by Thelma P. Freedman

Do you have a phobia? How many people do you know who do? Phobias may be the most common form of psychological “problem” in the world: Untold millions suffer from them. If you have one, you know all too well what it is. But for those of you who don’t, a phobia is an irrational fear of something that most other people do not fear: cats, perhaps, or water or caterpillars. The person with a phobia has little or no idea of what caused the phobia; if you ask, he or she will usually say, “Something in my childhood, I guess, but I don’t remember, I’ve just always had it.”

Phobias are sometimes confused with allergies. Allergies are physical reactions to something such as dust or pollen or a particular food, and although they can be very unpleasant, they are not phobias. A phobia is different. A phobia is frightening in itself because it leads to panic attacks, and every phobia sufferer is afraid of those attacks in themselves, as well as being afraid of the cat or the water. For those who don’t know, here’s how it works.

Take a man with a bad phobia for cats. He walks into a room with a cat in it, and the minute he sees it, he finds himself breathing faster and faster until he begins to hyperventilate, his hands shake and perspire, and his knees feel weak and about to collapse under him. He may feel dizzy or sick and may, in the worst (and very rare) case, actually pass out. He is terrified that he is about to have a heart attack or about to die, or lose control entirely and run howling and screaming from the room and make a complete fool of himself. This is called a panic attack, and it seems to happen all by itself, while everyone else in the room is petting and admiring the nice pretty kitty. Panic attacks just seem to take the phobic person over; people have no control over their own reactions, and nothing can be more terrifying than that.

So it doesn’t help to have well-meaning friends tell the person to “just get over it, there’s nothing to be afraid of, look how sweet the kitty is.” People with phobias already know those things, rationally. They tell themselves those things more often than their friends tell them. But the phobia doesn’t stop.

There are things we are all afraid of, like an out-of-control fire or a raging tiger charging at us. Fears like those are not really irrational. It is healthy to be afraid of those things; if we’re afraid of them, we’ll be careful to stay away from those situations. Fear is like pain: unpleasant, but it keeps us safer and living longer, because fear and pain lead us to avoid the causes of the fear and the pain.

But a phobia is an irrational fear. The man with the phobia for cats learns to avoid cats, all cats, anywhere. If he sees a cat walking down the street, he crosses to the other side; if you have a cat, he finds excuses not to visit you. By the time they are adults, most people with phobias have limited their activities, almost without realizing it. People with phobias for snakes or bugs will stay away from the woods and will never appreciate the beauty of nature; people with phobias for water will stay away from water and never learn to swim, never enjoy a boat ride or a simple day at the beach. And they do not even know what they are missing.

One of my clients, who had a phobia for caterpillars, hated summer because it was the caterpillar season. She never went outdoors in the summer without a large-brimmed hat (because caterpillars sometimes dropped from trees), made her husband and her three children brush themselves off before they came into the house, and watched every step she took because she might step on one of the hated things. She knew all this was limiting her life, she was ashamed of her own behavior, and she worried about how it might affect her children, but she still had no idea of the boundaries she had built around her life. After she got rid of the phobia, she discovered gardening, horseback riding, painting landscapes outdoors, and picnics and hiking with that same husband and children. Her life opened up when she no longer had the phobia, in ways she had not foreseen. She had been limiting herself more than she ever realized, as all phobia sufferers do.

Another bad thing about phobias is that people who have them are ashamed of them and try to hide them from others. They have learned that others often laugh at them, so they learn not to tell. Even when they come for therapy, they tell the therapist about the phobia as if they were confessing some wicked deed. They are afraid they are “crazy” or “weak-willed” because they cannot control their reactions, because they are afraid of this little, simple thing, a thing that other people think nothing of.

So far, I have mentioned only phobias for specific things, such as cats or caterpillars or water. But there are other kinds of phobias. There are three broad categories of phobias: specific phobias, social phobias, and agoraphobia. These are the categories listed in the current Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association. The three kinds are exactly what they sound like.

