Common Phobias & Fears – Acrophobia, Claustrophobia, Dentist Phobia

The easiest fears to pinpoint are the phobias, an inordinate fear of a situation or a thing. Drawing their energy from our primal need for survival that is buried deep in the most primitive region of our brain, they span the alphabet from A to Z, from agoraphobia to zelophobia (jealousy), and number into the hundreds.

We all have at least one—even the most intrepid fear something: snakes, rats, bats and spiders are a few of the most commonly feared creature-discomforts.

Some Common Phobias:

Little Miss Muffet, sat on a tuffet, eating some curds and whey, along came a spider,and sat down beside her, and frightened Miss Muffet away. Long before the movie Arachnophobia, Little Miss Muffet was the best known arachnophobic.

Animal phobias: snakes, rats, bees, spiders, bats, even cats or dogs. I have a friend who, after viewing a news story about a woman who found a boa constrictor in her toilet, did her business, all of it, standing up over the toilet for a week. She also had regular nightmares about her private parts being ambushed.

Acrophobia (fear of heights): You avoid high floors of buildings, ledges, airplanes hills, mountain treks, or even a highway bridge. If stuck in such situations, you may experience vertigo (dizziness)—remember how James Stewart in the movie “Vertigo?” was continually a victim of this personal fear—and a feeling that you might accidentally slip and fall. Sometimes people feel as if some external force were pulling them to the edge.

Claustrophobia (fear of enclosed spaces): You begin to panic when in confined spaces, like an elevator, in which there’s no ready exit. Claustrophobia is common to patients who undergo an MRI (Magnetic Resonance Imaging) scan, in which, until recent improvements you would have to lay completely still inside a narrow chamber for as long as 45 minutes. If you wonder if you might be at all claustrophobic, imagine yourself buried in the sand with only your head sticking up and see if you get the heebie-jeebies!

Doctor/Dentist Phobia: This fear often begins after an event of excruciating pain and generalizes to avoiding doctors and dentists altogether.

Blood Phobia: Ever know anyone to faint at the sight of blood? When I watched cardiac bypass surgery one time out of academic curiosity, the cardiac surgeon commended my ease at viewing the procedure. “Last week two guys from ABC News were here taping,” he said, “and fainted one by one before I finished cutting the patient’s chest open.”

Illness Phobia: You dread getting sick and spend much time visiting doctors for every ache and pain. It differs from hypochondria in that you imagine getting one specific disease (cancer, AIDS) rather than a slew of diseases. You worry that every minor disorder means cancer, for instance. You may fear dying, or focus on the pain, helplessness and possible disfigurement, a common dread in women who ruminate about getting breast cancer.

Secret Weapons

If you fear heights, you probably won’t go rock climbing to help you overcome your acrophobia. Leave that to the fearless duo in “Climber,”the extreme screensaver that challenges a pair of animated rock climbers to successfully scale a random, computer-generated rock face. You get to watch as the climbers progress up the cliff, with each step carefully planned and executed in real-time decisions.

Are these fears a problem? Most of the time, no. In fact, some are common sense: snakes can be lethal. They become a problem when avoiding them disrupts your life, when fear becomes terror.

Here are some examples of fears that are out of control:

A student, preparing for her classroom presentation for her management class, spends the night vomiting and misses her class.

A writer steps outside the safety of his home and begins to tremble and hyperventilate.

A schoolteacher walks up twenty flights of stairs rather than taking the elevator to attend her best friend’s prenuptial party.

A secretary trembles as she types and makes the same mistakes three times because she fears her co-workers are secretly staring at her.

A middle-aged divorce, fearful of being alone, stays out all night partying to avoid going home to her empty apartment.

A young mother doesn’t allow her four-year-old to play in another child’s house because she worries that he might get hit by his playmate, or fall down the stairs at the other child’s house.

A man with advanced symptoms of pneumonia delays going to the hospital and almost dies because of his lifelong fear of doctors.

If you recognize yourself or anyone you might know in any of these examples, don’t be surprised. One in nine adults in this country suffer from phobias, to the point of seeking psychiatric help. Often these fears begin in early childhood and we rarely outgrow them.

“Fear is a noose that binds until it strangles.” —Jean Toomer

Or we develop a fear after a single experience, like a dentist hitting a raw nerve, or a trauma, like getting knocked about by an Atlantic coastal hurricane, a Texas twister, or a West coast earthquake. But occasionally they pop up out of nowhere: one day you get on an airplane for an otherwise routine trip and wham! – you have a panic attack.

Don’t you love it when people tell you that your fears are unreasonable: “Just keep a stiff upper lip.” You’d like to give them a fat lip. You know your fears are ridiculous, but just knowing that doesn’t stop the immediate and compelling “run for your life” gut response you get when they come upon you.

This is especially so in agoraphobia, when phobias multiply to the point where you fear so many things and situations that you become housebound, and where your fear broadens to “fear of fear.”