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Old 30-05-2007, 14:46   #23
haku haku is offline
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Join Date: May 2003
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Larie't View Post
How you can even "get" these things... even if their just made up words to descripe one's strong feelings who can come up fear of thinking... Good luck to you who have some of these!
Some of the phobias you've quoted are not that rare actually, the phobia of forests for example, many people have a visceral fear of what lurks in the woods and it can reach phobic levels in some people; the fear of germs is also quite common, it often goes with the fear of diseases.
But even if there are only a couple of documented cases of a particular phobia in the whole world, doctors are going to publish papers about it in science journals and name it, hence the very long lists of phobias, lol.

But like QueenBee mentioned earlier, there is indeed a big difference between a simple fear and a full blown phobic fear. Most women have a fear of being raped for example, but that doesn't prevent them from having a normal social life and interacting with males, on the other hand women who have a phobia of rape are obsessed and terrified by the thought 24/7 and are unable to have a social life.

As to how people get phobias, it's highly debated and there's no definite answer. Many people develop phobias in their childhood for no obvious reasons, there doesn't seem to be a clear cause. Other people develop phobias after a trauma, sometimes the link is clear, like someone who develops a phobia of water after nearly drowning, but other times it's less obvious, like a woman who developped an intense phobia of birds after being raped in a room in which there was a bird cage, and sometimes the phobia is unrelated to the trauma and the trauma seems to have simply triggered a phobia that was already there in a latent state.
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