2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43
About phobia and how to remove it.
Once my old friend got a job as an electrician. Everything would be fine, but he had to maintain the lighting in a large basement.
And almost every second ceiling was inhabited by a family of spiders. Small, harmless.
And all would be fine, but even such spiders caused shock, and when they fell by the collar - panic.
As usual, they simulated how his psyche organizes a phobia.
It turned out that there is a picture, large, overhead, bright, lively, three-dimensional. And in this boundless picture there is a very very lively and large spider, which is just about to grab.
While modeling, I tried on myself. And yes, it became scary, although I have a rather calm attitude towards spiders. Rather, a research interest about the dangers of one or the other.
So, returning to my friend, I will further call him the Client.
Every time he saw a spider, no matter what size and in what situation, this picture was activated, with the corresponding sweating, heartbeat and other manifestations of stress and panic. True, it never came to fainting.
Having discovered this image, the client performed a series of operations that returned him a sense of control and, accordingly, removed the phobic reaction.
Determined where in his subjective, in his imagination, dangerous creatures are. It turned out to be a small area to the left, a little further than an outstretched arm. I remembered the characteristics of the images, their brightness, color, clarity.
Since his internal resource and my presence were not enough, he attracted an additional resource. Metaphorically, these are the hands of an angel. Well, this is the metaphor he has formed. It could also be the hands of the father, mother, God, the CIA, the KGB. The very principle of constructing a metaphor is that an additional resource in the client's view should be stronger than both the client and the object of the phobia.
With the help of his hands he made the boundaries of the image, set the frames, limitations for him. At the same time, a kind of separation of the client's space and the space in which the "spider lives" took place. At this moment, the client's strongest stress dropped sharply, from the conditional 10 and to 4x. The fear and disgust remained.
Further, while still with the help of "hands", the client transferred the image to the area of control - in front of the chest and moved it away. At this point, the intensity of the fear decreased, the disgust almost disappeared, but the internal tension remained, on a scale of about 2 out of 10.
Then I asked the client, first with the help of hands, and then without it, myself, to move the image of the spider left-right, forward and backward. Throw the spider "over the horizon" and return. Thus, he was trained in gaining control over the image.
Restoring full control over the image is its destruction and recreation. I asked to destroy and by will to recreate the image of the spider several times. After the second iteration, the tension disappeared completely, the image changed a lot, it became just a picture.
Further, I asked to place this image in space next to other dangerous creatures, and bring its dimensions and other visual characteristics into the same form as other dangerous creatures.
He asked me to talk about my feelings about spiders. Fear disappeared, research interest appeared. The client decided to delve into Wikipedia and other sources, to look for information about different spiders. Instead of fear and an attempt to escape, he developed a sense of boundaries, security, which allowed him to show research interest.
We checked the reaction to pictures with spiders. If before there was a fading, shortness of breath, disgust, now - interest, interest.
And, of course, a reality check. Work in the basement ceased to be perceived as hard labor and torture. A couple of weeks later, he sent a photo with a tarantula in the palm of his hand.
Oh, yes, Spielberg has something to do with it. A 6-year-old guy watched the movie "Fear of Spiders". In the evening. I was alone at home, somehow it happened.
He remembered this immediately after the phobia disappeared.
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