Your Questions Answered: What Is A Phobia?

Many people confuse the idea of a phobia with that of a fear. Although the words have similar meanings, it is not the case that every fear is a phobia. Indeed, not every phobia is strictly a fear – in some cases it may be an irrational and/or intense dislike of something – as is frequently the case with homophobia or xenophobia. To be strictly accurate, a phobia is the intense and irrational dislike or fear of something, which prevents the sufferer from behaving or thinking clearly in the presence of the thing that they fear.

In severe cases, even the idea of the thing that they fear can be a major problem for the sufferer of a phobia. Not everyone who is scared of flying, for example, can justifiably be termed a pteromerhanophobe (Pteromerhanophobia is the technical and medical term, but for understandable reasons people tend to stick with the phrase “fear of flying”). Some people don’t like flying, and get nervous every time they fly, but someone who suffers from pteromerhanophobia is not only scared when they get on a plane, but terrified the moment they know that they will have to – and in extreme cases, even by the mere idea of doing so.

A phobia is a debilitating fear which causes real anxiety about a situation and can do so even when that situation is not present. It is very different from a simple fear which can be logically defeated or worked around. For example, if someone expressed a fear that their house was going to be flooded by high rain fall, they could be reassured by the information that the local rainfall for their area would be nowhere near high enough to affect their home. However, if someone has a phobia related to dogs, needles, or the number thirteen – all common phobias – logical exercises will present no help in getting them to set their fears aside.

There are countless situations where perfectly well-meaning friends try to help phobia sufferers by telling them facts which they think will make the sufferer look at things differently. That is not how a phobia works. You can tell someone that they are far more likely to be killed in a car crash than in a plane crash, and if they are a pteromerhanophobe then they are vastly unlikely to take any consolation from that fact, even if they do accept it as the truth.

Fears can be worked around and, if they are perfectly reasonable fears, can be avoided. A phobia is a psychological condition which bypasses the logical centers of the brain and can only be defeated with effort and persistence. Often the best approach is through exposure therapy, where the sufferer is invited, or even forced, to face their fear and come through it. Eventually, someone with a fear of dogs can be persuaded that they have no need to be scared – but cajoling them and telling them that their fear is silly is not the way around it. Fear is a natural and useful emotion – it is when it becomes a block to rational thinking and everyday life that it becomes a phobia, and needs to be addressed.

The Golden Question: Why Do Phobias Occur?

One of the most frequently used words when describing a phobia is “irrational”. Over time, that word has taken on a specific connotation which implies some kind of failing on the part of the person to whom it is applied. It is unfortunate in a way that the idea of a phobia is linked in so closely with the idea of a sufferer being almost childish in the way they behave. It seems to imply that they have chosen to act in an immature manner, when really they would like nothing more than for the feeling of fear to go away.

It is often hard to trace a phobia to its root cause. We can make guesses and be reasonably confident that they are correct, but to assume in so doing that we have diagnosed the cause and made a major step to curing the phobia would be a gross error. In actual fact, phobias are often the result of a complex series of events which may be seemingly unconnected. You can believe that a person is scared of bees because they were once stung by one, but you may miss the fact that they read an article about a time when a single bee sting killed an unfortunate individual (who happened to have an allergy).

Some phobias are more prominent than others. This makes for an interesting question – as most phobias are to do with external factors, and given the huge number of external factors we all see in a given day, in a week, and over the course of a year or even a lifetime, why are certain things more prone to be the subject of a phobia? If we rule out potentially dangerous things with their own instinct such as dogs, snakes and spiders, we still have things such as the dark, flying and enclosed spaces. While all of these things can, logically, be extrapolated to be contributory factors to dangers, they are also entities which have no risk in and of themselves.

We are scared of the dark because we fear that something may lurk within the dark. We are scared of flying because we have seen that sometimes a plane crashes. We are afraid of enclosed spaces because we fear that they may not open up again. None of these fears are strictly rational. If we cannot see something lurking in the dark, then anything that may be lurking will be similarly impaired. Planes crash less often than just about any mode of transport, and there are few confined spaces in which you can become trapped against your will indefinitely.

Phobias are able to thrive, in many ways, because of the imagination of the person who suffers from them. although being imaginative has many important advantages and can be hugely useful in many jobs, its free expanses within the mind mean we are unfortunately prone to fear things which do not merit our fear.