Intensive Phobias
Rehab & TREATMENT PROGRAM

When do I have Phabia? It is perfectly normal for all human beings to experience anxiety and phobia at various times in their life. A certain amount of anxiety and phobia is healthy and performs a valuable function; enabling us to develop life skills and learn how to stay safe, grow and build resilience in life. How we manage and ‘grow’ from anxiety is dependent upon our ability to ‘recover’ from what we perceive as a threat, challenge, loss, crisis, change or fear in our life. Our ability to manage and cope with anxious situations is developed and ‘hot-wired’ in the central nervous system and is influenced by our early childhood experience and development.

How we manage anxiety and phobia is predominantly modelled (and learnt) through our primary caregivers (most commonly our parents). If anxiety is not managed in a ‘good enough’ way of coping with anxiety is experienced in a harmful or damaging way, it leaves us entering the world with a distorted version of life and we are left with inadequate emotional and life skills which are needed to be able to overcome life’s problems. If we do not learn healthy life skills and learn how to ‘be comfortable with’ and manage anxiety in a healthy way, then eventually the anxiety compromises our immune system’s ability to function, leaving us vulnerable to illness and exhaustion. As we encounter more anxiety we may experience bouts of depression, anger, and panic.

Modern-day stress and anxiety are reflective of the modern world we live in and often are related to us not feeling ‘good enough’ or not feeling successful, feeling ‘a failure’, always feeling unsatisfied, unable to maintain relationships. We strive for perfection and the anxiety ‘merry go round’ continues. Due to the uncomfortable feelings associated with high levels of anxiety, we develop our strategies and behaviour patterns to deal with (deny or numb out) these feelings, for example; self-medicating to dull emotional pain, drinking alcohol to relax or shut out feeling anxiety, working excessively to distract from the pressures and anxieties of life, over or under eating for comfort or to fill the frightening feeling of anxiety.

All these maladaptive behaviours are efforts to feel in control or discard uncomfortable feelings. The anxiety-related illness kills more people on the planet than any other condition. It is linked to cancer, heart disease, depression and addiction. Anxiety can also result in high suicide rates – especially among men.