My wife has a paralyzing phobia of snakes. Not a fear, a phobia. If we are walking in the woods and she sees a garter snake on the trail she will panic, scream and run the opposite direction until it is no longer in sight. At that point she will turn around and walk back the way she came so she doesn’t go anywhere near it again. She is so afraid of snakes that she can’t even look at a picture of one. If one comes on TV she will scream and leave the room until I give her the ‘all clear’ signal. Needless to say her least favorite movie to watch is Raiders of the Lost Ark. I’ve suggested a few times that she get desensitization therapy but she refuses to go because, well, you probably have to look at pictures of snakes. It doesn’t matter if the snake is venomous or not. That doesn’t factor into it. A rubber snake will elicit the same response as a real one.
According to her and her family she never had a scary encounter with a snake as a child, and I’ve heard of kids that were bitten by snakes and didn’t develop a phobia. I assume this is an inherited trait that most of us don’t have, and I can see why having an inborn fear of ‘dangerous animals’ would be a good survival instinct. So are phobias traceable to genes, or is something else going on? And more importantly, why doesn’t the obvious logic of “that snake is on TV and can’t hurt you” override her phobia?
I am going to try to get you a better answer when my husband comes home (he specializes in the treatment of anxiety disorders, including phobias.) And I maybe won’t remember all the correct terminology.
The fear of snakes is a relatively common phobia, so we can probably assume there is some survival instinct involved, but try to keep in mind there are people out there afraid of pickles. It’s not actually necessary for her to have had a bad experience with a snake. All that would really be required is for her to have a mildly distressing experience that even peripherally involved either a snake or something snake like (I’m not even sure that would be required.) The brain makes the association automatically - the snake is really a secondary stimulus. Remember how Skinner got baby Ben to be terrified of white bunnies? All he had to do was introduce a loud sound at the same time as the bunnies. Ben learned to generalize from bunnies to just fluffy things in general, even in the absence of the scary noise. I don’t believe we fully understand where phobias come from, but Ben is a clue.
So that’s part one, how the ball got rolling. Then there’s the other part, in that avoidance reinforces anxiety. Your wife has done this to herself, unwittingly. She may have started out mildly anxious but every time she freaked out and avoided a snake, she reinforced her assessment that the snake is dangerous. The more she responds that way, the worse her phobia will get. Also, it’s not the snake she’s avoiding, it’s the discomfort of being anxious.
Therapy is about learning to tolerate that anxious feeling. If your wife did receive exposure therapy, they’d probably start lower level than a picture. I’m guessing they’d start at whatever she identified as a 10-30 on the SUDS scale (max 100.) Maybe just talking about snakes. Eventually she’d learn to habituate to that small amount of anxiety, and then on to the next scariest thing. (I’ve done exposure therapy myself and therefore pretty familiar with the process.)
I’ll try to get you a more complete answer later. This is one of the weirder aspects of my husband’s job. His recent professional purchase from Amazon involved a stuffed tarantula, fake vomit, and pens that looked like syringes.
Phobias also enable evolutionary learning. You know how wild animals, after exposure to humans, often develop a fear of us? In some cases, that’s learned, taught by the older and wiser animals, but it also happens with animals that don’t teach their young. And even among those that do teach their young, that might not be enough, if every animal that encounters humans gets killed, and so is unable to pass down its experiences.
So how does it work? You start with a population with a random assortment of phobias. For any given stimulus (like humans), most of the animals aren’t afraid of it, but a few are. And this is for no particular reason: It’s not because of prior bad encounters, because they’re present even without any encounters at all. Then, when the population does encounter humans for the first time, most of the animals won’t be wary of humans, but a few will. And the unwary ones will get shot, giving the wary ones a big advantage in raising the next generation. It turns out that their phobia was justified after all, even though the fact that it was justified had no relationship to the reason why they had it.
So, maybe you’re afraid of creatures with tentacles on their face, like Dr. Zoidberg. And maybe, one day, they’ll make first contact with us, and you’ll act on that fear. And if it turns out that they’re benign and benevolent, then that’ll be something of an inconvenience for you. But in the event that they’re not, your fear might end up ensuring the survival of the species.