Specific phobias are fears of specific things, like the phobias for cats or water above. Social phobias, though, are fears of situations involving other people, like speaking in public. Some other fairly common social phobias are fears of eating in public, using public bathrooms, and being in a crowd. If they’re severe enough, social phobias can limit a person’s activities to nearly zero.

But perhaps the most limiting phobia of all is agoraphobia, the fear of leaving home. This often starts with panic attacks while the person is driving, although it may start in some other situation, and it gets worse until the person cannot leave his or her own home. Many people with agoraphobia have a “safe companion” they can leave home with, as long as the companion does the driving and never leaves them alone. But even with a safe companion, the person feels anxious while away from home. Such trips are no pleasure for them and they make them only if absolutely necessary. Some take anti-anxiety medications when they have to leave home, but many find that these either do not work well for them or create their own problems and they would rather not use them.

Agoraphobia is a seriously incapacitating condition. Sufferers cannot leave their homes to go to work, to shop, to visit others, to attend social functions, or to travel. And agoraphobia gets worse as the years roll by. Specific and social phobias tend not to get worse although they don’t usually get better, either, without treatment. But agoraphobia gets worse if it’s not healed, and the sufferer may eventually become self-imprisoned in a single room.

There are many treatments for all these kinds of phobias, some of them very effective. One of the most effective is proving to be past-life therapy, when the phobia has been caused by past-life experiences. But sometimes the source is in the person’s present lifetime.

One man with a phobia for heights had learned to fear heights when he was very small because his older brothers had thought it was funny to swing him suspended by his feet over the stairwell. Nothing to do with past lives here. When he realized the source of the phobia, it pretty much disappeared, and he even forgave his brothers as being young and thoughtless at the time. A woman with a fear of the dark traced it back to her childhood years, when she would lie awake and frightened in her dark room listening to her parents’ loud, angry fighting in the next room. This woman’s phobia also disappeared. So not all phobias are caused by past life experiences.

But a good many are. In a study I carried out, 84 percent of the specific phobias and 60 percent of the social phobias were caused by past-life experiences, and after the people looked at those past-life experiences in hypnosis, their phobias pretty much disappeared. I mentioned above the woman, Betty, with the phobia for caterpillars. Her fear was caused by past-life experiences. I describe them below. The past-life events she found are typical of the kinds of events that cause specific phobias.

I use a concept I call the client’s “Upper Mind” as a guide in past-life work. Betty’s Upper Mind said that she had four past lives that were responsible for her phobia for caterpillars. We examined these four. I asked Betty’s Upper Mind to choose the order in which they should be examined, and that order was not chronological. But I present them here in chronological order, with the order in which they were explored indicated in parentheses.

Josh: 1731-1797, France (fourth examined). Josh grew up in a small town and became, like his father, a physician in the same town. One day he was called to treat a man who had badly injured his leg while chopping wood and had lain alone in the woods for two or three days. By the time he was found, the wound was infected and gangrenous and maggots had invaded it. Josh insisted that the man be brought back to the town, where Josh would find it easier to work. However, the trip was not an easy one, and by the time they arrived in the town, the man was almost dead. He did die later, after Josh had amputated the leg, and Josh blamed himself for insisting upon bringing the man back to the town instead of trying to treat him in the woods. He felt that the maggots had beaten him and he hated them. Josh was married and had four children, and he said that for the most part it was a happy life. He died at sixty-six, apparently of a heart attack.

Claire: 1821-1837, Great Britain (third examined). A happy young girl, Claire lived in a stable farming family. She died at sixteen when a teen-aged boy was chasing her “in fun” with caterpillars in his hand, teasing her by threatening to put them on her back. Claire secretly liked the boy and hoped to marry him someday, but she slipped on wet grass and fell to her death down a cliff-like ravine. After her death, as she hovered above her crumpled body at the foot of the ravine, she could see the boy sobbing and trying to shake her back to life.

