Fears and Phobias

The information below will help you learn about fear, the difference between fear and anxiety, and about phobias.  Most importantly, if you suffer from fears and phobias I want you to understand that your fears and phobias can be significantly reduced or eliminated with the proper treatment.

Fear is a built-in survival response that involves both your mind and body. A fear reaction happens whenever we sense real or imagined danger. While there are people who seek out the thrill of danger, most of us will avoid, try to avoid, or escape from whatever we fear.

Normal fear seems pretty much like a worry, or something you feel uneasy about. Other times, fear comes as a understandable reaction to a sudden confrontation with danger.  Fears become a different kind of problem when they are persistent and interfere with your daily functioning. When a fear reaches this level of intensity, it is often identified as a phobia. With a phobia, the fear and danger are greatly exaggerated or imagined. For example, it is natural to be afraid of a vicious dog, but to be terrified of a small, friendly puppy is a different story or it is natural to feel fear if you are on an exposed platform that is being raised high into the air, but it is not normal to experience fear if this platform is a standard elevator rising to the top of a building.

Fear is a reaction to a specific danger signal.  When we see the perceived object of the fear, our body and mind react by getting ready to "fight or flight" and this response is directly related to what we see or hear. 

Anxiety is different.  With anxiety there is typically not anything right before us to trigger the anxiety.  The anxiety is not based on the threatening thing, but on the anticipation of future danger or something bad that could happen, but there is no danger happening now.  For addition information click on the link anxiety.

A phobia is an intense  and unreasonable fear of situations, objects, activities, or persons where the fear is out of proportion to the actual danger or harm. The fear may be caused by the actual presence of the feared object or situation or it may be caused by the anticipation of the presence of that feared object or situation.

If you have a phobia, the fear and distress is so intense that you do whatever you can to avoid coming into contact with the object of your phobia.  You probably also spend a good deal of time and energy thinking and worrying about, and fearing, the phobia object or situation whether or not you are really likely to encounter it.  If you have a phobia, you probably realize that your fear is unreasonable, yet you still are not able to control it. With a phobia, the pattern of anxiety, avoidance, and worry about the possibility of contact tends to grow bigger and bigger and to interfere with your life.

Phobias vary in severity among individuals. Some individuals can simply avoid the subject of their fear and suffer only relatively mild anxiety over that fear. Others suffer fully-fledged panic attacks.  When avoidance of the object, activity, or situation that triggers your phobia interferes with your normal functioning or keeps you from doing things you would otherwise enjoy, it is time to seek help.

The word phobia is used in a non-medical sense for aversions of all sorts.  However, when used in a clinical setting, many mental health professionals group phobias into two categories:

1) A Specific Phobia is when you have an encounter with an object or situation that involves or provokes an unreasonable amount of fear.  A specific phobia involves the fear of a single specific panic trigger such as spiders, dogs, snakes, tunnels, highway driving, water, flying, catching a specific illness, dogs and blood. Two of the most common specific phobias that result in countless distress are Acrophobia, a fear of heights, and Claustrophobia which involves the fear of enclosed or confined spaces such as closed rooms, elevators, tunnels, trains or airplanes.

2) A Social Phobia involves fear of people or social situations such as performance anxiety or fears of embarrassment by scrutiny of others, such as eating in public or fear of public speaking. If you have social phobia you may be excessively self-conscious and afraid of embarrassing or humiliating yourself in front of others. One of the most common social phobias is called Agoraphobia.  If you suffer from agoraphobia, you are likely to avoid crowded places such as shopping malls and movie theaters. You may also avoid cars, airplanes, subways, and other forms of travel. In more severe cases, you might only feel safe at home and be homebound. 

Specific phobias are highly treatable with psychotherapy.  Social phobias and agoraphobia typically have a more complex cause than a specific phobia and while they are treatable, they are generally more difficult to treat than specific phobias.  It is believed that heredity, genetics, and brain chemistry combine with life experiences to play a major role in the development of social phobias and agoraphobia.

The most frequently used form of treatment for a phobia typically involves behavior therapy including systematic desensitization or exposure therapy.  This therapeutic approach involves using the safety of the therapeutic situation to gradually introduce you to the very situation that normally causes you fear and anxiety.  First you do this in your imagination and then in reality using a gradual step-by-step exposure process. In this way you learn that you can control your fear and anxiety while gaining greater and greater exposure to your phobic situation or object.  Cognitive behavioral therapy and relaxation training may also be extremely effective.

Relaxation and stress relief techniques are frequently used as an accompaniment to other therapeutic approaches.  Relaxation techniques may include specific breathing techniques, muscle relaxation training, guided mental imagery, and self-talk.

Hypnotherapy can also be used to treat phobia. This usually consists of systematic desensitization and other therapeutic techniques conducted under hypnosis by a clinical hypnotherapist. Because of ethical concerns and problems around the use of hypnotherapy, I do not use hypnotherapy with any of my clients.

A phobia can be linked to almost any behavior by using the suffix -phobia combination. There are phobias for so many things that there are whole websites listing all the phobias.  For a list of the many phobias please visit the page List of Phobias.

For more information about fear and phobias, please click on the linked websites listed below.

"If you really want help dealing with your feelings and emotions, changing your behavior, and improving your life, I will be happy to help you.  I am available almost any time and any place.  You can call me directly and there is no cost or obligation for the initial telephone consultation.  Or you can reach me by email.  I look forward to the possibility of helping you to improve your life."   Dr. Vince Berger