Not weird at all. Wide open spaces without cover leaves you exposed. Most small furry animals don't like it either. This is why you need to give pet rats, hamsters etc. something in their cage that they can curl up and hide inside.
I am wholeheartedly with you. I have several phobia's myself including Arachnophobia, Trypanophobia but most severely Thantophobia - the fear of dying. The thantophobia is extremely strong and a few years ago i had a period of around 18 months where i suffered from extreme anxiety and repeated panic attacks if i so much as got a tiny headache since my subconciuos would convincve me that i was about to have a massive aneurysm or a pain in my chest was a heart attack and a slight cough for a couple of days was lung cancer. Now i am not a hyperchondriac, far from it, which is why having this has always surprised me. I have since been able to control it almost entirely by way of going all sciency on it. I have embedded into my brain that i should logically and rationally reason out what exactly these might be and why they wont be what i think. Thankfully i had the full support of my wife who didn't even once get angry or annoyed when for the umpteenth time i was begging for an amubluance at 4 in the morning because i thought i might have swallowed a tiny tiny piece of bone during dinner. Alot of you wont like this next bit. One way i also helped myself was to find out about other phobia's which one might consider ridiculous, silly, stupid or funny. Yes i know that phobia's are irrational and not something a person can choose to have or not have and that to mock the afflicted is wrong, prejudicial and downright callous. The fact remains however that it helped me because i was able to briefly forget my own issues whilst chuckling about other peoples. I apologise for that methodology but the simple point remains that my phobia was directly affecting my lifestyle, my work, my health and my wife's life, something had to be done and i tried everything i could and that seemed to work. So to wrap that up, if it offends you i'm sorry but tough ****, it enabled me to lead a relatively normal life. I must say though that some of them are waaaay beyond the bounds of the norm that even the most polite and understanding of people will at least say 'you're kidding right?' For example: - Triscodecophobia - The fear of the number 13. - Anatidaephobia - The fear of being watched by a duck. (it is recorded and real) Last but not least (holy crap did i write that much???) a little link to some poems which may make you feel a little better about your own phobia's whatever they may be.http://phobiapoems.tumblr.com/
Again, it makes sense. Instead of challenging the phobic thoughts (i.e. with logical reasoning or facts) you are challenging the phobic thinking. You are taking a step back to get a meta-view of phobia, so to speak.
I can completely understand your reaction to your fears, luckily I'm not quite as bad. For me, I have two. The first one is needles (trypanophobia). I can't bear to look at one, if there is one on TV I have to look away and it takes me a few minutes to feel 'normal' again. Should I ever need one at the doctors or dentists I spend the whole visit with my eyes shut tight gripping to the seat for dear life, but this is not my worst fear. My worst fear is not specifically heights but the fear of falling. I can climb a tree (well I used to when I wasn't quite so old and fat) and that never bothered me. As I had something secure to grip I was fine, but anything else and I am a wreck. I've tried lots of different things but there is no way in the world I can even be 20 feet above ground and feel safe if I am not holding onto something (and can see a drop). I've tried looking over a cliff, but to get near to the edge I had to lie down about 20 feet away from the edge and pull myself forward. I hated it and won't ever try again. I thought I was going to be sick. I even feel woozy looking out windows in high buildings, so much so that I have to sit down for fear of falling out. I even feel bad when I look at photos of the blokes sitting on the scaffolding when they were building the Empire State Building. I know it's completely irrational to feel bad about a photo, but I do. The thought of being up high and able to fall, just scares the hell out of me. You're not alone with your irrational fears, most of us just tend not to speak about them.
It's nice to know that I'm not alone. Call it what you will, but knowing that other people deal with the same feelings helps me feel a lot less weird. Thanks, guys. But today... all I'm going to say is goddammit Penny Arcade. Goddammit.
I had a spider inside my car, this morning. The thing walked through the windshield during my ride on the highway. The worst-case scenario ever
I dislike heights to the point where I froze up a triple ladder once, at the top which was about 3 stories high. I had to get my wife to open the window the ladder was at and clamber through. Not sure if it is a true phobia or not, but I definitely become very scared at anything over the height of a single ladder. I got offered a job working on the pylons when I was younger, and was gutted I couldn't go for it as the pay was great for a lad of that age. I don't understand how I became scared of heights, as I used to love climbing trees as a kid, and had no problems with heights at all.
The only phobia I use to suffer from was Emetophobia, the fear of vomiting. I only threw up twice when I was little, then I ate some bad food when I was 14 and vomited like 6 times that day. I could barely eat anything for months without thinking of it. So I would only eat very little, because I was scared it might happen again. I moved on, but I was still afraid of vomiting. For instance, if I got a stomach ache in the morning, I would call in sick for the day, and just have a ton of anxiety. Just the moment it's happening, where you can't breath, can't control yourself, it feels like your dying. Then I got sick a few months back, really sick where I vomited 60 times overnight. Needless to say, I no longer have that phobia. I still don't want it to happen, but if it does, it does.
