Phobia is defined as a set of emotional, intellectual, behavioral and physiological reactions given disproportionately towards an object or situation and the danger in question, and the tendency to avoid the feared thing or situation depending on these reactions. The word phobia comes from the ancient Greek God Phobos, who frightened his enemies. Nowadays, phobias have begun to be named by adding the word phobia after the name of the feared object. All phobias are considered as anxiety disorders. Psychologists divide phobia into two: social phobia and specific phobia. Social phobia is a problem in which a person holds back in a social environment due to concerns such as making mistakes, being humiliated, or not performing adequately, and does not enter certain environments, or remains passive even if he/she does.
Specific Phobia.
Specific phobia is an unfounded, exaggerated, unreal fear that occurs when encountering or expecting to encounter a specific object, situation or living thing. There are dozens of phobias described in the psychological literature. Some of those; airplane phobia, animal phobia, closed space phobia, elevator phobia, suffocation phobia, writing phobia, etc.
How Do Phobias Form?
A problem in psychology. or there is more than one theory about the emergence of the disorder. Each theory makes different recommendations for the formation and treatment of the disorder in question. According to the three most common approaches among these theories, the formation of phobia is as follows;
Phobia Formation According to Psychoanalytic Theory
According to Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychology, phobias are symbolic of our unconscious conflicts. are reflections. In some situations where people experience conflict and intense negative emotions in their past or present lives, they cannot express their emotions and suppress their emotions. They feel the need to express these emotions in order to reduce the tension created by the emotions they repress, but since they are unconsciously afraid that they will encounter something negative themselves if they express their negative emotions towards the people with whom they experience these negative emotions, they symbolically direct their unconscious conflicts to another thing or object, thus interacting with these emotions to a certain extent. to cope they get used to it. For example, a client of mine, who was going to go to another city to follow an important case of his father, experienced the feeling of guilt he would feel towards his father if he lost the case so intensely that, even though he had boarded the plane many times before, when he arrived at the airport for the case, he suddenly started to be afraid of the plane and thought that the plane would crash, so he decided not to take the flight. He stated that he gave up and never got on the plane again.
Phobia Formation According to the Behaviorist Theory
According to the behaviorist approach, phobia occurs when the person experiences a neutral stimulus/situation and a negative situation. He suggests that it occurs sequentially and occurs due to a match being formed in the person's mind. While encountering a situation/object that did not cause any discomfort to the person before, due to a change in the person's physical symptoms or a negative event, a situation/object that was previously neutral for the person turns into a situation that creates fear, and the person must take action to avoid experiencing this situation again. He begins to avoid the situation/object, and his fear/anxiety towards the situation/object further develops and ossifies. The best example of this is the Little Albert experiment. In this experiment, the researchers first gave a real rabbit to a little boy named Albert and asked him to play with it, and Albert played with the rabbit fearlessly and with pleasure. Afterwards, they showed the rabbit to Albert over and over again and then made a very loud and disturbing sound. After this, Albert started to get scared and cry when he saw the rabbit. Because Albert formed a bond between the rabbit and the noise and experienced classical conditioning. Afterwards, Albert even started crying when he saw many white things and even when he saw Santa Claus.
Phobia Formation Depending on Social Learning and Experience
This is the main development of many phobias. is the reason. Humans are creatures that can learn by directly experiencing or observing. Having a negative experience about a situation that was neutral in the past, or sometimes seeing someone experiencing it, provides us with information about the situation in question, and the person shapes his life in line with the newly acquired knowledge. For example, someone who has been attacked by an animal before may fear that that animal or even other animals could harm him. He develops a fear and when he sees that animal, he may get scared and run away and even avoid places and environments where he may encounter that animal. This leads to the development of phobia. Similarly, someone who experiences turbulence during a flight may develop airplane phobia. Since people develop anxiety that they will experience something similar to the event they have experienced, they begin to think that the event in question will occur more frequently in the future. This brings with it fear of fear.
