This is me. TO and landing are generally fine. It’s the smooth flight, just waiting for the problems to start that gets me… I spend the whole flight waiting to crash.
NLP: Neuro-linguistic programming, helps you to restructure your internal experience of a phobia. Basiycally, you disassociate from a phobic memory, then you scramble the way you present it internally by running it backwards or making it funny and then you generalise it, all while staying in a safe emotional state.
EFT: Emotional Freedom Technique: You tap on certain meridian points while thinking of the phobia and this seems to scramble or delete the emotions attached to the phobia.
Both very effective and you can find lots of free videos and articles about it on the net.
Stinging insects like bees, wasps, hornets. My friends have learned that it’s a bad idea to tell me if there’s one nearby because my flailing could get somebody nearby seriously injured. Best case scenario is me going, “nnnnnnnnnnnnghhhhhhhhhhhhh” as I hustle my ass away from wherever the little fuckers are.
Ignore them and they won’t sting you. They have a phobia of people that flail their arms around ya know.
I’m not even capable of acting like there’s any sanity left in the world when there’s a spider in the room, let alone my own sanity.
There a few things that I don’t like, that make me uneasy, that I make very deliberate efforts to avoid, and yes, if called upon I could play it cool while losing my shit inside, but my arachnophobia is not one of them. I know a lot of people are terrified of spiders, but even those people are like, “Dude, you need to chill.” It is completely out of control. Spiders are the only thing I am truly, deeply, irrepressibly afraid of.
And now you know my only weakness. That and flattery. And gin.
Same here. If I see a snake on tv, I’ll turn my head until it’s gone. When we were kids, my cousin used to chase me with issues of National Geographic.
I make Indiana Jones look like Steve Irwin.
My phobia is dentistry, so I have to answer yes, I can. That’s how I get myself into the dentist’s chair, actually. Each and every time.
But only for a time. I have already wrapped my head around it, steeled my nerve. I have brought my music machine and am actively distracting myself, during the lead in to my appointment.
But when I was there just a few days ago, between the cleaning and seeing the dentist, she was addressing an emergency, I sat, first in the waiting room, and then in the chair, for a total of about 35minutes. She arrived just in time to see me taking off the bib, getting out of the chair, and bundling up my things. I was literally seconds away from bolting. Out into the waiting room to pay for the cleaning and get the hell out of there.
She was most apologetic, I was already at the, ‘I don’t think I can do this!’, stage by then. But she did manage to get me sitting down, calmed a little, etc. ‘Why don’t I just have a look, while you’re here…’ She’s a very good dentist!
So I can clearly do it, when need be. But it seems I cannot do it for an open ended period of time. I need to see a clearish end time to be able to manage it.
Since it’s unlikely I’d ever have to do public speaking, I’ll never get the chance to see if I could pretend my way into looking unafraid.
However, at the base of the public speaking fear is a fear of being stared at. I don’t even like close-ups of staring eyes in movies and television. Whenever there was a close-up of Frodo and his unnaturally huge eyes staring into the camera, I’d have to avert my gaze. In real-life situations, I avoid people’s eyes as well.
This is something I’m working on. At work, I’m always repeating an inner mantra “make eye contact - make eye contact” so I don’t come across as having Asperger’s. I’m getting pretty good at it. Next thing to work on is smiling and asking about their kids.
So yes, I’m capable of pretending my fear doesn’t exist. I don’t know if I’d call it a phobia, though.
I’m pretty claustrophobic, but I managed to talk myself through back-to-back shoulder MRI’s. I was in that damned tube for about an hour and a half. I just kept telling myself that I was perfectly safe and I had a way out. And I mostly kept my eyes closed so I wouldn’t see that the tube was mere inches from my nose.
Heights, on the other hand…I don’t think I could psych myself out of that one.
I have an inexplicable fear of traveling, and especially stopping, under a train trestle and having it collapse and crush me. I have a recurring nightmare about it and travel several miles out of my way daily to avoid one that would be on my most direct route to work. My palms are getting sweaty even writing about it!
I doubt very much that I could fool anyone into thinking I was OK with it.
And if the train on the trestle were full of spiders??? Fageddaboudit!
I do, every time I see the phlebotomist.
Since falling down the stairs and snapping off my wrist bone, I have a very understandable fear of falling down stairs. I can only go down them one at a time, making sure both feet are on one stair before proceeding. I also count them to make sure my feet are firmly on the stair.
I can’t hide it, and anyone who doesn’t sympathize with me is an old poopyhead.