These examples seem to come along nearly every other day now... people putting themselves at high risk in order to combat a fear that could be dealt with much more safely and comfortably.
This time it's a celebrity - Winona Ryder - who decided to use powerful prescription drugs to combat her fear of flying. The result? She apparently overdosed on tranquilizers, forcing the pilot to request a priority landing so she could be rushed to the hospital.
Click here for the story from Reuters.
Thankfully, Ms. Ryder survived and is in good health. It's a shame that with all her wealth and popularity, she hasn't yet found the help she needs to address her fear appropriately.
Drugs (tranquilizers, in this case) treat symptoms, that's it. They do nothing to address the cause. Even if you never overdose on them, the best you can hope for is that you'll continue taking them for the rest of your life. It's dependency... slavery, if you will.
Fear begins in the subconscious. There are thoughts that cross Winona Ryder's mind when she takes a flight, or even thinks about flying, and these thoughts produce feelings of panic and anxiety. People who enjoy flying don't think about it the same way. If they did, they'd be as afraid as she is.
The way to eliminate a phobia is to change the thoughts that produce the feelings. Once the thoughts change, the response changes automatically. It doesn't matter how long the fear has been in place. It doesn't matter what the feared object may be.
The change can happen very quickly.
While it is understandable that to someone who hasn't studied or experienced hypnosis or NLP (neuro-linguistic programming), this may seem fanciful - too good to be true - the truth is that therapists have been curing phobias in this way for decades. Do a little Google research into the "10-minute phobia cure" created by Richard Bandler (photo, above), the co-founder of NLP.
I often tell my clients the story of how I cured my first phobia after reading a famous book co-authored by Richard Bandler and John Grinder - Frogs into Princes (pictured below). I quite literally had a couple months' worth of hypnotherapy training, added to the knowledge I gained reading Bandler & Grinder's books, when I made my first attempt. The result? I helped a 52-year-old woman lose her 33-year phobia of cats - in one session.
Now I'm no conspiracy theorist, but I instantly began to wonder why something so simple and safe would remain relatively unknown to the majority of the population. After all, even most psychiatrists these days still employ "exposure" therapy to cure fears and phobias.
Then I realized that many psychiatrists prescribe pharmaceuticals to patients for the phobias, and that large pharmaceutical companies like Merck and Pfizer make billions of dollars a year selling these drugs to people. While a hypnotherapist might make a few hundred bucks curing your fear, think about how much money can be made selling you prescription drugs for the rest of your life.
Treating phobias with drugs is profitable. It's big business.
So if you're skeptical as to whether something like hypnosis could actually work, and if so, why it remains so obscure (even though it's becoming more mainstream), consider how many billions of dollars in profits would be lost if everyone stopped taking tranquilizers and used hypnosis to eliminate their anxiety.
My hope is that Ms. Ryder, and anyone else suffering from intense fear or anxiety, will now seek help from someone who's well-trained in hypnosis and NLP, so this kind of thing doesn't happen again.
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