Phobia and Phobic Experience from a Holistic Perspective
Some people are born genetically and hereditarily predisposed to psychological problems. Just like our immune system. Some people get sick frequently, while others get sick very rarely. A similar situation applies to psychological problems. People who are naturally more prone to anxiety are more likely to develop phobias, even in small negative situations. On the other hand, some people's autonomic nervous systems (physiological responses) are very sensitive and volatile. In addition to these innate predispositions, someone who has a negative experience with an animal, situation or object begins to think that if he encounters that animal, object or situation again, he will be harmed, that he will experience something similar to what he experienced in the past, or perhaps much worse, and this thought triggers anxiety and fear. , anxiety and fear trigger the autonomic nervous system, resulting in sympathetic nervous system symptoms such as heart palpitations, sweating, hot flashes, tremors, body tension, etc. As a result of all this, the person moves away from that situation, object or animal. When he walks away, he notices that his fear and anxiety decrease. In order to maintain this state of comfort, the person starts to constantly stay away from the scary thing, which leads to the formation of phobia. In extreme cases, some people even begin to show symptoms of anxiety when they hear the name of the thing they are phobic about, see it on TV, or imagine it.
The incidence of specific phobia is around 7% in men and 16% in women. On the other hand, people with anxiety disorders such as panic attacks and generalized anxiety disorder are more likely to have phobias.
Animal Phobia
An animal phobia is a phobia of any or more abundant than all animals It is characterized by extraneous and exaggerated fear. While it is normal for everyone to be afraid of certain animal species, this fear does not prevent people from continuing their lives normally. For animal phobia, knowing that an encounter with a particular type of animal is imminent may lead the sufferer to limit his or her life by changing his or her plans to avoid all animals or certain types of animals. The most common animal phobias are; cat phobia, dog phobia, insect phobia.
Causes of Animal Phobia
Like all phobias, there is no universal explanation for animal phobia. Rather, it is each individual's various unique experiences that lead to the emergence of such a disorder. Some examples of experiences that may lead to the development of animal phobia include early life traumatic events involving animals, witnessing such events, or even upbringing by parents or caregivers that emphasizes a fear or fear of animals. Regardless, if left untreated, the phobia can worsen and further hinder and limit the person's social and emotional life.
How is Phobia Treated?
Phobias are very restrictive of human life. Although it is a problem, phobia treatment is considered a psychological problem with a short and high success rate. There are many treatment methods used to treat phobia. Some of these are;
Systematic desensitization; In this method, the person is taught breathing, autogenic relaxation exercises and imagination practices. Then, the person's fears about the thing he is phobic about are listed from least to most anxiety-provoking, then he is gradually confronted with the things he fears through imagination exercises, and in the meantime, he is enabled to control the physiological symptoms that arise. In the last stage, the person is gradually confronted with the real state of the thing he/she has a phobia problem with. From an evolutionary perspective, the most basic feature of all living things in the world is adaptation. With the systematic desensitization method, people are able to adapt to the stimulus they feel anxious about. The best example of this is when someone with a cat or dog phobia starts feeding a kitten or dog, and they overcome their phobia over time.
Cognitive behavioral therapy; In this method, first of all, the distorted negative feelings and thoughts of the person regarding the phobic situation he is experiencing are detected, and then these thoughts are replaced with more realistic and rational thoughts. In the second stage, some methods similar to systematic desensitization enable the person to control the physical symptoms experienced in case of phobia.
EMDR; In the EMDR method, which stands for eye movement desensitization and reprocessing technique, the negative events experienced in the past related to the formation of a phobia are listed and, preferably starting from the first event experienced, the images of the negative situations experienced or the emotions of the events in question are erased with EMDR techniques. After EMDR application, people either do not remember these events at all, or even if they remember, this remembrance does not bother them in any way. The EMDR method can be used in possible situations and scenarios that have not yet been experienced but are assumed to occur. For example, someone who has never been on a plane has some possible scenarios or images in his mind that he assumes he will experience on the plane. EMDR treats phobias by erasing these images.
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