داستان انگلیسی ترس ها و فوبیا ها

ACTIVE LISTENING MAIN STORY

FEARS AND PHOBIAS

Susanne ran through the dark as unseen hands reached out to grab her. Hungry zombies were behind her. When they eventually caught her, their teeth would sink into her shoulder. And Susanne would scream herself awake from this recurring zombie nightmare.

Like many people with phobias, Susanne’s fear of zombies was rooted in her childhood. At the age of five, Susanne’s grandfather died. Being so young, she had trouble understanding death. The funeral was only open to adults, so she wasn’t able to attend and get closure on his passing.

Not long after the funeral, her family took a vacation. Left alone in the hotel room at night, she watched the iconic zombie film, Night of the Living Dead. In this movie from the 60’s, the dead come back to life to eat the living. This traumatized Susanne so much that she regularly had zombie nightmares for most of her life.

This didn’t just affect her sleep. She began to fear zombies in the day as well. Once, at the age of seven, a motorcyclist hit the car she was riding in. The rider smashed into the car and against Susanne’s window. As she looked at the bloodied rider begging for help, she broke down into tears. She was sure he was a zombie.

As she became an adult the nightmares continued, and in some ways they became worse, as zombies became more and more common in pop culture. If a zombie show or movie came on TV, Susanne would hyperventilate and have to leave the room. If it was a rental video, she would not be able to sleep just thinking that the DVD was in the house.

As Susanne got older a therapist helped her understand that her fear of zombies, was really a much more common fear of death. The zombie movie she saw soon after her grandfather died confused her young mind into equating death with zombies.

With the help of the therapist, Susanne started to slowly face her fears. First she worked on just having a zombie video in her house. Then she worked her way up to actually watching a zombie movie without having a nightmare. Finally she started to write zombie short stories as a form of therapy. This process of slowly facing her fears has mostly stopped the nightmares and allows her to live a more normal life.

A serious fear of zombies is unusual, but in fact there are many unusual phobias that humans have.

Fear of vomiting, fear of hair, fear of water, fear of buttons and even fear of good news to name just a few. What these fears have in common is they are irrational, illogical, uncontrollable, and have no basis in reality. We call these fears phobias.

Phobias usually manifest as fears that disrupt our everyday lives, but like all emotions, there is a wide range of intensity. Phobias might be completely paralyzing on the one hand, yet merely unpleasant on the other.

There are three main types of phobias. Fear of specific things like snakes or spiders, fear of wideopen spaces or crowded places, and social phobias.

Theophilus Van Kannel had a classic case of social phobia. He hated interacting with people in general, but his pet peeve was the social obligations he felt at doorways. ‘You first, no, no, you first,’ type mini-conversations with strangers really bugged him. And for some reason the social expectation of a man having to hold the door open for a woman really got under his skin. In fact, it bothered him so much that it led him to create the revolving door in 1888.

The revolving door was the solution to the anxiety he so often felt when he entered or left a building.

Chivalry demanded that men of his time held the door open for a woman, but no longer. The revolving door was a door that was always open and always closed. Problem solved.

Not only would Theophilus no longer have to interact with strangers at doorways, it was actually a very environmentally friendly design. With a revolving door, there is never a direct opening between the inside and the outside of a building. This means there is 80% less loss of warm air in the winter, and 80% less loss of cool air in the summer. This can equal thousands of dollars of energy savings a year.

Created as a solution to social phobia, interestingly, the revolving door is also the source of a different phobia. Some studies have reported that when people enter buildings with both normal doors and revolving doors, 70-80% of them choose the normal door. Some people not only dislike revolving doors, they are afraid of them.

This is a type of agoraphobia. Some fear the small space, and others fear getting trapped in the revolving door with a stranger. Famous Hollywood actor Mathew McConaughey is one of many people that are irrationally fearful of revolving doors. He says, “I get anxious just being near them.”

The history of phobias predates revolving doors by far. The ancient Greek doctor Hippocrates was the first to write about irrational fear as a medical problem.

The first person to use ‘phobia’ to describe an unreasonable fear was the Roman doctor Celsus.

Celsus described the fear of water in some of his patients as hydrophobia. Celsus lived 500 years after the Greek doctor Hippocrates, and was inspired by Greek mythology.

‘Phobia’ comes from the word ‘Phobos’, the son of Aries, the Greek god of war. Phobos was such a frightening god that warriors painted his face on their shields to scare their enemies.

Phobia as a stand-alone word was coined in 1786. It was defined in a magazine as “A fear of an imaginary evil, or an undue fear of a real one.” But when is a fear a natural one and when is it an unhealthy phobia?

Fear is the language of the natural world. It helps humans and all other living things survive and evolve. Throughout history, animals without fear were less likely to get away from danger, and died out. Those that had a healthy fear of real dangers, like wild animals or high places that you could fall from, were more likely to survive and pass on their genes to the next generation.

When a fear crosses the line from something that helps us survive to something that makes us less effective and less able to deal with reality, we get in trouble. Author Karen Thompson Walker says we should approach our fears as stories. Fears are stories that we tell ourselves using the power of our imagination. Some of them are useful and some are worthless. To know which of these stories are valuable and which ones are irrational we need to step back and remember that we are both the writer and the reader of these stories.

She tells the story of the sailors of the Essex who let their imagination and fear lead them to their doom. The Essex was a US-based whaling ship in the early 1800s. It left port in 1820 to hunt whales, which were killed to make oil. After a 5-week journey, the Essex arrived on the west coast of South America, but were unable to find the whales they were hunting. Hearing stories that whales were plentiful more than 3,000 kilometers west of South America, they set off in search of their prey.

On Nov 20th, the Essex spotted whales, but on this day, the hunters became the hunted. An enormous angry 25-meter whale smashed into the ship twice, ripping a massive hole into the boat and sending it to the bottom of the ocean. The 21 sailors boarded 3 small boats that the Essex carried. These were fragile boats that were not meant to travel long distances.

They were 10,000 miles from home and had only enough food and water for 60 days. They had 3 choices. Option one: they could sail towards the Marquesa islands, which were 1,200 miles away.

This was the closest land, but they had heard terrifying stories of cannibals living here. Option two: they could sail for Hawaii, but the captain feared their small boats would be destroyed by storms.

Option three: they could sail south and then east back to the west coast of South America. This was by far the farthest option at over 3,000 miles and they knew that their food probably wouldn’t last that long.

They were left with three fears, death by cannibals, death by storms and death by starvation. Fearing cannibals and storms more than starvation, they decided on the long journey back to South America.

As they expected, they did run out of food, and their worst fear of being eaten, ended up happening anyways. Having run out of food, some of the men ate each other. Only a handful of the sailors survived long enough to be rescued and tell their story. Karen Walker suggests that their downfall was not that they were fearful. Their problem was that they were not able to judge which fear was most realistic. Walker says that fear, when properly read can be a teacher that can give us “a little wisdom, a bit of insight and a version of that most elusive thing – the truth.”