Fix Your Phobia in 90 Minutes

As someone deeply involved in phobias and fears and their eradication I bought this book as research.Sadly, I found some of the author's assumptions and assertions were misguided, wrong or misleading. The book gets 2* because there is also some useful background to phobias in the book, and some of the techniques are accurate and useful.When I hit page 60 and the statements "If someone promises to cure a phobia without exposure, it's a scam." and ":To manage your phobia you need to get up close and personal with your phobic stimulus, to befriend it", I am afraid I almost stopped reading on. In the interest of research I continued, however. These statements are simply untrue. I have personally worked with someone and their fear of clowns went in under 2 hours, and that's only because it was a phone call about something else entirely.The book makes some interesting points, but the implied promise of a 90 minute fix simply isn't borne out by the methodology which requires a number of time-consuming and lengthy exercises and list-writing BEFORE you do the 90 minutes (e.g. p.77 "Whatever your phobic stimulus, become an expert on it.").This book also encourages recruitment of a "phobia friend". Now to my mind having a friend who is prepared to non-judgementally work though all of this as well is probably a very difficult person to track down. A partner will have their own set of emotional responses to deal with (especially if they are living with the repercussions of the phobic person), and will bring their untrained baggage along for the ride. The recruitment process for your "phobic friend" is pretty tough - good luck with that part.If you think that you will buy this book, read it , do a 90-minute exercise and be 'fixed' I am afraid you will be very disappointed. I have no doubt the author, a psychologist, did indeed cure his own phobia, and does work effectively with his patients over a long period of time, but the premise of a 90-minute fix that the title suggests is simply not true.

I heard the author being interviewed on the radio and was skeptical, but thought I would buy it and see.The book proved to be very insightful, easy to read and understand. There's actually a lot of humour too which I wasn't expecting in a book of this nature.Some of the exercises were a bit of pain, though looking back I'm grateful I did them as they helped set the foundation for increasing my confidence (and lowering my pessimism) to tackle the 90 minute exposure later in the book.Thanks to this book I have fixed my phobia (let's just say my phobia is a little less common than most) and now I feel like I can enjoy life.I can't thank this book enough as it has been my saviour. I recommend Fix Your Phobia to anyone who has a phobia or wants to know more about them.