Phobia

Hello there,


You are right, Alison, for sure there is no one single ‘true’ cause for phobia, and for some people it is difficult to have a clear recollection as to when their phobia actually started. Perhaps that is because of the very young age when the particular fear occurs, or because of the nature of fear itself in response to an object or situation, that is all to do with the overestimation of the threat. What is seen as excessive and irrational in specific phobias, such as in fear of heights manifested in adults for example, was helpful for a little child who was not able to get down stairs by himself and kept falling and getting hurt, or was perhaps pushed. It seems that most phobias begin early in life and usually it is uncommon to suffer from just one phobia. Phobia is, in my view, only one feature of the fearful little child who some of us still carry with us into our adulthood.


Of course, many fears were, from an evolutionary perspective, adaptive responses to danger, but in most phobias fears are excessive or disproportionate compared to the degree of danger an object or a situation actually poses.
The aetiology of a phobia could be more or less complex, involving psychological and biological factors, and also environmental ones.


There are a number of theories explaining the causality of phobia, most of them, but not all, related to a particular type of psychotherapeutic theory, and from this point of view they must be considered by taking into account the perspective held by that particular psychotherapy.
There is the psychoanalytic perspective on the phobia, mentioned in the course, where anxiety is caused by intrapsychic conflict ‘solved’ through repression and transferred to a common objects (spiders, heights, public speaking, etc.), or more exotic ones (such as balloons or vegetables).
Conditioning clearly plays a big role in the development of fears and phobias, and thus this is one of my favorite causes for common phobias. This is the behavioural perspective at work, and is based on the classical conditioning theory developed by J. B. Watson, who used the example of little Albert, as a point that proves that the anxiety is a learned response. But unfortunately this is not the case all the time, and so there are people who for example develop phobias of situations in which they have never been. And if, according to classical conditioning theory, we can learn to be frightened of any neutral stimulus, why is it that some fears are more common than others? Why are so many people afraid of heights or spiders and so few scared of…sitting on a chair? It’s also true we can learn to fear from how others behave, and from what they tell us… As little children, usually we mimic other people’s behaviour in an automatic way, without being able to recall the moment when we acquired a particular fear and phobia.
According to the cognitive theory of anxiety, the key insight is that anxiety, like other emotions, arises from our appraisal of a situation, and that this initial interpretation may not be a conscious process, and that it is also affected by our styles of thinking. When researchers analysed the thoughts of a person with spider phobia, for example, and noted down what people with this phobia think while seeing a spider, their responses all included: ‘bite me’, ‘crawl into my clothes’, ‘ make me scream and faint’, etc. All these are fearful thoughts that play a crucial role in causing phobias, and the idea is if you change your thinking, you can then change your emotion. There are of course cognitive biases underlying and sustaining phobias, like safety behaviours involving avoidance of the object that produces fear in the first place. The real problem appears when the object of fear cannot be avoided in the everyday. This is usually when people turn to therapy, as in fear of flying, claustrophobia, fear of injections, fear of blood, or fear of speaking in public, to mention just a few.


One of the causes of phobia that is really interesting seems to be brain-related and involves our biological preparedness for coping with the potential catastrophic situations. To be effective in the face of disaster, early humans had to learn a strategy that was triggered by environmental cues, and resulted in an automatic response. Fight or flight mechanism enabled our species to survive. Freeze did not. The imbalance in what we may call the ‘fear system’ of the brain (including the amygdala, the hippocampus, and the prefrontal cortex) is probably genetic in origin, and research proves that genetic make-up and vulnerability of that part of the brain, responsible for fear, could be part of the reason why some people develop phobia and others do not.



I used to suffer from the phobia triggered by spiders, of all sizes and shapes. I think I just learned to fear them as a small child. I grew up on a farm, and my favourite place to play was the woods nearby. There were always spiders there, hanging between the branches of trees or in bushes. If you were not careful, you could easily get caught up in their web. It was an unpleasant business to get rid of it from your clothes and hair, and spiders were not happy to see it destroyed even by accident. I also recall how my older siblings used to scare me by shouting that a spider had just landed on my head or back, anyway in a place I couldn’t check for myself. It may be that I fed and maintained this phobia over the years as an adult, and also as a way of, strangely enough, getting attention from someone I knew would come and rescue me…
As you may imagine, I was the perfect candidate for desensitization under hypnosis during the first and second stages of the courses. The first time, as an exercise, something went wrong and I ended up in abreaction, while a colleague was giving me suggestions that made the small spider in my imagination become too big, even as ‘seen’ through a screen. The second time, it was performed by the tutor as an example of how NLP could actually make the whole process of desensitization very short and effective indeed. Needless to say, now I like to play with spiders and feel how ticklish they can make your skin feel. No fear at all. I just have to stop myself grabbing larger spiders as if they were soft toys. Indeed, some of them can bite if threatened.

Hi Liliana

" It may be that I fed and maintained this phobia over the years as an adult, and also as a way of, strangely enough, getting attention from someone I knew would come and rescue me…"

I swear I wrote my previous post before getting to that part of your post....