It seems logical that logic should overcome emotions. But emotions aren’t logical. Logic doesn’t stop you from feeling the feeling, and if that feeling is already overwhelming, then logic can’t get a word in edgewise. Such is the nature (the definition, even) of phobias: the suffer is often aware that their feelings aren’t logical and are all out of proportion to the reality of the situation, but they are absolutely powerless to do anything about it.
What astonishes me is how finely tuned a phobia can be. I react in helpless panic to spiders…but scorpions, crabs, lobsters, and other critters, very similar to spiders visually, don’t set off my alarm bells. I don’t understand it at all.
Yeah, I have a fear of heights. I was once hanging out at the Orozco mural in Guadalajara, which is painted on the ceiling of a large domed building.
This article makes it sound really innocuous, but the mirror is set up so that you can look down and see the ceiling… which seems way, way down. It feels like you’re standing on the edge of an 8-foot-square gap that stands 60 feet above the ground.
Hard as I tried, I couldn’t lean over that mirror. Knowing that I wasn’t really looking down from a great height, the illusion was nonetheless too strong.
Habituation is a very real thing. As most of you know, my job is airplane piloting. I spend a *lot *of time looking out on the world from high and not-so-high places.
20-ish years ago I bought a condo way up on the upper floors of a high rise building. It had a nice walk-out 8’x20’ balcony surrounded by a lightweight metal railing at the usual belly-button height. The whole balcony was cantilevered out past the sheer vertical face of the building. IOW, one long side was attached to the building and the other three sides just ended out in space.
When I first bought the place I could happily go out onto the balcony and could walk out to about 4 feet short of the railing. But it was increasingly uncomfortable to go farther. It was very uncomfortable to get close enough to touch the railing. That took severe willpower. It was like it had a repulsion field that physically pushed me away.
I was very surprised by this unconscious uncontrollable reaction. I had never felt something like that in my life and I certainly didn’t expect it when I bought the place.
A month later I thought nothing of walking right up to the railing, grabbing it with one or both hands, and leaning my torso out over the railing into space. That had zero anxiety.
I got a nice bar-height table & chairs out there and often ate meals sitting alongside the railing. Sitting up extra-high like that was actually high enough that the railing wasn’t really tall enough to be fall-proof; it’d be possible to go over the top of the railing if you fell out of the chair just right. Didn’t bother me a bit.
The stimulus hadn’t changed whit one. Something in my unconscious reaction to the stimulus had changed. And not because I did anything other than go out there regularly and push the envelope just a little bit.
Fear of snakes and snakelike objects is thought to be innate/genetic, and it makes sense to some extent. A full blown phobia (which it definitely sounds like she has) is likely learned. As it sounds slightly disruptive, it may be a good idea to consult a specialist.
Fear of snakes and snakelike objects is thought to be innate/genetic, and it makes sense to some extent. A full blown phobia (which it definitely sounds like she has) is likely learned. As it sounds slightly disruptive, it may be a good idea to consult a specialist.
Tell her welcome to the club. When I see a snake all 6’, 240lbs of me go running and screaming like a little girl. I then calm down, get my trusty 12ga and proceed to blast the snake to Kingdom Come. God I hate snakes.
I think it’s a complex issue that is deeply rooted in her psyche. There’s no question that exposure therapy works for lots of people, but you have to be willing to face your fears long enough to get through the therapy, and she’s not there today. I told her I will support her no matter what. Where we live snakes are fairly common, especially this time of year. I see at least one a week.
I think at some point she will realize that the stress and anxiety that comes from her phobia is degrading her quality of life since he enjoys being outdoors. Once she gets to that point she may be willing to accept therapy. In the meantime if I see a snake, and she doesn’t see it, I keep my mouth shut and keep walking…
Similar story to LSLGuy’s, except in virtual reality. I got an Oculus Rift a few months ago. I started playing a game called Windlands, in which you’re required to jump between platforms which appear to be several hundred feet above the ground. The experience is very realistic. At first I was just terrified. It was very difficult to just “walk” to the edge of a platform and look over the edge, let alone jump between them. I was frequently sweating and shaking after a few minutes of playing. Now I’ve played it for many hours, and I have almost zero problem jumping between platforms, swinging on grappling hooks, etc. I occasionally get a little twinge of fear in very precarious situations, but it’s vastly different than it was when I first started playing.
