I was asked how I would deal with a client who had  a  Fear of Dogs.

The usual treatment in hypnotherapy is to use the NLP Magic Cinema technique. This works by getting the person to imagine a scene where they are about to meet or be threatened by a dog and then changing the scene in their mind.  The technique gets the client to change the sound, or the colour or the size of the image. This works quite well in most cases.

A refinement of this is to imagine the scene differently. This involves getting the person to imagine the dog changing into a cartoon character or turning into giant tongue licking the client all wet and sloppy, or some other ridiculous outcome. This works even better.

The theory behind this is that the client was frightened by a dog in the past and  has a fixed response to the trigger of seeing or hearing a dog. Interfering with this fixed response disrupts the response and encourages the client to imagine some different outcome.

The other common treatment is regression to cause. If the client was frightened by a dog at some time in the past then the therapist can take the client back in time and change the outcome so that the client is no longer afraid of dogs.

A more modern approach, based on Peter Levine's work, is to allow the client to experience the state of fear but to focus their attention on where in their body they are experiencing the feeling. The essence is to listen to the body, not the mind. The client is encouraged to finish the muscular activity that was not completed at the time of the dog experience. In most cases the client wanted to run away but was prevented from doing so, and the need to run away has been left in muscle memory as a type of PTSD. Allowing the client to clear the muscle memory will clear the fear completely and permanently.

I would use the muscle memory technique first. If the client was unable to access the feelings in their body I would then try an affect bridge technique as a lead in to regression. If there was no actually memory of the dog problem then I would use the affect bridge on any memory and regress on that, and if that didn't work I would teach the client to use the NLP technique and let them develop that in their own time.

There is no script that will work in all cases for all people.