Nature of Anxiety And Phobias
The phobias cause intense anxiety, accompanied by its various physical and emotional symptoms, the phobic individual is reacting to a specific object or situation which can to some extent and without great inconvenience, be avoided. As long as the feared event, object or situation is not an integral part of the person's life, he can remain free from the anxiety effects of phobia.
For instance, someone who has an intense fear of flying can usually find ways of getting to places without going on an aeroplane. The anxiety sufferer however, cannot always pinpoint the source of his anxiety. And even if he can identify the cause, he cannot avoid encountering it; either the demands of his daily life force him to confront the feared circumstances, or he has so completely internalised his fear that the source of it is within himself. Sometimes it is necessary for a person to experience fear in order to acknowledge the threat of a real danger and prepare himself to meet it. A certain degree of anxiety may accompany such fear. But the person who suffers from excessive anxiety or phobic reactions is not responding to the realities of the situation. He may be anticipating a threat to his well being when there is little likelihood of it happening.
If he is facing a challenge of some sort an exam or a job interview, he will magnify the difficulties and dwell on the horrors of a negative outcome. At the same time he will underestimate, overlook or discount his own ability to cope with whatever he fears. In other words, he misinterprets and distorts reality so that he feels anxious about dangers which either do not exist or which he could cope with effectively if he were not so disabled by his own anxiety reactions. To make matters worse, when the severely anxious person becomes intensely aware of his own unpleasant physical and emotional reactions, he may begin to dread and fear the symptoms themselves even more than the situation that triggers them. The more upset he gets, the more exaggerated his symptoms become, and he is involved in a self-perpetuating spiral of increasingly intense emotional and physical suffering.
