Phobia factor
Professional help and self-help put Maria Moreno - who was seriously afraid of driving - on the road to recovery

By Peggy O'Farrell
Cincinnati Enquirer staff writer
Monday, September 26, 2005

Maria Moreno used to stop her car and cry, but hypnotherapy and anxiety management have helped her overcome her fears and drive again.

Maria Moreno hated driving.

On the interstate or in the city, Moreno was sure she was going to have an accident whenever she got behind the wheel. She had witnessed several wrecks as a child, and the images "got stuck in my mind," she says.

So, eventually, she stopped doing it.

"I would just get so nervous and not do it," the 35-year-old Clifton woman says. "When I would try to practice, I would just stop the car and start crying. I didn't have panic attacks. I just felt very nervous and insecure."

A combination of hypnotherapy and an anxiety management technique helped Moreno get past her intense fear of driving and back on the road after 10 years. Now, she drives everywhere, she says.

Fears and phobias are a roadblock for millions of Americans: Some can't look at spiders. Some can't get on roller coasters. Some are too scared of leaving their house to go to work or the supermarket or church.

Dr. Joseph Schroeder, a neuropsychologist with TriHealth, calls phobias "a self-perpetuating cycle" of escalating irrational anxiety. Someone who has a phobia about snakes, for example, might be too anxious to go hiking for fear of encountering one, and that person's thought process might spin into something like, "I'll see a snake and I'll be so afraid I'll pass out and the snake will bite me and I'll die.

"The secret to treating anxiety and phobias is to intervene in that cycle," Schroeder says.

Intervention usually means learning relaxation techniques, such as deep breathing, guided imagery or self-hypnosis, he says. Therapists also teach clients something similar to a script that they can use when they encounter the source of their fear.

"It's something like, 'I know this isn't easy to get through, but if I focus on something other than my anxious thoughts, I can do this,' " he says.

Therapists sometimes also work to bring clients face-to-face with what scares them.

Depending on the client, Schroeder says, the therapist might take a gradual approach, leading the client from thinking about a spider, for example, to actually touching one.

Or the therapist might use what's called the "flooding" approach and sit the client down in a room with a spider on the first day of therapy.

"You let them kind of sweat it out until they realize they're all right," he says.

"Most research shows that flooding is probably more effective in terms of time, but it certainly causes more distress for the client."

Most people with specific phobias don't see a therapist, Schroeder says. They seek help only when, like Moreno, their phobia interferes too much with their real life.

"You can live in this part of the country with a phobia about venomous snakes and not come in contact with a rattlesnake or copperhead," he says. "But if you're agoraphobic and you can't leave your house, then it gets harder to survive."

Moreno got help for her driving phobia from Margaret Arthur, a Springdale hypnotherapist, when she got tired of having to ask her husband, Eric Tepe, to drive her everywhere she wanted to go.

As she grew up in Spain, Moreno could more easily use public transportation to get around.

"Here in the U.S., you can't even get milk without driving," she says.

Arthur used hypnotism and a technique called EFT (emotional freedom technique) that involves tapping specific energy points while repeating positive messages to help Moreno.

If a client is afraid of getting in an elevator, Arthur helps that person to identify what, exactly, it is about the elevator that's scary.

"There are all these different aspects. There's fear of dying, fear of falling, fear of being closed up, getting germs from other people," she says. Then she targets the messages, or self-talk, to those specific aspects.

When she first started driving again, Moreno repeated those messages over and over.

"They were just reassuring, like, 'You're a good driver. You're a safe driver,'" she says. "They help keep those fearful thoughts away."

Cincinnati Enquirer

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