Mental health problems >>>> How do phobias develop?

How do phobias develop?

Phobia is called obsessive fear caused by any objects or phenomena, exacerbated in certain situations, stubbornly persecuting a person and defying logical explanation. There are almost as many phobias as there are objects and situations in life. Many phobias transform into mental abnormalities and turn into a painful condition that is almost impossible to cope with. There are phobias that are not considered a mental disorder, and a person can and should fight with them.

It is believed that some phobias come from childhood, when, in order to form a child's sense of danger , parents stipulate in advance some situations that should be avoided without checking their results on their own experience. For some people, the fear of such situations, from childhood not tested by curiosity and their own feelings, can be fixed and remain with a person for life. It happens that phobias develop in people after a catastrophic incident, psychological trauma. Painful sensations and traumatic memories of the past make a person avoid similar situations in the future and cause him an overwhelming feeling of fear.

Psychiatrists believe that phobic fears at the very beginning of their development can be easily defeated, but if the process of the emergence of fear is fixed in the psyche, then over time it becomes more and more difficult to cope with it. There are cases of phobias when a person begins to experience fear of fear. Fear uncontrollable by consciousness can lead to such absurd phobias!

In the generally accepted understanding, fear is not considered a pathology, rather fearlessness will cause bewilderment, because nature endowed a person with a sense of fear, giving him the opportunity to rebuild biochemical processes in the body in such a way that the dangers of the environment can be avoided. Fears are controlled by internal secretions (hormones) and allow a person to quickly run away or engage in combat with the object that caused the fear. But nature intended to evoke in man an instinctive sense of fear of a real danger, not a fictional or perceived one. Here, man himself has corrected nature by virtue of his ability to fantasize.

How to distinguish between feelings of fear of a real threat and a phobia? If a person has never in his life faced something that he is afraid in advance, it is worth collecting statistical data on the alleged dangerous situation or object and calculate how many people these situations and objects cause concern, and how many of them actually suffered damage (physical and moral) from approaching a selected object or situation. If the difference between fear and damage is small, then you have a real threat, and if damage is done to only a small number of people (a very small percentage), then this kind of fear is worth fighting.

If you still do not know if you have any phobias, then you can not "get hung up" on fears. But if you still suspect that you have irrational fears , then it is worth remembering the willpower that nature has also endowed us with and start fighting the fears that prevent us from living a full life. There are two ways to deal with a phobia: see a specialist or do self-healing.

Self-management of a phobia requires self-control and a little courage. First, situations are simulated that cause a feeling of fear and panic - they should be experienced until (many times), until the experience of facing a "terrible" situation or object is developed, and the emotional tension begins to gradually subside. The subconscious mind will do its job for you and reflexively consolidate your balanced state of the nervous system at the moment of experiencing a "terrible" situation. During the period of living in a "terrible" situation, you should learn to control your breathing (breathe more slowly and deeper). Stop analyzing the dangerous sides of the situation you are facing. Reflect on the fact that people remain alive and well in a situation similar to yours.

If phobias have developed as a result of a traumatic incident, then in order to get rid of them, you need to be a psychologist for yourself and deal with the situation, rewinding time back and determining the true causes of its occurrence. A person is not always able to control everything that happens to him, and sometimes this control is not needed. The surrounding reality can correct a person's desires and not in all cases allows him to model life as he wants, this must be taken into account and allowance should be made for random unfortunate events.

An ordinary person cannot predict man-made disasters, the psychology and behavior of other people, but he can intuitively anticipate many dangerous situations based on the subconsciously collected life experience. Therefore, do not confuse phobias with intuition predicting danger, very often such intuitive fears can save your health and life.