blood phobia

[DaSwede]

One of my half sisters suffers from blood phobia. Anyone out there know anything about what treatments might work? I understand cognitive therapy to be successful in treating different phobias, but of all the articles I've read on this, not one has given blood phobia as an example.

You don't have to google for me, I'm more interested in your personal thoughts and experiences and your 'personal hearsays.' (But of course, if you do know of a particularly good site, that's welcome too.)

I'm not on the internet every day, so please accept some delay in my thanking you.

[Dizzieblonde]

I used to hate injections of any sort - ever since a child - and go to great lengths to avoid having them, and kicked and screamed and cried as a teenager during my heaf test! I trained to be a nurse, and not only did I have to have about 6 before I could even start, I had to learn how to give them to others - the phobia quickly went because I had no choice but to deal with it.

There was a similar attitude towards it on the TV show 'Shameless', with an agoraphobic woman who wouldn't leave the house. Her children pretended there'd been a terrible accident outside and she *had* to force herself to go outside - after much huffing and puffing, she went, and was fine.

It's a type of behavioural psychotherapy, which claims that the symptoms of a phobia (sweating, dizziness, crying, or whatever) can only last for so long before your body returns to normal. It's cruel, and a bit of a short, sharp shock, but it really does work - there were many case studies of medics pushing water-phobic people into a swimming pool. After they screamed and flapped around for a few minutes, they soon began to calm down and eventually were fine, having overcome their fear. Not sure how you could do it with blood though, unless you buy something raw and bloody from the butchers - you either get over your phobia and clean it, or you go hungry!

[DaSwede]

(...or maybe that should have been 'half-sister', with a hyphen. No wonder you develop blood phobia if you're cut in half...)

Thanks for your reply, Dizzieblonde. Reading it I'm thinking that your needle phobia must have been milder than my half-sisters blood phobia - the idea of becoming a nurse wouldn't have occured to her in a million years. Hospitals equal blood, stay the h*ll out of them - that's what she would have thought. Congratulations on losing your phobia, though!

I'm sceptical of the kind of brusque 'therapy' you describe having seen on television. Of course you do what it takes to survive or to save your children, even if it means going against a severe phobia. But I'm wondering if, in the long run, this kind of 'treatment' might not either aggravate the original phobia or as it were redirect it, so that eventually you'd develop another phobia or another symptom altogether. They wouldn't include that in the show, now would they...

But I do believe the part you quote about the body not being able to sustain severe anxiety symptoms for more than a few minutes. The key to treatment must somehow lie therein.

Thanks!