Your Irrational Fears/Phobias

skateycat said:
Me too! There was some video of someone's house after their sweetie had filled their house full of red heart-shaped balloons for Valentine's Day. What a nightmare!!!
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Cannot remember what the heck show I was watching, but there was a segment on people who had a balloon fetish. They even had conventions where they all got together and played with balloons and rode on large balloons and rolled around in balloon pits. Popping balloons can even trigger orgasms in some people. Fascinating.
 
moebius said:
I have lots of fears, but I don't consider them irrational. I don't see anything irrational about being afraid of bees, wasps, heights, snakes. Irrational fears are when you are afraid of something that makes no sense, such as stuffed animals, flowers, sofa, or anything that shouldn't trigger any fears.
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I think that there is a point at which any fear becomes irrational, no matter what it is of. I have a fear of fire, for example, but it stems from the fact that I set my hair on a fire as a small child and I don't consider it irrational because I'm generally fine with open fire. I might never start a fire in a fireplace or a bone fire but that is due to the respect I have for its power of destruction rather than fear. I can be around a fireplace fire or a bone fire or candles. And I can also light candles and over the years, I've even started to use matches (up until then I'd only use those bar-b-q lighter thing-ys
The fear of spiders, however, I find irrational because the majority of spiders where I live don't even do anything and they certainly can't harm me when I see them on TV no matter what kind of spider they are. Yet I can't watch them because watching them creeps me out.
 
Train tracks, as in crossing them. I used to be afraid of my foot becoming stuck between rails when I was a child, and am now afraid of my car stalling on the tracks when driving. Luckily, there aren't many (any?) train tracks I have to cross anymore.
 
My credit card bill. :scream:
Which is really irrational because I rarely have more than a couple of hundred dollars on it.
I only use it for online shopping, but I will lose track of what I have purchased, so I am always :yikes: when I open it. It scares me to owe money, as I hate having something before I have actually paid for it. :slinkaway
 
Me too about the credit card bill. I thought I was the only one.

I'm also terrified of getting stuck in an elevator.
 
Oh, yes. Meeting new people. :scream:

I am certainly looking forward to meeting some FSUers at Skate Canada, but also terrified I won't be cool enough to hang out with them. :slinkaway
I'm bringing a book, just in case. :D
 
Multiplying small numbers by themselves on a cheap calculator until the E comes up was my preferred way of scaring myself as a child. (ETA: OK, post-adolescent. As a kid, I thought it was kinda cool. :shuffle:) I'm sorry to admit that doing the same thing on my PC's computer is having a similar effect, and I'm only up to e+37 so far. :yikes: :shuffle:
 
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I think my choice of "irrational" was the wrong word. I was watching a Graham Norton rerun and there was a woman afraid of bread sweat. I had never heard of that but apparently her toast wasn't as toasty enough. Perhaps I should have said fears both usual and unusual.
 
moebius said:
I have lots of fears, but I don't consider them irrational. I don't see anything irrational about being afraid of bees, wasps, heights, snakes.
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They are not irrational because they have a basis - bees, wasps and snakes can bit you, hurt you, even kill you in the case of a snake. And a person can fall from a height and be injured or die.

In recent years I've developed a fear of stairs, escalators and crossing busy intersections. It's not constant, and I feel it much more strongly when I'm tired or anxious. I sometimes have panic attacks about driving as well.

This is all kind of embarrassing and I don't like the inconvenience the fears pose. So I get in my car, and drive anyway. I cross the intersection anyway. But stairs and escalators are harder. There have been times I have taken an elevator rather than an escalator.

I saw on the news a while back that x number of people die from falling down stairs every year, and that just affirmed my fear.

But the truth is, most people who go up and down stairs are not going to fall. So the fear is just an emotional escalation regarding an ordinary activity or remote possibility, and that's likely the basis of many phobias.
 
gkelly said:
Me too, to an extent.

My sister has a more severe bridge phobia.

She has had to make use of the Chesapeake Bay Bridge driver service for work sometimes.

I have only had to cross that bridge a few times in my life and I wasn't driving. I'm not sure whether I could do it myself. I don't like the Delaware Memorial Bridge, but as long as I stay in a center lane I'm fine.

Once I was driving past Baltimore and both tunnels had severe backups, so I detoured to take the Key Bridge. I was driving in the right lane because I expected to drive slowly, but I found myself getting so anxious that I could barely maintain 40 mph. My solution was to move into the left lane, where I didn't have to worry about falling off the bridge into the water, just about the oncoming traffic. No different from regular highway driving, so that proved the best solution for me.

That's when I realized that even if my bridge phobia wasn't as bad as my sister's, it did exist.

Often when I drive on bridges or flyover ramps with low barriers, I can't help thinking about how easy it would be to drive over the side.

About 15 years ago I also went through a period when every time I took the Metro I would obsess about how easy it would be to fall or jump off the platform onto the tracks. More recently I don't take Metro very often, but fortunately I seem to have gotten over that obsession.

