My Personal Experience

My fear of needles blood test, is one of the reasons I became a Cognitive Hypnotherapist, is because I came to understand that you do not need to have months and months of talking therapy session in order to feel better. Another reason is that it has helped me to work on my fear of needles blood test. Since I have memory I experienced this fear.

From very young, I used to experience extreme fear of needles blood test. It was to the point that I fainted a few times as I was getting the blood test or just afterwards. I remember, as an adolescent, always going on a specific day of the week whenever I needed to get a blood test. Once, I came across this nurse that was magnificent (meaning I did not experience any discomfort whatsoever). From that day I would only get my blood tests done with her because I even got to relax!. On one occasion, she was not there, but I was confident I could do it with somebody else. I have been very relaxed lately with my blood tests. Unfortunately, I had a nurse that said that my vein collapsed and that little drama took me back to square one.

I even had a cyst removed in a theatre, and I spent the whole time crying like a baby because I was scared of all the needles and things happening in my neck (location of the cyst).

Working on getting over it

I knew I had to do something because I wanted to have kids in the future. After that incident with the collapsed vein, it was only getting worse. That is when I decided to go to my GP, and was recommended to do CBT (cognitive behavioural therapy). I did CBT with face to face sessions, all through the National Health Service. However, it did not work for me, it was an associative fear. The CBT protocol did not explore why I got it, only how to get over it. Which is an approach that helps many people.

But I needed to work with my unconscious because my fear was not in my rational mind. The combination of two things helped me: being pregnant with gestational diabetes and hypnotherapy. When you have gestaitional diabetes, you need to prick your fingers 4 times a day to test the sugar levels. Which to everybody else I translate it as: “getting on with it” and working on the unconscious mind.

If you are experiencing fear of needles or phobia of needles, you can work on it. Did you know that most of the phobias are a misinterpretation of our brain of a significant event that was associated with, in this case needles? With the help of a professional, you can retrain your brain to feel better.