In life, chances are you will come into contact with blood at some point. You may accidentally cut yourself when you are busy preparing food. Children may come home with scraped and bleeding hands or knees if they have fallen off their bikes, and your health may require you to have your blood tested. So then you will have to deal with blood sampling. If you are afraid of blood, these are quite a few moments that impact your life and you may even avoid care. That's why overcoming fear of blood is so incredibly important
There are several signals, or symptoms, by which you can recognize that you have a fear of blood. Fear of blood is often related to fear of needles or fear of getting injections.
You usually avoid going to a hospital, and the dentist is also a place you prefer not to go because of your fear of blood[1].
Symptoms related to fear of blood are:
- Avoiding places where you can see blood
- Afraid to get hurt
- Afraid to faint when you see blood
- If you see blood you can...
- Getting Dizzy
- vibrate
- additional sweating
- Breathe Faster
- Getting Tense Muscles
- Fainting
These are all physical symptoms of anxiety.
Fainting when you see blood
Fainting when you see blood is incredibly inconvenient because the floor is not equally soft everywhere and you can end up unhappy. The fear of blood can therefore cause greater injuries, such as broken bones and bruises (or even more blood if you fall on something sharp).
When it comes to blood, taking blood during blood draws in particular is something that makes people faint rather than when they get something injected[2].
Researchers have thought for some time that disgust could be a reason for fainting, but each time, fear still wins out when it comes to fainting from blood. However, it is true that horror of, for example, the blood you can see in animals that have died, for example, from a road collision can also cause fainting when you have a fear of blood[3].
Fear of blood hereditary?
Whether the fear of blood is hereditary, researchers cannot say with 100 percent certainty. However, they do indicate that fear of blood can occur in the same family due to environmental factors. That is, parents can pass on the fear of blood (unconsciously) to their children.
However, if you have a fear of blood and can faint from this, this fainting may well be related to genetic factors[4]. Perhaps you simply come from a family that faints more quickly than average and the (unconsciously learned) fear reaction to blood causes you to faint.
Overcoming fear of blood
So even if your mother faints from blood, this does not mean that you necessarily have to too. That researchers cannot state with certainty that the fear is in your genes shows that there is hope and that you can overcome your fear of blood in a very high probability.
So how do you do it?
There are several ways to overcome your fear of blood. Because blood is something you can see and touch, this phobia is very well suited for a confrontation. The purpose of that confrontation is that you are confronted with blood so often that at some point it becomes boring to you. If you become bored by (a little) blood, it means that it no longer triggers fear. Of course, the idea is not to think that nothing is wrong while you have an arterial bleed and you are in mortal danger.
For this confrontation, it's not about cutting into yourself or anything like that. Step by step you are going to confront yourself more and more with blood. You do this under the guidance, for example, of a hypnosis expert[5].
In you first create a kind of top 10 of your fear of blood, such as:
- A drawing of blood.
- A picture of blood.
- A video of blood.
- A substance very similar to blood.
- Blood of an animal.
- Blood of Another.
- Being with someone whose blood is being pricked for testing.
- Pricking yourself for a drop of blood (as in testing blood sugar levels).
- Have blood drawn for a blood test.
- Donate blood to the blood bank.
You can overcome this fear step by step until you have so little fear of blood that when you get a wound you just grab a Band-Aid instead of trying to make it to the bank because you feel you are going to pass out.
Overcoming each step is something a hypnosis expert will help you with. For example, each step can first be extensively visualized. During that visualization, you also learn what to do to stay calm. To not be bothered by the physical signals that you are suffering from anxiety, and to even control those signals so that you get them little to none. This also keeps the mental fear of blood from being amplified which can make overcoming fear a lot easier.
Then you face the "real" confrontation. Because you have already visualized that confrontation, you know what you are going to do. You know what to do when you are bothered by physical anxiety symptoms and then do it when you are bothered by them.
You do this just as often, until you get so bored of blood and you may make a habit of donating your blood for those in need.
Regression
Another way to overcome your fear of blood is to trace where the fear originated and ritualize all the fear behaviors you do when you see blood. This is something you can do with regression.
With regression, you go from the last moment you were afraid of blood to the first moment you were afraid of blood. This first moment is often a moment in your childhood, because that was the period when your beliefs about how the world works and how you function in it were formed. This may have happened, for example, because you saw how your mother reacted to blood.
Especially as a (small) child, what your mother does is important in determining whether you are safe or not. If your mother panics about blood, this is a clear signal to you as a (small) child that seeing blood is not safe and that you may then become frightened.
When you go into regression to such a moment, which may be completely different for you than in this example, the hypnosis expert helps you experience this moment in a different way. This can go with all sorts of things, such as empathizing with the person who was anxious or something else that will make you think the fear of blood doesn't make sense.
Hypnotic suggestions for victory
In addition to regression and confrontation step by step for habituation, you can also use hypnotic suggestions that you can repeat during self-hypnosis. These suggestions depend on your beliefs about blood that make you so anxious. For example, it is a way to rethink awkward beliefs into helpful ones, such as:
"When I bleed, I have no control."
"I will never stay conscious at a blood check because I passed out once."
You can flip these two thoughts, to:
"I can control blood with a band-aid."
"Blood coagulates quickly."
"Losing a little blood does not cause fainting."
The omdenk thoughts can be repeated as hypnotic suggestions while you are under hypnosis. Because you are under hypnosis, you more quickly adopt these suggestions as the new truth and beliefs about how the world works and how you function in it.
So overcoming fear of blood is certainly possible. This can be done by confronting yourself with the fear, finding out the cause of the fear, and either rethinking your thoughts that reinforce the fear of blood or confronting them with a fact.
With hypnosis, you can overcome fear faster because many fears come from your subconscious. Regression is also a technique performed precisely under hypnosis.
Want to learn more about how hypnosis works and whether you can hypnotize people? Then come to the hypnosis playshop in Wormerveer or Zwolle.
Instead, would you like to learn more techniques immediately that you can use to help yourself and/or others? Then come to one of our events or register directly for one of our trainings.
[1] https://care.diabetesjournals.org/content/20/2/176.short
[2] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0005796797800022
[3] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0887618504001343
[4] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/(SICI)1096-8628(19980907)81:5%3C377::AID-AJMG5%3E3.0.CO;2-Q
[5] https://www.magonlinelibrary.com/doi/abs/10.12968/denu.2002.29.2.70
