12/02/2024
What's a fast phobia intervention? It's exactly how it sounds.
This intervention allows you to take a phobia and desensitise your emotion (fear) associated with it.
This technique uses visualisation as it's main process. The visual learners of you out there will find this super easy!
First of all, you need to be in a quiet place to be able to concentrate, so find somewhere you wont be disturbed and there's no distractions around.
Once you have found a quiet place, we need to close our eyes and visualise a cinema. It can be an old style theatre cinema with the big chandeliers, old red cloth seats and those little lights on the steps as it goes down. Make it a visual as you can (Visualise your own place). Really imagine yourself walking through the doors into the auditorium.
Once you have this image, Sit in the front seats of the cinema. Looking up, you can see the screen right in front of you, nice and big. From here we want to dissociate yourself. We do this by floating ourselves out of your body, floating up and to the back seats leaving your body still in the front seats.
As you now sit in the back seats, you can see your body still in the front row ready to watch the film. This dissociates you physically from the phobia you're about to watch.
Take a time, a memory that really stands out as a clear driver behind your phobia. It could be a time you fell off your horse and got seriously injured, or a scary unplanned canter. What ever it is, it must be a clear and vivid memory connected to your phobia.
As you sit at the back watching your body watch the video, play the scene on the big screen from start to finish.
Once played... change the video into black and white and replay it.
Now play it backwards, still in black and white. Each time watch the full video in your mind, as you watch your body watch it in the cinema from the back seats. (3rd person perspective)
At this point, this may be enough to have desensitised from the phobia. If not, try adding a comical sound track like the Benny Hill theme tune or similar. Dress yourself in a funny fancy dress and give the horse a dress. What we are trying to do is make the emotions attached to the phobia feel different and less scary.
You can do this as many times as you need to dissociate.
What we're trying to do it reduce your fear associated with the scene. By doing this, every time in the future that you are represented with this phobia, you'll react differently. It's OK to know it may be dangerous, however you'll have less fear about it.
Final stage. Break your state of concentration by reciting your phone number backwards to your self.
Now think about putting yourself into a future position where normally your phobia would kick in and see how you feel about it now.
Repeat as necessary.
This is the Fast Phobia technique.
Camel Valley Riding Club
