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WHEN FEAR TAKES HOLD

They may seem bizarre to the rest of us, but phobias can have a devastating impact on the lives of those who suffer them. Grant Woodward reports ...

Her friends keep telling her to give peas a chance, but Louise Arnold goes all mushy at the very thought. The 35-year-old has such a phobia of peas - particularly the common garden variety lurking in freezers nationwide - that she cannot bear to be in the same room as them.

It began five years ago, after her daughter Chloe was bom. Now talking or even thinking about peas is enough to make her throat constrict, while seeing them is enough to push her into a panic attack. Louise, from Cheltenham, is unable to so much as watch a television advert for peas or go to her local pub because the restaurant serves them. Even trips to the supermarket are fraught with difficulty as she has to avoid aisles where peas are found.

Friends think her problem is a huge joke - even giving her a T-shirt with 'Give Peas A Chance' written on it - but phobias are no laughing matter. A recent survey carried out by Leeds station 96.3 Radio Aire revealed that polystyrene, clowns, blackboards, matches, birds and wet wood were just a few of the weird and wacky things people couldn't bear to be around. Cotton wool was another unlikely source of anxiety, with one listener from Chapel Allerton confessing: "My ex-husband has a phobia about cotton wool and when I left him I left it all over the house."

Affliction

Being afraid of frozen peas or cotton wool may seem a rather unusual affliction, but phobias are very common, with up to 16 million Britons thought to suffer from irrational fears.

Consultant clinical psychologist Mary Burgess says they can make it extremely difficult for sufferers to function socially. "People often think they are going mad, other people laugh at them. They may feel quite isolated and swamped."

And being exposed to your particular fear can result in a panic attack, causing rapid breathing, chest pains and pins and needles.

The National Phobics Society says anxiety-related disorders, like phobias, can be triggered by a range of factors, including stress, physical factors such as thyroid problems, childhood environment, genetic predispositions and biochemical imbalances (changes in the levels of chemical messengers in the brain). Burgess explains that most phobias develop in response to stressful situations.

"It's usually from having a bad experience and it becomes linked with an object. Often these objects are things we need to be wary of- such as spiders, where we sense danger," she says. "But if your background level of anxiety is high and you're in a fearful state anyway, it may increase your chances of a having a fearful response."

If you grew up with a mother petrified of spiders, chances are you will 'inherit' her fear, she says. "It's quite common for children to have fears like night terrors and fear of the dark, but they leam a lot from adults. If you see someone get very scared of something, you take that on. Children can become sensitised to things and family fears can be picked up."

One man offering help to those desperate to rid themselves of their hang-ups is West Yorkshire phobia expert John Ellis.

The registered hypno-therapist uses a trademarked technique known as Time Line Therapy to help his clients conquer their terror, allowing them to lead normal lives.

He has cured people suffering from a range of phobias from a fear of dentists to a panic over eating in public. John, who works out of a clinic in Bingley, says he has cured scores of people since starting out eight years ago using Time Line Therapy and something known as Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP).

Behaviour

"NLP is really a study of how the mind works, enabling you to change behaviour," he explains. "Time Line Therapy relates to the mind and how we store memories. The two procedures together work beautifully in connection with releasing phobias.

"The human mind is like a computer. If something is not quite right with a computer you can reprogramme it so that it works properly. If a mind is not working correctly, as with something like phobias, then you can help the client to reprogramme it so that it works perfectly."

John says people come to him for help with all sorts of phobias. They range from the common ones - such as a fear of spiders, heights, flying or confined spaces - to the more unusual ones.

"One I get a lot is something called emetophobia, which is a fear of being sick or seeing someone else being sick. It's almost always women who have this phobia and generally they're pregnant or have a young child who is off to school for the first time and is going to pick up classroom sicknesses. That's what motivates them to come and see me. I also had somebody who had a fear of the plant Stepmother's Blessing. In the summer they couldn't go out for countryside walks. Someone else couldn't bear to eat in public. Then I get a lot with medical phobias - hospitals, going to the dentist, needles - and driving is another one, particularly dual carriageways or motorways. Agoraphobia, where someone can't go out of the house, is also quite common."

John reckons 60 per cent of his clients are women, though he thinks that could be down to the fact that a lot of men don't want to acknowledge that they have a problem.

Client

Before accepting a client he insists that they are completely ready to banish their phobia for good.

"I need to be sure they are at a stage where they have absolutely had enough of the phobia and want to do something about it. We work as a team and I need their total co-operation and willingness to resolve the problem otherwise they won't respond. I'm one of the few therapists in the country who gives a guarantee. If I accept someone as a client I agree to work with them for the fixed cost until the problem disappears. I'm confident that if someone really wants to get rid of a phobia then I can help them do it."

John says that in order to cure a phobia it is absolutely vital to find the root cause of it. He compares it to gardening. If you take the top off a weed it's free to grow again but if you get the root out it's gone for good. "Often they associate the source of their fear with something bad that has happened to them. Invariably it goes back to something very early un their lives. The first event may not have been too startling but later it builds and builds, it's like making a mountain out of a molehill."

John says Time Line Therapy discovers what triggered a particular phobia by asking questions designed to tap into the unconscious mind, the part that stores memories your conscious mind may not be able to recall.

"People's unconscious minds remember everything," he says. "Going somewhere, a smell, a taste or touch, can take you back 15 years. Consciously, we can't always reach things that our unconscious always knows. What you do is help the client themselves to trace things back."

The aim is to get the background to the problem and then build a rapport between the mind's unconscious and conscious, trying to get the sufferer to respond in a different manner. It doesn't matter what the phobia is or how long someone has had it, says John. The structure of the problem in the sufferer's mind will largely be the same. "It's great to see the way people respond. When they come in and you see how they react to whatever the problem is, then two or three hours later when they go out they are completely different, they're confident and happy. That's a great feeling.

"I do this because it's something I have a real interest in," he says. "But I also like to think of it as a public service. A lot of people don't think it's possible to take phobias they have had for years and shift them in the space of an afternoon, but it is."