The other day I talked with a client that told me they had previously had a huge problem, she had a fear of doctors and hospitals. For someone that is diabetic this is a huge complication that can cause more than just a few problems. When I asked her why, like most problems she told she did not know why, she then explained that she did not have this problem a few years ago. It had started after she had to have surgery for a minor problem, but it was enough that they had to use anesthesia on the client. The next thing she told me is truly the thing that nightmares are made of; it seems that during the entire surgery she was conscious, she said everything was distorted, the sounds in the room echoed and varied, she had her eyes partially open and her vision was blurry distorted, but she was still conscious none the less, and also she felt everything they had done to her during her surgery. From this for over 2 years she nightmares about the distorted doctor she saw working on her and the events she went through. When I heard this, my heart about stopped. To be unable to say or do anything while a doctor was performing surgery on you no matter how small, words fail to describe how horrible an experience like this is, but its does speak volumes about how severely she was scarred by the experience that she re-lived night after night for over 2 years. She is over her fear of doctors now thanks to the help of hypnosis and NLP and she is pretty much guaranteed that the night mares are over. But between this and my own experience of watching a couple of horror movies I recently watched that left me mildly disturbed and jumping at my own shadow for a couple of days made me think about the subject of fear.
Why is it that with all of the horrible things in life that exist and atrocities in real life, do we have movies and TV shows that have the intent to scare us? Some say it is by and large a hold out in our minds of times when we had rites of passage that marked our passage into being adults. While others theorize that we watch these things because it is our way of suppressing our violent tendencies left over from our more savage times before we became civilized. I personally find the theory that sometimes in life we need a good scare to remind us that even though we witness so many things that are horrible in our lives, in our own lives and in the lives of our friends and loved ones, that horror movies are there as a kind of safe haven where we can be frightened in a safe environment, where the danger is only in our minds and this allows us a modicum of comfort and humor while still being reminded there are worse things we could be forced to endure, simply for the right to survive another day.
Research has proven that no matter what kind of fear we experience be it real or imaginary, our bodies and minds reactions are exactly the same. Your pulse rate quickens, your heart rate increases and our minds race with alternatives and solutions to the problems presented before us. This is the very same state that helps us to empathize with others and allows us to create rapport with everyone we meet and know. Rapport is the foundation for all relationships with everyone we have and will meet in our lifetimes. Why is it that with all of the horrible things in life that exist and atrocities in real life, do we have movies and TV shows that have the intent to scare us? Some say it is by and large a hold out in our minds of times when we had rites of passage that marked our passage into being adults. While others theorize that we watch these things because it is our way of suppressing our violent tendencies left over from our more savage times before we became civilized. I personally find the theory that sometimes in life we need a good scare to remind us that even though we witness so many things that are horrible in our lives, in our own lives and in the lives of our friends and loved ones, that horror movies are there as a kind of safe haven where we can be frightened in a safe environment, where the danger is only in our minds and this allows us a modicum of comfort and humor while still being reminded there are worse things we could be forced to endure, simply for the right to survive another day.
Also have you ever noticed that in the theatre people seem to react more profoundly to the movie that if they were watching in the seclusion of their homes? This is a powerful ability our minds utilize to create inside us a state that allows us to go into another form of trance. This phenomenon is what we call group or mass hypnosis. Basically when watching we empathize with the characters were watching and thusly in a large group it creates a state of rapport in the theatre, so in this sense we are actually sharing our fear, nervousness, bravery, sense of humor etc… Being an unspoken form of communication it easily affects everyone universally through out the entire group of people in the theatre. This same type of responsiveness from large groups is responsible for 100% of all riots. When I was a child I remember the cabbage patch kid’s frenzy that gripped
Our minds and bodies are inescapably, and completely linked, anything we can create in our minds our bodies will follow. In the case of emotions like fear, remember we were taught that to have certain reactions when we are exposed to certain stimuli we would encounter in our later lives as children. In the case of scary movies it could have been a sibling that came home from freshly seeing a movie like Friday the 13th or A Nightmare on Elm Street, and they told us how frightening they were, but how cool the movie was at the same time. Personally I think this type of conditioning started even earlier than that, we all remember mother goose and her book of rhymes, many cases of arachnophobia could have been averted if we had but not hear the words, “Little Miss Muffet sat on her tuffet eating her curds and way…”
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