Reactions to phobias will often lead to avoidance of the feared situation. These responses can be quite severe and range from a person being initially conscious of their phobia, to it becoming second nature – without them necessarily realising the extent to which it has changed their life.
The feared situation may not be avoided entirely, but will trigger anxiety in anticipation of the situation, even before it is encountered, and a sense of enduring it with discomfort.
If you are diagnosed with a phobia, it will be placed into one of two main categories of phobia known as specific phobias or complex phobias.
Specific or simple phobias
These type of phobias revolve around particular objects, situations or activities, and include animal phobias, environment phobias and bodily phobias.
This type of phobia usually develops in childhood or adolescence, and can become easier to manage as you get older.
This stage can be reached more effectively if you have attended psychotherapy sessions such as those offered at Priory, which can teach you coping techniques to prevent or reduce the severity unwanted symptoms.
Examples of simple phobias include:
- Phobia of animals such as dogs, snakes or rodents
- Fear of your surrounding environment, including heights and open water
- Situational phobias such as an intense fear of flying
- Body related phobias such as a phobia of vomiting or blood
- Sexual phobias which can be related to performance anxiety
Although the situation is discrete, contact with such scenario mentioned above can evoke significant anxiety or even panic attacks, which can be so unpleasant that a fear of the situation occurring can last for a lifetime if it remains untreated.
Complex phobias
Tend to be more disabling in terms of how you function on a day-to-day basis.
The symptoms of anxiety associated with phobias such as agoraphobia, which is a fear of not being able to escape if you have a panic attack, and social phobia, where a person feels excessively anxious in social situations, leads you to avoiding situations such as being in a crowded place or travelling on public transport.
The most common types of complex phobias include:
Social phobias
Social phobias often start in early adulthood. They characteristically involve thoughts of being looked at negatively by others or fear of embarrassment in public. It can be very common to have anxiety before public speaking, which is often present to a mild degree in everyone. However, it can become increasingly more severe, leading to avoidance, and developing into a phobia.
Sufferers often find it difficult to relate to others and find it hard to make friendships. They tend to constantly go over conversations with others once they have happened, and wonder after an event how they came across to other people and what people thought of them. This can leave them struggling socially outside of the immediate family, with these difficulties impairing the formation of friendships and relationships, and even limiting career development.
Agoraphobia
Agoraphobia is far greater than a fear of open spaces, which it is often acknowledged as. This encompasses an acute fear of a variety of different, usually very busy situations, complicated by difficulty in escaping from the situation.
Agoraphobia can be easily triggered by queuing situations such as leaving a supermarket, which has the added complication of being a very public scenario. Symptoms can therefore overlap and can include fear of leaving home, entering shops, crowds and public places, or travelling on buses and planes.
In severe instances, individuals can avoid leaving their house and become very isolated. Agoraphobia can often be complicated by the fear of something negative happening in public and with its strong link to panic attacks, can often include the fear of fainting or collapsing in public and being helpless and embarrassed.