I was especially obsessed when my niece was an infant and it was easy to fixate on how vulnerable she would be if whoever was holding happened to drop her off a bridge, onto train tracks, down a steep mountain, by accident or on purpose.
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Those are exactly my fears as well.I hate driving over the bridges across the Mississippi river..then there's the reallllllly long bridges down on the gulf coast outside of Mobile and near Pensacola and the one between Mississippi and Louisiana.And the I think it's the Dolly Parton bridge out of Mobile.I have to go over that one everytime I go see my family down there.I just take lots of deep breaths.
 
Count me as another for bees and wasps. I don't see the fear itself as irrational though, since they are evil and can cause a lot of pain. To me it's only irrational because I'm not allergic, nor have I been stung. I work with children, and when one is around, I can pretend to be calm for them (pretend being the key word) so that they don't get worked up, but inside I'm panicking. When I'm on my own or with adults, I'm one of those who runs in circles repeating 'a bee, a bee, a bee' over and over. Anytime I see an insect with yellow and black stripes, whether it has a stinger or not, I panic. The only redeeming quality about bees is honey and they are a bit more docile. Wasps are just plain evil bastards.

I'm also fiercely creeped out by cockroaches. A few years ago I was visiting a friend in Australia who was moving to a new apartment and doing the final cleaning. From what I've heard, it's quite common to have roaches in Australia, so when she was going to clean under the oven and fridge, I ran to the bedroom and put my head under the pillow and cried until she told me it was safe.

When I was younger I was briefly scared of windmills (the old water pump metal ones). I've seen some rickety ones, so I was scared that the spinning part was going to fall off and decapitate me.

One that's hard to explain properly is my fear of not being good at things. Not a fear of failure, per se, because I've failed at things and been fine, but more at trying something new, not being good at it, and reactions to that. I often don't try new things, because I don't want to not be good. Like I said, it's hard to explain properly (and especially to explain this fear from the fear of failure)
 
Reuven said:
Not a fear, but I HATE to be written on, like having to have my hand stamped, or the way some folks will write a memo on their hand. This why I cannot understand the need to be tattooed. Frankly, I find tattoos repulsive. Sorry.
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Tattoos freak me out a little. I don't know if I'm afraid of them, exactly, but i don't like them.
 
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I thought I got over my fear of flying and for some years I was fine. Then last spring, a flight from Vienna to Israel hit bad turbulence over Greece. I mean, bad. Religious people were praying aloud, the attendants were buckled in and the pilots didn't tell us what was going on. Now the fear is back as soon as the ride gets bumpy...

I'm also claustrophobic. I'm sure Room is a fine movie but I'll never know firsthand.
 
Needles. The thought of someone purposely puncturing my skin and a vein or muscle grosses me out terribly. It is all I can do to get a flu shot and IV's are a real problem even though I have great veins. Tattoos are completely off the table. I often wish that I still had the port used when I was getting chemo. Why aren't we born with one of those?
 
Heights. But only in certain situations. Really it's more of heights combined with very steep access.
 
RoseAugust said:
I have a contact lense phobia.

My dog has a fear of buildings.
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Does you dog have his/her own doghouse? And the fear of it? Or if your dog lives in the house is she/he afraid to enter and exit? How does this work?
 
Cachoo said:
Does you dog have his/her own doghouse? And the fear of it? Or if your dog lives in the house is she/he afraid to enter and exit? How does this work?
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Basically, she's afraid to enter any building that she is not familiar with. For example, my son just moved to a new duplex. She hates it! She will enter it, but is visibly stressed, can't look at anyone and wants to leave. We don't make her stay for more than a few minutes. Baby steps. Eventually she will be okay with it, but there may be rooms she will always refuse to enter. Places like stores, she will refuse to enter...even pet stores! When she was a puppy, she would lay down in the parking lot or do a u-turn if she thought we were heading to a building. If we we walked along side a building, she would keep a distance as far away from it as possible. It took a couple visits to the vet before I didn't have to carry her in. She's a German Shepherd!
 
RoseAugust said:
Basically, she's afraid to enter any building that she is not familiar with. For example, my son just moved to a new duplex. She hates it! She will enter it, but is visibly stressed, can't look at anyone and wants to leave. We don't make her stay for more than a few minutes. Baby steps. Eventually she will be okay with it, but there may be rooms she will always refuse to enter. Places like stores, she will refuse to enter...even pet stores! When she was a puppy, she would lay down in the parking lot or do a u-turn if she thought we were heading to a building. If we we walked along side a building, she would keep a distance as far away from it as possible. It took a couple visits to the vet before I didn't have to carry her in. She's a German Shepherd!
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Has your dog been with you since he was a puppy? If not there could very well be some incident in his past that has caused this. Animals are smart - they remember things. For example, if he came to you from a shelter, it could be because he felt abandoned then and now has the same fears of being left in any new building he enters. If he's from a breeder, maybe there was something in some building or room that scared him - either way, it would go a long way to explaining his fear of pet stores especially, if he's had bad experiences entering buildings/rooms full of other animals.

((((doggie))))
 
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