I'm very phobic about flying, but I'm also drawn to it.
There was a time I wouldn't fly to California if I had to spend the night. Can you believe it? I would not fly to California, the phrase was, 'if the sun has to set on me.' I just had prejudices against it.
I'm terrified of bugs and I travel with sprays, lotions, potions; the lot. I have to check the room before I go to sleep and if I come across a bug and fail to remove it I have to sleep in a separate room as I'm paranoid that I'll be taken advantage of as I sleep.
Learning is to discover that something is possible. We are using most of our energies for self-destructiv e games, self-preventing games. We prevent ourselves from growing the very moment something unpleasant, something painful comes up. At that moment we become phobic, we run away, we desensitize ourselves. Neurotic suffering is suffering in imagination, suffering in fantasy.
My dirty little secret is I don't drive at all, though I have my license and I renew it every five years. I'm phobic. I keep worrying if I drive, I'll end up killing someone. I hoped that by writing about a car crash, I might understand and heal this phobia, but I didn't! I'm still phobic.
I turn into a crying, hysterical maniac when I see a spider. It's pathetic.
Given a sufficient level of perceived self-efficacy to take on threatening tasks, phobics perform them with varying amounts of fear arousal depending on the strength of their perceived self-efficacy
I suspect that some apparently homosexual people are really heterosexuals who deeply phobic about the opposite sex or have other emotional problems.
Peter was 2 years and 10 months old when we began to study him. He was afraid of a white rat, and this fear extended to a rabbit, a fur coat, a feather, cotton wool, etc., but not to wooden blocks and similar toys.
