Phobia is a persistent fear, even often obsessive. Despite the fact that phobias are ubiquitous, they are not the norm of human behavior. And if people usually manage to cope with ordinary fear on their own, then phobias most often require professional treatment. Phobias are very different, but they can all be classified.
Instructions
Step 1
Childhood phobias are fears based on contact with the environment that arise in early childhood. This is the fear of the dark, the fear of some special objects, for example, doors to basements and closets. If a person did not begin to be afraid of such things in childhood, he, most likely, will not begin to do it in the future. Social phobia belongs to children's fears, since the need to socialize occurs in a person just in the early years of life. Children most of all do not like to go to kindergarten. Adolescents and adults usually do not display fear of school or work as explicitly as they do. Nevertheless, phobias of this group affect a person throughout his life. Childhood social phobia often results in the fear of public speaking or communication with superiors or powerful people, which is present in most adults.
Step 2
Teenage phobias. At this age, fears arise based on understanding oneself as part of the environment. Fears are associated with a specific type of interaction with other people or objects. For example, intimophobia - a fear of sexual relations - and all sexual fears associated with this phobia most often originate in adolescence. But if at first a person is frightened by the prospect of physical contact, then in adulthood this fear usually translates into a fear of close spiritual relationships. An intimophobic person is afraid to open up, take responsibility and get closer to people. Self-doubt, which is most often manifested in adolescents, also leads to phobias. Also at this age there is a fear of death (thanatophobia), fear of a closed space (claustrophobia) or open space (agoraphobia).
Step 3
Responsibility phobias usually haunt young parents. Some of them are very afraid that something might happen to the child. They try to control their child in everything, choose friends for him and forbid him to walk far from home. Obsessive fears of this kind are not expressions of love; they are panic that parents cannot cope with. As a result, phobias often appear in children.
Step 4
Strange phobias. In recent decades, the list of human phobias has expanded significantly. Some of the phobias become typical of their time, such as fear of being overweight, while others become unusual, such as the fear of balloons, chickens, or the pattern in a circle. Not all phobias from this group have their own name.
