After ten hour-long sessions, using a new virtual reality approach to treating zoophobia, she was cured. Hypnosis works with some people. Sowing the seeds of phobia It is important to remember that phobics are not mad. Neither are they neurotic, or immature. Rather, their brains have acquired an extreme reaction to something that most other people shrug off.
Phobias often begin in young children between the ages of three and eight.
Sometimes they learn a phobia from someone in authority - fears are often transmitted within families. There may even be a phobia gene. A traumatic experience may trigger a phobia, for instance an attack by a dog, or being pinched by a crab. We in the developed West seem to have many more phobias about the natural world than anywhere else on Earth. From fear to fascination People who have zoophobia often feel that they are alone, that they are crazy, that their phobia is incurable.