger. To many it can indeed seem miraculous. But the Fast
Phobia Cure isn’t miraculous: it’s just based on good brain science,
on current neurology.
THE ADVANTAGES
As well as its reliability, the Fast Phobia Cure has three key
advantages over traditional phobia treatments.

6. Firstly, as the name suggests, it’s fast. The treatment usually takes
only a single session. The mind learns very quickly. It learned to be
phobic very quickly, perhaps in a matter of seconds. Learning how
not to be phobic again can be, and is necessarily, equally quick. So
long painful treatment is not necessary.
Secondly, it’s safe. There is no direct confrontation with the phobic
trigger and the phobic is calm and comfortable throughout the
treatment.
Thirdly, it’s non-intrusive. Because the “movies” are the patient’s,
the therapist does not need to know the precise details of the
traumatic memory or phobic encounters.
WHY IS IT NOT MORE WIDELY AVAILABLE?
The Fast Phobia Cure is a remarkable treatment that can be
learned and used by any competent therapist. But it’s not being
widely used. Why?
The answer seems to be that it works too well. And too fast. It can
be done in minutes and easily within a single therapy session. And
there’s the rub: therapists using the Fast Phobia Cure will probably
need to see a client just once, so they don’t make much money.
And traditional old-school therapists and counsellors when faced
with fast, painless results start to question their own models of
long, drawn-out painful therapy.