Needle Phobia

I found myself listening to Jeremy Vine on the radio the other day, discussing needle phobia and many people phoned the show to talk about their experiences of this very depilating fear.

The impact of this phobia on many people’s life can be very dramatic especially if people have to have regular injections for diabetes or for other medical problems.

There are many reasons a person may have a needle phobia, it may be to do an early experience at school, possibly hearing other children telling stories about how much it hurts, or just the idea of the injection itself .Other people may worry about infections from needles, what they are being injected with, the size of the needle or the manner in which they were given the injection.

However what people often don’t realise is just how much help there is available. There are many therapies available to help people with needle phobias quite successfully and rapidly, a selection of them is detailed below:

Cognitive Behaviour Therapy (CBT) and Rational Emotive Behaviour Therapy (REBT) – both similar ‘talking’ therapies that help a person to think differently whilst using behavioural exposure to the fear.

Thought Field Therapy (TFT) –that involves the person thinking of their fear whilst tapping on meridian points on their body. Although this sounds quite unusual it is very effective in treating fears and phobias.

Hypnosis – despite how hypnosis is presented in the media, it is a very safe therapy where the client has full control throughout the session. This therapy is once again very helpful in treating phobias quite rapidly

Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP) has developed several techniques that have been found to be very successful in treat phobias. Sometimes these techniques maybe used in combination with more formal hypnosis however they can also be used separately.

Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) is another therapy that has proven to be very successful in treating phobias. A person is asked to thinking about a specific aspect of their fear whilst using bi-lateral stimulation. This may involve the client moving their eyes back and forth or the use of alternate taps on the back of the hand or listening to alternate sounds played through head phones. This helps the brain to reprocess their fear and helps the person to feel relaxed when confronted by the fear.