Jenna: About 1845/1850-1890s, Europe (first examined). Jenna lived on a farm in what was possibly Austria. There were three incidents involving caterpillars in Jenna’s life, all during a summer of bad caterpillar infestation when Jenna was ten years old. The three incidents were (1) seeing caterpillars everywhere outside; (2) seeing other children catching and crushing caterpillars in their fingers, which disgusted Jenna; and (3) going outdoors one day and getting caterpillars in her hair. When she tried to brush them out, they made a mess in her hair. This third incident was especially important, because her mother scolded her for her “stupidity” instead of comforting her and helping her to clean her hair. Jenna felt this was unfair of her mother, who had asked her to go outdoors to do some chore even though Jenna had not wanted to go out because of the caterpillars. Jenna grew up and became a farm wife, and came to terms with caterpillars. However, she said they were never as bad again as they had been during that one year. In that life Jenna hated caterpillars but she did not fear them; she said that she had “no choice” because caterpillars were there and there was nothing she could do about them. Jenna died in her bed in her forties, of an unspecified illness.

John: 1902-1937, Eastern United States, a railroad town (second examined). In his very early years, John was raised by both parents in a pleasant apartment, but his mother either died in childbirth or ran away when John was very young; exactly which is not clear. John said his father would not speak of it. In any case, when John was about twelve, he and his father moved to a shack by the railroad tracks, and his father did odd jobs for the railroad. John did the same work starting in his teens, loading and unloading freight cars and doing any other work he could find. The caterpillar incident had occurred in his teen years, when he and some other boys were burning caterpillar tents in a farmer’s orchard. (This was a common way of getting rid of caterpillars in those days. A torch was made of rags, kerosene, and a long pole, lighted, and held up into the tree branches, to burn the caterpillar tents.) Some flaming bits had fallen onto John’s back, burning him severely before the other boys could slap the fire out. Since the boys were not supposed to be burning the tents, John was afraid to tell anyone about his injury, and could get no treatment for it. Eventually it healed, but not without much pain and probably infection. John lived to the age of thirty-five, when he died in a fight with another man along the railroad tracks. He never married and never moved from the shack he and his father had shared.

An interesting thing about Betty’s regression as John is that Betty has a birthmark on her back in the same place that the burning tent fell. I knew that Dr. Ian Stevenson had found birthmarks sometimes connected to children’s memories of violent injuries in past lives, so this interested me. Betty at first said that she had a birthmark on her back but that it was on the wrong side. However, when we looked, it turned out that she had remembered the birthmark wrongly. After all, it was on her back, and she had never really seen it except in mirrors. But it was on the same side and in the same place where the burning tent had fallen on John’s back.

What can we deduce from these four past lives? For one thing, there is the centuries-long development of a phobia. Josh, the eighteenth-century small-town doctor, developed a hatred rather than a fear of maggots. Maggots are not really caterpillars (at least, they do not turn into butterflies or moths, but flies). But they are similar in appearance to some small caterpillars. In her regression, Betty likened them to the small pale caterpillars that she had sometimes found on fresh vegetables, to her intense disgust. In the chronologically second of the four past lives, Betty’s life as Claire, caterpillars were associated with her death in that life. The boy was carrying them in his hand as he chased her, teasing, as she fell to her death down the ravine. Betty did not think Claire had really been afraid of them, although she disliked them; rather, the two young people were playing a flirtatious game, and Claire was only pretending to be afraid for the sake of the game. Nevertheless, because they were associated with her death in that lifetime, Betty began to have a little fear of them.

In the third of the four past lives, Jenna experienced a year of heavy caterpillar infestation. She had reactions to the caterpillars that were different from those of the other children. The other children played with them, albeit cruelly, and did not mind them. Jenna, on the other hand, found them repugnant, disgusting, and frightening, and this may indicate that a phobia had developed even then, caused by her experiences in the earlier Josh and Claire lives. Then in the Jenna life she had an especially unpleasant experience with them when she tried to brush them out of her hair. However, Jenna’s real emotional reaction centered more on her mother’s impatient scolding than on the caterpillars in her hair themselves. Jenna wanted comfort and help in cleaning her hair, but her mother treated her roughly and scolded her for getting them in her hair.

