Five Strange & Bizarre Phobias

For those who do not have a phobia, there is often some comedy to be had in looking at the things that people are irrationally afraid of. However, it is important to bear in mind that a phobia is not an affected lifestyle choice, rather something that genuinely causes problems for the sufferer, and to them it is no laughing matter. Some of the following phobias, however, may surprise you, and one of them is, in fact, fake. Bear in mind that to the people who suffer from the genuine ones, mocking their fear is neither big nor clever. Finding it curious, though, is not.

Do you know any Pteronophobia sufferers? This is the very real fear of being tickled by a feather. For many, it is fair to assume, the real strangeness of this fear is the specificity of it. a fear of being tickled is quite understandable, and a fear of feathers is reasonable enough. But combining the two makes for an interesting question. Is it only feathers that you are scared of being tickled by? What about something that looks like a feather?

Linonophobia is another one that might surprise a few people. It is the medical name for a fear of string. Bearing in mind how often in life you will come into contact with something that has string in it, this must be a hard one to deal with. It is an absolutely genuine phobia, too, and one which is understandable, after a fashion. String, after all, can get tangled and can be a hazard in some situations. It seems strange that it has its own phobia, but tell that to a linonophobe.

The really unlucky linonophobe might find that they also have a touch of Koumpounophobia to make matters still worse. This is the medical title for the absolutely genuine fear of buttons. Scientists are, as of this moment, still not entirely certain why the sufferer has such a fear of something so specific, but sufferers have said that it is mostly to do with the feel of buttons, and that plastic ones are apparently much worse than the larger, metallic ones that you would find on a pair of jeans.

Lutraphobia? That is the term for an irrational fear of otters. For all the ailurophobes and cynophobes out there, a person who is scared of otters may seem quite bizarre. but if you live in a heavily wooded area next to a river, then the chances are you have occasion to see an otter up close more often than the majority of people – and therefore it is reasonable that some people would develop such a fear.

The final one is Anatidaephobia. This is the fear that somewhere, somehow, a duck is watching you. One can only imagine the terrors that a sufferer goes through, checking the windows at night and getting their friends to complete a sweep of the nearby area to make sure that the duck does not have a clear line of view. It is perhaps reassuring to know, then, that in this case there is nothing to worry about. Anatidaephobia does not exist, and was in fact the fictitious subject of a drawing by the surreal cartoonist Gary Larson.

Exposure Therapy – A Useful Weapon Against Your Phobias

When you are very young, and a wasp flies into the room where you are sitting, you may very well jump off your seat and run away in terror. You have heard, after all, that these things sting you, and when that happens it really hurts. Knowing that you don’t want to get hurt, you duck and cover, naturally. It is usually at that point that a kindly family member tries to console you with the words “Don’t worry! It’s more scared of you than you are of it!”. Which, obviously, is completely untrue.

When you have a phobia, the slightest exposure to the object of your fears can have you reeling with terror. It is fairly common to have a fear of stinging insects because, well… they sting. Not only that, but they can fly and you often do not see them until it’s too late. As a consequence, it is very easy to get stung by an insect – although many people go through life and never have it happen to them. so when a wasp or a bee appears in the scene, the accepted wisdom for a child is to get out of the way.

What exposure therapy teaches us is that this is entirely the wrong way to go about things. Of course, when you are a child, you are not really disposed to listen to someone who tells you that you should face what you are scared of. Why would you be? the thing is trying to attack you! But as time goes on it becomes clear that in order to deal with your fears, you need to get real. You cannot live in a world without wasps, so you need to be able to live comfortably with the possibility of one coming near you.

Exposure therapy teaches us – in as much as the concept can be squeezed down into a simple phrase – that what we really fear is fear itself. We know, deep down, that a wasp is not going to do really serious harm to us, because in order to do so it would need to stay still for some time – long enough, usually, to be squashed. What we really fear is the torment, the anticipation that we are going to be stung, and we are not going to like it.

Exposure therapy teaches us that we can look at a wasp and think “it is only a wasp”. We start by simply looking at pictures, and realising that the picture cannot harm us. Then we observe their movement. Obviously, as they are flying insects, we cannot hold a wasp, but we can observe them, and read about them, to find out that as much as a wasp sting might initially hurt, they are largely harmless when compared to other things. The crux of exposure therapy is that, by being forced to observe that which scares us, we realize that on balance, it is something we do not need to be scared of.

Acrophobia: The Fear of Heights

One of the most common fears known to man, and one of the most consistently misnamed, is the fear of heights. Incredibly often, when fear of heights is mentioned, people will say “Ah, yes. Vertigo.”. They will be wrong to do so, because vertigo is not in fact the fear of heights. Although it is often caused by a fear of heights, vertigo is actually a physical sensation that makes someone feel as though they are spinning when they are not. The correct term for the phobia which is caused by heights is in fact Acrophobia.

It was felt for a long time that the reason for acrophobia was that sufferers associated high places with an unpleasant experience involving heights as a child, or to an incident they had heard of. Recent studies however suggest that this is not strictly true, and in actual fact that acrophobia is one of the phobias which is actually innate. We – or some of us, anyway – suffer from acrophobia because our evolution has taught us that heights have negative connotations.

In the present day, there is little or no reason why anyone who has not taken the decision to do so themselves should ever be in a position where there is a specific danger from the height they are at. Of course, height in and of itself poses no primary danger. That is to say that 1860 feet of height will not kill us, but if we fall from it, the fall is likely to – and if that doesn’t do it, then the landing is likely to finish the job. However, as cities and towns have come to be built in the most accessible places, there are few of us who cannot avoid being at such a height.

That, of course, is far from the full story. A phobia does not cease to be a problem because you remove yourself from the situation in which is might directly affect you. A phobia is an irrational fear after all. People who suffer from severe acrophobia may be affected if they hear a work colleague talk about their holiday, where they went on to the observation deck at the CN Tower and looked down. Even the thought of gargantuan (and comparatively small) heights can be problematic to someone with acrophobia. Then there is the part of a phobia which can be even more destructive – it makes us change our behavior.

Say you are fresh out of college and applying for jobs to put your newly-gained diploma to work for you. You strike out with the first couple of applications, and then you get a letter inviting you for an interview. It’s your dream job, it’s the culmination of your study, it’s on the 11th floor. Because you have become conditioned to avoiding heights, you may feel that you cannot attend the interview or take the job. This is how acrophobia and many other phobias really infringe upon a person’s life – by forcing changes in behavior which, if unchecked, can become all-encompassing. This is why exposure therapy may well be necessary to break down your phobia.