I was afraid of heights until i got a job as a Duct Fitter. Doing that job i was frequently working at heights, such as 120 feet up in a cherry picker which is swaying around in the wind but because i was doing a job and had alot in front of me to concentrate on i eventually found that the height didn't bother me. If you are just up high the chances are you will freak out as there is nothing for you to think about except 'zomg its so ****ing high i'm gonna die i'm gonna die getmedowngetmedowngetmedown!!!!!!!!!!!!1!!!!!!!' When there is something to occupy your mind you wont even think about it until at some point you'll notice the height in passing and say 'ooo thats high, pass me a 17mm spanner dude' because thats the only importance it has at the time. Also while doing that job i found a bizarre thing. I was only ever apprehensive at heights from roughly 15-20 feet up to 60ish feet. Anything above that didn't bother me at all. My thought's on this is that subconsciously i knew that between those heights if i fall its going to REALLY ****ING HURT and probably leave me severely incapacitated or more likely paralysed. Everytime above that height i believe my subconscious was telling me 'pfft ****it, if you fall you aint gonna feel it so why worry'. I honestly believe that phobia's can be altered or even removed by exposure to them in controlled environments and by consciously thinking about what your subconscious is telling you and adjusting your own thoughts to suit. Yeah that all sounds a bit wierd and backwards but it obviously worked since i can now watch This (be warned this shows extreme heights and do not watch if you get vertigo through video) and all i think is "AWESOME I WANNA GO UP THERE!!!"
A cousin of mine, back in the day, vomitited in the middle of his classroom hummm in 12th grade. After this incident, He become agoraphob.
My all time favourite medically recognised phobia is Arachibutyrophobia, the irrational fear of getting peanut butter stuck to the roof of your mouth. I personally don't suffer from any phobias thank goodness, I'm able to rationalise them all out. Thinking about it simply though: you can teach yourself nearly anything, I'm sure there are very few reactions that are permemntly hardwired into someone's unconcious. It'll be hard, difficult and take a long time, but if you really want to you'll be able to teach yourself not to react to spiders like you do. That London Zoo course sounded like a very good idea! Incidentally, I think a lot of the problem arrises from the success of Wolf Spiders in urban environments. These are your common "house" or "garden" spiders: they don't spin webs, instead they chase down their prey like a Big Cat would. As such, unlike almost all other spiders, you see them all over the place (as they move around so much) and they move fast. Almost all other common species of spiders sit on webs and don't go anywhere, making them much less threatening. My other half is scared of spiders, but I've taught her not to kill them and to leave them to me. Personally I try not to get rid of all of them: Wolf Spiders especially basically act like mini-vacume cleaners, running around your house and eating all the bugs, grubs and lavae that live in the carpets and cracks around your house. Long live free house cleaners!
I'm **** scared of spiders, Once in a hotel where i work a girl came down said theres a spider on her bed and wanted me to remove it, I walked in the room, she burst out crying, i said "it hasn't paid for the room" which made her giggle a little, for a good 5-10 minutes we where standing their just looking at it, then a guest was walking past which i called over and he just picked it up and let it go outside. Tonight i got back from doing a round, and my mate said theirs a spider on you shoulder, which made me go crazy throw my jacket off, which then he picked the spider up showed me and said freaking hell its got boxing gloves on "referring to its fangs" In reception theres a corner which attracts spiders for some reason =/ I find i normally lose most my fears when my temper starts going off, I think i've got so angry before i've removed a spider from above my bed on the wall threw it outside, then just questioned what i was getting angry with in the first place =/ In my old house i use to have my pet kitties which kicked anything's ass on our grounds but i've moved now so their with my parents.
I have a phobia/ocd/freakishness with bed bugs. Those little fu(|<ers took over our house. Every time we go "treated" they would always come back! In the end -$140,000 later we got a house Free from them. I HATE bugs that don't contribute anything to the world. bed bugs, ticks, fleas... I'm fine with mosquitos and flies cause they feed other things.
Think that's bad? Check this one out. I have a bit of a fear of heights despite the fact I go indoor climbing once a week (i'm trying to get over it) but watching that video makes me nervous as hell. My number 1 fear though is definitely Octopuses, can't even look at a picture of the damn things without freaking out, it's just lucky I don't tend to bump into them in the street very often. Completely irrational I know but damn those things are freaky.
The only thing that freaks me about Octopuses is their damned intelligence. In fact any animal which shows a scary level of intelligence will freak me out, not make me all scared but just more than a little concerned.
Dentists. God I hate dentists. I once had a really nice one, who was awesome and relaxed and didn't use that drill even once. And then I got a horrible dentist who never said anything but his alien dentist language and used the drill and was horrible. I have not been to the dentist since. Aside from the fact there are no decent NHS dentists anywhere, I'm terrified that I will get a bad one that won't knock me out to pull a tooth. This has come around as I have a broken tooth from a fight that won't stop bothering me lately.
I went to groundschool with a girl who was deadly afraid of worms. Just waving a rubber band would set her off. Good times!
I can relate to this I finally went to the dentist and had 2 extractions at the back, they could have been avoided if I had gone sooner. I don't mind what the dentist does, it's just I suffer from anxiety and imagine all the stuff that could go wrong !
