Phobias are unreasonable fears that develop for different reasons, but are usually related to a person’s experiences and emotions. There are basically five types of phobias: natural environment (like fear of storms), animal phobias, injury type phobias (fear of flying, etc), situational phobia (fear of a bridge), and assorted childhood type phobias like fear of clowns or loud noises.
Most people try to wreck their brains to figure out why they even have a phobia, but it isn’t always that simple to figure out. There are several ways of trying to get rid of a phobia, but in some cases all it does is end up transforming into another kind of phobia in the process.
What do Phobias involve?
Phobias can happen to any one of us and studies say that at least 11 percent of us get them sometime in our lives. That’s a frightening statistic. Some of the most common phobias are things like a fear of flying, fear of dogs, fear of crowds, etc, but there are literally hundreds of phobias. Some phobias may be based on a fact that has some basis to it. For instance, a fear of flying could be considered to be somewhat logical since planes do crash over the course of time. But most have no real fact or objective and can just flare up for no particular reason like having a fear of cleanliness, or even a phobia of ketchup. Why would someone fear being clean when the alternative can cause people to avoid you, as well as some types of disease?
Getting Rid of a Phobia
If you talk to a therapist they may try to get you to sit through countless therapy sessions, and conduct shock therapy. Other people will swear that you can get rid of a phobia through sheer will power. Another way is by desensitizing yourself to something by immersing yourself into it until it doesn’t bother you anymore. For instance, if you have a fear of flying, you can make yourself fly in a plane a few times and if nothing bad happens, it may relieve your phobia.
But what would you do if you worked to get rid of your phobia only to then end up with a new one in its place? Is that even plausible? It may sound silly, but it can happen in some cases. Let’s use the fear of flying phobia. What if during the process of taking some flights to get rid of the fear of flying you suddenly developed a phobia of germs from using airplane bathrooms? Or if you learn about the countless bacteria trapped inside the airplane with you during the flight? That would mean they couldn’t go on a long flight or they could wet their pants or worse. But what could cause this strange transference to occur?
In most cases, it is doubtful that anyone would purposely try to change a phobia they had into another one just to get rid of it, but in some cases I suppose it could actually be the principle of accepting the better of two evils. In our example of the person who traded fear of flying for fear of a plane restroom, it could be seen as a fair trade if the person rarely has to take a long flight and can go to the bathroom right before they get on the plane. In this case, at least they are no longer afraid to travel by air so can more easily get to things like vacations or business trips.
All in all, a phobia is a strange and often not understood problem that many people suffer from. They may be considered irrational, but to those who have them, they are very real indeed.
Have you successful gotten rid of a phobia just to have another phobia creep up on you?
