I have often felt that most people
don’t understand the term “phobia”. The general meaning is understood – a phobia
is a fear. But, if it’s a fear, why not just say “fear” instead of “phobia”?
The reason is that a phobia is much
more than a fear – it is a type of anxiety disorder. Depending on the severity
of the phobias, they can be very debilitating. As someone who suffers from a
number of them, I would know. That being said, the information I can give you
is based off of my own experiences and may or may not reflect those of other
people, but in the very least it can give you an idea of what having a phobia
is like.
The very worst part of having a
phobia is knowing that it exists, because they are generally irrational fears.
With a normal irrational fear, someone can use logic and explain to you how it
is irrational and that helps you overcome the fear, but with a phobia, all it
can do is make you aware that your response is entirely involuntary. There’s
nothing worse than knowing that you can’t control your reaction to something
you know you shouldn't be afraid of.
Perhaps the best way to demonstrate
this is with an example. One of my phobias that I discovered when I was a
teenager was a fear of heights. But not all heights, no, just a certain type. I
could easily jump down from a ten foot balcony or have LARP sword fights with
my friends on the angled (and usually slippery) pavilion roofs at the park, but
to get up to that roof I had to walk across the narrow sides of two-by-fours
which I discovered I could only do if I was holding on to something.
Now, I know, that seems perfectly logical
and is an intelligent safety precaution, which is true, but what struck me was
that I actually couldn't move if I wasn't holding on to something. I have an excellent sense of balance and I had
every confidence that I could even run across those two-by-fours without
falling, but my body refused to move.
Logic told me I would be safe; I had
the confidence and the skill, but I still couldn't do it. This is the difference
between a phobia and a fear. Here is a picture of the closest I ever got to
defeating that phobia:
It was taken as part of a series of
pictures where I was having LARP dagger fights with my best friend everywhere. Of all the pictures, this
was the only one that was posed (including one where we were fighting while
standing on either end of a teeter-totter) because I couldn't stay standing up
long enough to fight.
I shouldn't say that logic is
entirely useless in regards to phobias. It is wonderful for making them worse.
There is one very common mistake that people make when trying to help someone
with a phobia, and that is to give them logic. “Why are you afraid of X? Don’t
you know that Y, which you have no problem with, has far more bacteria?” To
which my response is, “Gee, thanks, now my phobia won’t let me touch X or Y!”
In fact, being a logical person and
having a phobia is probably the worst combination there is. One of my worst
phobias is raw meat. Somewhere along the lines, I picked up that raw meat
carried all kinds of bad... something. I don’t even know what it is that I'm afraid of, but I know I can’t touch raw meat.
Or anything that raw meat touches. Or that that touches. It’s like there’s a
force-field.
Colleen and I went to the local
Farmer’s Market a few weeks ago and we bought a couple pounds of bacon. It was
nearly a traumatising experience for me and worse for Colleen once I pointed
out to her what had happened (she makes every possible effort to not agitate my
phobias. Isn't she wonderful?). The lady at the shop handled the bacon with her
bare hands, which she then used to wrap the bacon before putting it on the
counter. To clarify this in my phobia’s terminology, the bacon contaminated the
lady’s hands, which contaminated the paper that was now, by my expectation, supposed
to be preventing the bacon from contaminating anything else.
Good job there.
Moving on, Colleen paid the woman,
who took the money and gave change with the same contaminated hands. Taking the
contaminated change, Colleen’s hands became contaminated, as did her wallet and
everything in it when she put the money inside. Then, on the way home, Colleen
brushed her hair out of her eyes with her contaminated hands...
And that is how phobia logic works!
It took every ounce of my self control and mental re-routing to stop my phobia
from preventing me from handling money ever again (because I don’t know how
much of it has been passed through hands that have handled raw meat). To be
fair, that’s a pretty powerful phobia, but it should at least give you an idea
what having one is like (if you don’t already have one).
So, what can you do to help someone
with a phobia if logic doesn't work? The best suggestion I have is to leave
them to take care of themselves and to respect that their fears are rooted so
deeply that it is more than a fear – it is an involuntary, often paralysing,
reaction. People who know they have phobias know what precautions to take to
prevent them from being too problematic (such as marrying a wonderful person who’s
willing to eliminate all those spiders that want to kill them). In my
experience, all you can do by trying to make the phobias go away is to make
them worse.
I hope this has helped you to
understand phobias a bit better and that, if you have phobias, it hasn't made
them worse.
To that one despicable person out
there who just opened their wallet and started rubbing all their money on a raw
steak, I hope that whatever it is that my phobia insists I’m afraid of gets you
instead of me.
Click here to find the charity anthology containing a couple of my short stories.
If there's any subject you'd like to see me ramble on about, feel free to leave a comment asking me to do so.
