Some Thoughts on Fears and Phobias
”To be afraid of, expect with alarm.” ~ Webster’s Dictionary
“Fear is the ability to recognize danger leading to an urge to confront it or flee from it.” ~Wikipedia
“Fear not.” ~ The Angel Gabriel and others
“Do not fear.”~ Jesus.
“False Evidence Appearing Real” ~Somewhere on the Internet
Fear is also one of the themes of Bridging Two Hearts where Amy is terrified of the Coronado Bridge and Josh, a Navy SEAL, who doesn’t believe he’s afraid of anything. (Though small spaces bother him after a recent near-tragic assignment).
Fears and phobias are related, of course, though phobias often have a psychological component and frequently need professional help to overcome.
The list of phobias–φόβος, Greek for fear–is endless, but some of the more common ones are mentioned in the novel.
Amy’s fear of bridges is called Gephyrophobia. Most people know claustrophobia is a fear of small enclosed spaces.
Gephyrophobia is so common in San Diego (whose Coronado Bridge is the number three suicide bridge in the country), that the Virtual Reality Medical Center is well prepared to handle people needing to deal with it. The 4.3 mile Chesapeake Bay Bridge in Maryland so frightens people that for many years the Maryland Transit Authority had a program where someone else would drive your car over the bridge while you sat in the passenger seat.
In Bridging Two Hearts, Amy develops her phobia of bridges because of something in her past. Rather than deal with that personal issue, she transfers the fear and panic to where it occured: a bridge. Crippled by that fear, she avoided driving over bridges until the opportunity to grow up and get her dream job forced the issue. She had to choose whether to allow her fear to control her or to face it and overcome it.
The genesis for this plot idea came from my own, well-meaning mother’s attempts to keep us out of trouble.
Our two-story house was built on a hill and my lower-story bedroom had a door to access the roomy crawl space. My mother did not want her children playing in there, so she warned us to stay out because “black widow spiders live under there. If one bites you, you’ll die.”
Why would I not believe her?
I was terrified to go under the house and every time she gave me something to store under there, I hurried in and out as fast as possible.
(Until right now, it never occurred to me that an enterprising spider could have slipped under the door. I’m glad I didn’t realize that before!)
Just like the movie.
(I tried to cure myself of this fear by watching Steven Spielberg’s film one night. I only lasted five minutes before I, literally, ran screaming out of the room.)
When I reached adulthood, any spider spooked me. I’m fanatic about vacuuming spider webs found in the house. But our Connecticut home in the woods sported a lot of Daddy Long Legs (Pholcidae) who moved in every spring.
“Repeat after me,” my husband said, getting a grip on my shoulders. “The spider is my friend. He eats insects.”
“The spider is my friend.” I did repeat it.
Often.
After awhile, they didn’t bother me as much. But I still vacuumed them up.
“Whenever we’re afraid, it’s because we don’t know enough. If we understood enough, we would never be afraid,”~ motivational speaker Earl Nightingale.
I didn’t want my children to be afraid of every insect with eight legs. I wanted them to recognize spiders as Charlotte, but from a distance.
So, we did a study of spiders and I learned, for the first time, how to recognize a black widow spider, particularly the red infinity symbol on the back of its bulbous body.
I’ve only seen three in my life.
But I stomped on all three immediately.
I can handle spiders better now because I’ve used knowledge to overcome my fears. I used to be afraid to fly, but I overcame that, again, by looking at the situation with rational eyes.
But not all fears and certainly not phobias, can be treated by logic and knowledge as Josh discovered in Bridging Two Hearts.
His teammate needed professional help to deal with a psychological-based phobia brought on by a near-dying incident. The military, as it does in real life, paid for the SEAL to get treatment at a clinic to deal with claustrophobia. He had to deal with that fear or he’d lose his SEAL designator and thus his livelihood.
Sometimes it takes a powerful motive to help us confront our fears and phobias.
But the truth can set us free.
How have you dealt with fear in the past? Were you able to figure out why you feared something? Did learning about what you feared help?
Tweetables:
Dealing with a phobia, or is it just a fear? Click here to tweet
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The list of phobias is endless, but how do you deal with them? Click to tweet
