Not every fear can be considered a phobia, in terms of psychology we use as referent the Marks’s criteria:
•
It’s an extreme response of anxiety in confront of the situation or the object that causes the fear, and/or is related with stimulus that potentially aren’t so dangerous.
•
It can’t be removed in a rational way.
•
It’s out of the will control.
•
It produces avoiding or escaping responses in front of the situation.
We can describe phobias in a few words as “intense anxiety associated to a situation or object that the person admits rationally isn’t dangerous for him”. Phobia is clearly a disruptive response.
Phobias are an anxiety response, and although anxiety it’s a word frequently used it’s important to know what’s exactly the anxiety.
Anxiety it’s just an emotion, its job it’s to prepare our body for facing danger, that’s why anxiety raises our breath and our heart beats, to provide more oxygen to our muscles, and that’s why we start feel them more tense; our body it’s getting ready for face the danger fighting or slipping away.
Anxiety itself it’s a useful feeling, it helps us to preserve our life, for example when crossing a street we hear a horn and we stop suddenly, and in a few more situations. But anxiety might become a problem when we start considering as dangerous, some situations that aren’t so damaging, and then we start to avoid them.
Phobias usually developed when we avoid some situations after the first anxiety response, in that moment we didn’t give us the chance to discover if the danger was incoming or was only a false alarm; that’s how we learned to be afraid in that situation, and every time we will have to face something similar our body will react with anxiety.
Sometimes phobia appear after a traumatic experience, for example if a dog bitted you when you where a child and now you are afraid of every dog. But sometimes we learned to be scared trough other people’s experience, if we saw it or if they told you hat happened.
According to the DSM-IV phobias can be classified under the following general categories:
•
Natural environment type: Includes all the environmental events as thunderstorms, lightning, deep water, wind, heights, and darkness.
•
Situational type: Includes specific places or situations as being in closed rooms, elevators, airplanes, ships, trains, tunnels, etc.
•
Animal type: Includes a big variety of animals, domestic animals (dogs, cats, birds), insects, spiders and other animals usually avoid as snakes or frogs.
•
Blood, injuries, injections, medical o dental procedures: In this specific phobias, specially in the case of blood phobia, the anxiety response it’s different, al first there’s a simpatic stimulation and after a while begins a parasimpatic response that might cause a swoon
The most effective treatment for specific phobias it’s the gradual exposition to the object or situation, plus a right management of the thoughts that will help to a more effective confrontation.
During a gradual exposition the person faces the feared objects or situations without avoidance responses. Usually the situations are graduated by levels of difficulty. This technique it’s very effective because facing the different situation, the person realizes his fears are baseless, and that’s the clue to vanish the anxiety response. It’s important to have a good knowledge of the management of these techniques, and ask for professional advice, especially if the specific phobia appeared a long time ago, or if there are high levels of anxiety.