Living with the Extreme Fear Created by Anxiety Disorders

Anxiety disorders are mental disorders caused by extreme or severe anxiety often caused by overwhelming worries, fears, and stress. Phobic disorder, commonly known as phobia, is a type of anxiety disorder wherein the individual acquires an excessive and irrational fear of a particular object or situation, with the fear being out of proportion to the real threat. “The word [phobia] is derived from Phobos, the Greek god of fear, whose likeness was painted on masks and shields to frighten enemies in battle.” (Passer and Smith 537) Jennifer Ong defines phobia as a heightened sense of fear. Also, according to her, psychologists assert that the fears in phobia are usually based on irrational grounds.

A fear develops into a phobia when a situation is so dreaded that a person would go to any length to avoid it. Those that possess phobia have intense unrealistic fears that are not proportional to the actual danger involved. However, even if they understood this, they have no idea on how to handle their fears face front, resulting to intensely avoiding their feared stimulus. Also, phobic individuals can pinpoint the cause of their fears (Barlow, 2001). According to Melinda Smith, Robert Segal, and Jeanne Segal, “If you have a phobia, you will probably realize that your fear is unreasonable, yet you still can’t control your feelings. Just thinking about the feared object or situation may make you anxious. And when you’re actually exposed to the thing you fear, the terror is automatic and overwhelming.” The scary thing is that phobia can hit anyone, be it adults or children. Phobia does not simply mean possessing exaggerated fear of specific stimulus (Gazzaniga et al. 564). Like other anxiety disorders, it also exhibits symptoms, such as an...

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...rflies are practically harmless, and such a case of going blind is not much heard of. He should convince himself with the idea that several people have already interacted with butterflies, and there has not been any known case that some went blind. Continuous practice and application of the said methods increase the success rate of self-treatment. Conclusively, self-treatment is considered favourable since it helps the individual overcome his own fears with his own strength, resulting to greatly surpassing his anxiety.

In addition to self-treatment, another form of psychotherapy or behavioural technique is exposure therapy. Exposure therapy is a behavioural therapy for phobia wherein the individual is repeatedly exposed to his feared object or situation. The repeated exposure eventually eliminates the individual's avoidance response or behaviour towards his phobia.