Do I Have a Phobia?

Hello, I am a Santa Rosa psychologist, therapist, and counselor, Dr. Eric Ryan—I help people learn to overcome their fears and phobias! In this sense I am a fear doctor or psychotherapist. I would like to talk to you about your phobia and help you understand what phobias are and how you can get help, and give some basic tips on how to overcome them.

A phobia is defined as “an irrational fear of a specific object or situation.” When confronted with the feared situation you may experience an unreasonable and distressing level of suffering. Because the situation is so scary to you, the object or situation is either avoided or endured with intense distress (learn more about Anxiety & Avoidance).

In a nut shell, phobias of any type are maintained by a vicious cycle of fear and avoidance.  You fear the situation, place, or object, and therefore avoid it.  However, by avoiding the situation you never confront the fear thus making it impossible to overcome: fear causes avoidance, which causes more fear, which causes more avoidance!  Overtime, this cycle can become progressively more debilitating.

A phobia is a common problem that can become very debilitating depending on the type of phobia and how often it comes up in your life. For instance, someone with a driving phobia may become panicky when they have to drive on the freeway making getting to work or visiting friends a problem. Similarly people with fears of heights and bridges may avoid any travel over a bridge, high roads, or even flying. The more situations that you have to avoid as a result of your phobia, leads to progressively more and more limitation in your life.  As a result ones world shrinks.

There are several types of phobias:

• Animal Type: includes excessive fears of spiders, insects, dogs, cats, snakes, etc.
• Natural Environment Type: includes fears of heights, water, storms, etc.
• Blood-Injection-Injury Type: includes fears of seeing blood, getting an injection or blood test, watching surgery, etc.
• Situational Type: includes fears of enclosures, driving, flying, bridges, elevators, etc.

Phobias will affect around 33 million Americans over the course of a lifetime.  Many people “adapt” their life around the phobia and never really deal with it.  In this sense the phobia becomes a compartmentalized segment of their life.  It is hard to feel good about yourself when you have walled off a phobia!  In a way you have admitted defeat over something that others usually have no problem with.  That can have a bad effect on your sense of self-esteem.

Contrary to what you might expect, it turns out that phobias are one of the easiest psychological problems to overcome!  The best way to do so is to find ways to confront the situation again and again.  You can break it up into manageable chunks.  For instance if you fear heights, try just going up a step ladder, or even a few steps of a real ladder.  Try to get a little closer to edges of heights, like looking out of building’s (rather than looking away).  Approach the feared situation, object, or animal gradually but persistently and you will eventually overcome your fear.  The technical name for this process is Behavioral Exposure, which leads to calming changes in your brain.  Each time you approach the situation and confront it is called “doing an exposure”.  The more you do, the more frequent, prolonged, the faster you will get over the phobia.  Good luck!