A phobia is a persistent, severe dread of a particular thing, person, circumstance, or environment. Certain events and objects might trigger phobias.
Because the human mind is so inventive, it is possible to create fears of almost anything, including dogs, cats, flying, wind, clouds, blushing, relationships, and a long list of other things.
Phobias are typically very uncomfortable, but with the right therapy, you can get over them. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), fear and phobia affect more than 20 percent of the population, making them one of the most common psychological difficulties.
In essence, there are many levels of fear: there is pure dread, which is a phobia or phobic reaction; there is pure fear with some kind of control, which is also known as obsessive-compulsive disorder; and then there is pure control of pure preoccupation and obsessiveness.
Fearing Our Solutions
There are numerous potential sources of fear, some of which are internal to the person and others of which are external, leading to a wide range of phobias. Some phobias are mental constructs, like the dread of blushing, while others are reality-based, like the fear of snakes or tigers, which do in fact pose a threat to human safety.
A phobia, however, might start to disable people in their life and obstruct them in their employment and close or personal connections once it has been developed. However, as mentioned in my book The 12 Most Common Mental Traps (Gibson, 2021), psychological problems tend to happen in a predictive and redundant manner, often following the same pattern, such as those we observe with panic attacks and agoraphobia.
Some people bear the wounds of battles never fought, and the wounds of battles never fought are the hardest ones to heal.
Poet Fernando Pessoa
With these two phobic reactions specifically (which I will cover in this blog in the coming weeks), we commonly observe the use of three dysfunctional attempted solutions by patients: 1) avoidance of any situation that might trigger their fear, 2) the request for help and reassurance of others, only to find they bring to question their own resources, and 3) the attempt to forcefully control their biological response, only to find they trigger the very reaction they are trying to suppress.
These unsuccessful attempts to exert control over the circumstance cause their concerns to get increasingly out of control. In terms of time, it only takes several months at which. Together, these efforts at solving the situation create an inflexible psychological issue that may be a diagnosable condition.
This phobic reaction, which is brought on by failed attempts to address the issue, feeds the problem and keeps the person in jail.
Be Spontaneous
Another issue with these impromptu attempts at problem-solving is that we start to worry about them even when we are far from the feared circumstance. We continue to amplify it to the point where we no longer require the existence of the fear but only the mere thought of it to elicit a phobic response.
This is what we call a phobic-obsessive reaction. It should be clear that the goal of any successful treatment is to stop the client from engaging in these repetitive cycles. Nevertheless, even though this may sound simple and logical to us sitting here reading this text right now, every living system, including humans, opposes change.
Biology and Stability
Therapies based on a rationale explanation cannot effectively stop a phobic person from avoiding, seeking consolation or assistance, and then blocking their fixation with their fear. Most phobic patients are extremely rational people and understand what is wrong.
But, the answer still seems unattainable due to our uncontrollable biological and psychobiological reactions as well as the perception that the person has formed. We now need to take a more indirect and strategic approach to the issue.
An Unusual Approach
Helping patients change their dysfunctional situations, using effective treatments that are not based on rational logic but non-ordinary logic (Gibson 2021; Nardone 2013). Thanks to the meticulous research and effective interventions in hundreds of cases, we have been assisting patients in overcoming their obsessions and phobias.
In fact, medicine can sadly turn into a type of “chemical crutch” in the case of many phobic and obsessive disorders, first reducing the physical symptoms of anxiety but ultimately confirming the person’s inability to address what appears to be a straightforward problem on their own.
The poet Fernando Pessoa has said, which may be more effective than any logical scientific explanation. Pessoa noted that “some people bear the wounds of battles never fought, and the wounds of battles never fought are the hardest ones to heal.”
The next time you consider avoiding anything, think about the potential longer-term effects and how this immediate desire to avoid something might quickly steal your future.
