A Driving Peace customer emailed me the other day, asking about tunnel phobia. If you’ve never heard of this, “tunnel phobia” is the fear brought on by having to drive through a tunnel.
I have to admit, I’d never had much reason to think about this type of driving fear, seeing as how I’d never lived anyplace I had to drive through tunnels. Tunnel phobia was pretty much off my radar.
Then I started thinking about it…
My Experience with Tunnel Phobia and Claustrophobia
“Now wait just a minute,” I told myself. “Greg, you lived in California for over two years! Are you telling me you’ve forgotten the SUBWAY?!”
“Oh…well, yeah taking the subway WAS pretty unpleasant, wasn’t it? Especially when the train went into the underground tunnel part. It was pretty dark in there. And small. And confining. I guess I DID feel pretty claustrophobic — trapped and worried about how I was going to get out. Now that you mention it, I seem to recall a couple of occasions where I wondered if I would start screaming before the train came back above ground…”
After this little internal exchange, I sheepishly admitted I had more experience with tunnel phobia than I had first thought.
The fear of tunnels is actually a manifestation of claustrophobia. Claustrophobia is usually an irrational fear of small or otherwise confining spaces. People with claustrophobia are afraid of being trapped in a situation they can’t handle and where no one can or will help them.
For example, one of the most common manifestations of driving phobia — being stuck in bumper-to-bumper traffic — is really claustrophobia. You feel trapped among all those other vehicles and imagine that if something terrible happens, you’ll lose control and no one will be able to help you.
Using Hypnosis for Claustrophobia
Claustrophobia is one of the most common irrational human fears and has been proven to respond well to hypnosis. Hypnosis, aka hypnotherapy, uses relaxation, meditation and our imaginations to reprogram the fearful associations our brains sometimes make with certain situations – such as driving through a tunnel. Much like the Driving Peace program, hypnosis changes the way we feel about things by turning off the link between certain thoughts and their fear-based emotional responses.
Here’s Driving Peace co-creator Andrew Cunningham talking about how he uses hypnosis for tunnel phobia and claustrophobia in his private therapy practice:
Whatever form it may take for you, there’s an excellent chance that your claustrophobia will respond well to hypnosis. Whether you’re dealing with tunnel phobia, fear of bridges, worry about driving in heavy traffic, nervousness about driving on highways…all of these are really different manifestations of claustrophobia. There’s no need to suffer when such effective treatment exists.
One thought on “Tunnel Phobia Responds Well to Hypnosis for Claustrophobia”
That’s not everything about tunnel phobia. I might have discovered an addition to it. How about, pipe lines or deep sewage storm drains, or a shower head with a large hole in, or a tap where water comes out of? The pipe’s shape is elongated, or like a funnel (tornado), the countours are sharp and show how powerful they are when they can suck anything in like a vacuum, just looking at the darkness inside of it. A tornado or a spiral, the depth of it, endlessly moving and making weird sounds. The sounds you hear when a train races over a tunnel, that roar that keeps happening, and the coldness of it. As if the fear came when you once got stuck in a shower and it turned on by itself or you stood in a round tunnel and it began blowing out this air like an A/C. And how about a fan, those automatic ones on the ceiling when they keep spinning and spinning, and you can hear that robotic sound. THAT, is my fear, of which above your head.