It is possible, although we will never know, that if Jenna’s mother had been more helpful and sympathetic, the phobia might have been forestalled from ever developing further, even given John’s experience in Betty’s most recent life. Another thing about the Jenna life is that the other children laughed at Jenna for her dislike of their “games” with the caterpillars, calling her humiliating names. This is something that we should all realize: The ways in which we treat children’s reactions and fears can help to shape a developing phobia (or other problem) for centuries to come, or possibly nip it in the bud.

In the John life, Betty’s most recent life before she was born as Betty, we see again an unpleasant experience with caterpillars, the burn on John’s back. John hated caterpillars and was afraid of them before that happened, and the burn experience deepened both the fear and the hatred. After the burn, John tried to avoid caterpillars. He never took part in tent burning again, and he became very alert to them. John died in 1937, and Betty herself was born in 1948, after an eleven-year “turnaround,” or intermission time.

What we see in these four past lives is behaviorism in action. According to the theories of behaviorism, people learn things, both good and bad, because of “reinforcements,” repeated experiences that either reinforce or discourage ideas and actions. In the case of these four past lives, each lifetime’s unpleasant experience added its bit to Betty’s feelings about caterpillars: Her hatred and then her fear were reinforced by each of those experiences in its turn.

Dissolving The Phobia

In Betty’s case, we examined the four relevant past lives during four separate sessions, and in the summer, too, when caterpillars were nibbling at our trees. As she came in for each session, she would tell me about something that had happened during the previous week that indicated that the phobia was “dissolving.” Before her fourth and last session, she said that she didn’t think she needed the session at all, because she had seen some caterpillars on a tree and barely noticed them until she had walked past them. She had come in only because her Upper Mind had said there were four past lives that had caused the phobia, and she was curious about what the fourth past life would be like. It turned out to be the Josh life, the one involving maggots.

I called Betty about five years later, to see how she was doing. We had an interesting exchange. We talked a bit about her family and general matters; then I asked, “How are you getting along with caterpillars these days?”

Betty told me that her life had opened up for her since our work. She is the one I mentioned earlier who now gardens, rides horseback, paints outdoors, hikes, picnics, and generally enjoys her life indoors and out, in summer as well as winter. And caterpillars no longer bother her.

Betty’s phobia had “dissolved,” and this is not a result that is usually attained with other standard mainstream therapy.

So the behaviorists are right when they say that phobias are built from several unpleasant experiences, and each experience teaches the person once again the lesson that “that thing is dangerous, bad, scary, and I hate it and fear it.” But the experiences may stretch back centuries and occur in past lives, not this one. I think it takes more than one unpleasant experience to build a specific phobia; in my own research study of people with phobias, the average number of unpleasant experiences in past lives the people reported was between three and four.

This makes sense. After all, if phobias developed from only one unpleasant experience, we should all be afraid of everything, because we have all had many unpleasant experiences in our present lives. Yet we’re not afraid of everything. It takes several unpleasant experiences, and usually over two or more past lives, and as each one builds on the ones before, the lesson to “fear this” gets stronger and stronger and we take it with us like unconscious baggage from life to life.

It probably also takes a trigger to set it off. By “trigger” I do not mean the causes of the phobia; I mean the incident that sets the phobia off in the present life, as a trigger sets off a loaded gun just waiting to be fired. In Betty’s case, we never found the trigger and didn’t even look for it, for it doesn’t really seem to be necessary to find it. But I think there always is a trigger, whether we look for it or not. We can only guess, but for Betty it was most likely her first sight of a caterpillar, or even a picture of one, that acted as the trigger. It is usually something like that, something that was seemingly unimportant at the time it happened and is not even consciously remembered. It became important only because it acted as the trigger that set the phobia off.

However, I have worked with innumerable people with phobias who, like Betty, have freed themselves from their fears by exploring the past-life connections but with whom we never looked for a trigger at all. What is necessary is that the person find out the past-life causes. Simply becoming aware of those causes seems to be enough.

Excerpt from Soul Echoes