The NLP Fast Phobia Cure was developed by Richard Bandler and John Grinder (the founders of Neuro-linguistic Programming). They had had great success in discovering how much it was possible to change quickly, simply by approaching things that people wanted to change in their mind with a curiosity about HOW these things occurred.
The story is that they decided to see if they could make a difference in the area of phobias and started by placing an advert in the paper asking for people who ‘used to have a phobia but don’t anymore' to come forward for a research project. They then established what these people had in common in HOW they pictured the thing/situation that they used to be phobic of.
They found a very clear commonality – they all saw the picture of themselves with that thing/situation as if they were observing it from the outside (as if they were watching a movie instead of inside the movie like an actor).
The Fast Phobia Cure was then created as a guided process to help people change their internal pictures to create this perspective. The process involves a skilled NLP Practitioner guiding the Client to picture things from their memory that feels completely safe. It is as if it is the opposite of exposure therapy – key to the process working is that the client does not re-live the fear of the phobic response during the change process.
The fact that it works often shocks people. It is so far removed from the popular psychological concept in western culture that you ‘have to feel the fear and express it’ to recover from something. It is quite common for people to no longer have the phobia and find it completely baffled that the process could have made the difference that it did.
The NLP Fast Phobia Cure is one of the most famous processes created in Neuro-Linguistic Programming (and there are hundreds).
It works for a simple phobia, where someone has a simple ‘trigger’ followed by a big fear response. A simple phobia is a very fast reaction and usually can happen on a small level, just at the thought (the internal picture) of the object/situation. The Fast Phobia Cure would not be expected to work (by itself) with something like a phobic response where the person is not sure what the trigger is.
If you are reading this because you suffer from a phobia and would like to get rid of it, I offer an online service for folks with a fear of needles. This was something created after I worked with several clients on this and heard people talking about how anxious they were starting to feel with the constant images of needles and injections on the news due to the Covid Vaccination. As there is more and more talk about how travel and other things may be dependent on someone being vaccinated, I thought it would be a good idea to get the word out there that there is a well-established process to cure a phobia and it works online!
Below is a video demonstration of the process demonstrated in front of a large group at a training seminar and then a follow-up 25 years later. The Facilitator, Steve Andreas, is one of the early developers of NLP and is now passed away.
Note, this process has now been clinically researched by the US military in the treatment of PTSD in veterans with incredibly encouraging results (90%+ full recovery over 4 trials). If you are interested in learning more about these clinical trials, click here to download a PDF 'Summary of Research', with references to the original studies.
At this point in time, there is no clinical research for its use with phobias, however, it continues to be used by NLP Practitioners working with thousands of people all over the world as an 'alternative therapy. Because it is so well-established, many Practitioners offer a money-back guarantee to people who have struggled with a phobia for a long time and find it hard to believe that it could be cleared so easily.
If you have a needle phobia and would like to access this method online, click through here to learn more.
