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[sistawendy]

Why don't more people develop phobias of heart disease, cancer, layoffs, or divorce? You know, stuff that actually happens a lot.

Comments

[mamishka.livejournal.com]

Who sez they don't? Hypocondriacs for one are prone to being phobic about heart disease and cancer. I think a lot of people are terrified about layoffs these days, depending upon the market they work in. A possible explanation for why there might not be as high a degree of this phobia could be due to the fact that until a few decades ago, it was pretty normal to get a job and keep it for pretty much your whole life without fear of getting fired. Job security used to be the norm, not the exception. I also think there is a lot of phobia about divorce, or at least about marriages falling apart. Cause there are an awful lot of private investigators makin' money off of those kinds of worries.

I also recall reading once somewhere that people generally tend to worry about things that rarely actually end up being the traumatic experiences in their lives, and that when disaster does strike, it's rarely what they were half-expecting.

[fizzgig-bites.livejournal.com]

I'm phobic about divorce. I was avoiding dating and then when Ed creeped into my life, it took me six months to even admit to myself we were dating. Marriage was for financial and legal reasons. Today I am afraid that he will stray but I keep that to myself. I try to control my insecurities and do pretty well.

Heart disease, cancer and layoffs are expected and you just deal with it when they happen. I work with cardiology data and it just seems that eventually everyone has pre-cursors to heart disease as they get older.

Being in Florida I know I will get pre-cancer growths on my skin. It also runs in my family. It will happen and I watch out for it now.

Working in the technology industry, I know that I have to keep my education up or be left behind. I have to keep reinventing myself and job changes help that.

Phobias are based on irrational fear and all the things listed could happen and probably will. I don't fear the divorce itself but the fight while divorcing. I fear fighting with someone I love because my parents had an ugly divorce. I can't imagine Ed and I fighting like that because we don't fight much to begin with. It is irrational to think that my marriage will end like my parents' divorce did.

Good point.

[aaminahlefae.livejournal.com]

Although I do think people fear these things. Maybe it's less talked about as a fear or phobia because it's more of a 'duh' that they're concerns.

I avoid certain chemicals etc for fear of cancer, I've turned down marriage proposals for fear of divorce, I've been pretty nervous about keeping my job here in the travel industry especially since 9/11.

[plantae.livejournal.com]

I've been thinking about this for a while.

Generally, a phobia is an extreme (irrational) fear of something. I was looking around, and there are a couple theories about why people are more likely to be phobic of snakes than cancer.

One theory is that it's evolutionary. People who tend to be afraid of snakes tended not to get bitten. And humans and their ancestral hominid species have probably been around snakes (or cliffs, or dangerous insects, or open areas with no refuge from predators, etc) for about 7 million years. So we just haven't had time to evolve instinctive fear of cancer and divorce.

But there's also a predictability aspect to it. If you can predict ways to avoid something, being afraid of it will motivate you to avoid it. There doesn't seem to be any really good way to avoid cancer. There are some ways to avoid heart disease, but things like eating less fat run directly counter to the last oh, 400 million years of evolution. But I can avoid, for instance, falling off a cliff by not going to close to the edge, or avoid lightning by not wandering around during a storm.

Another theory is that phobias are more or less likely to develop based on the experiences we have with the situation. Most people aren't car-phobic, despite *knowing* that cars are dangerous and probably seeing/being in/having a friend/relative in a car accident. Possibly because there are also a large number of good/safe experiences with cars. But that which is unfamiliar is dangerous--I'm more likely to be afraid of a snake, as I don't interact with them frequently, and most of my information about other people's experiences might be negative (ie, cousin Ed got bitten at some point, or similar).

And then, people can train themselves into a phobia. If there is something you fear a little bit (maybe interacting with a large dog) and so you avoid it, and worry about it, and become increasingly afraid of what *might* happen when you actually interact with a dog, and so avoid it more, and start to feel stressed when you even see pictures of a dog, so avoid it even more, you've just cleverly developed a phobia of dogs, because you were a little afraid of one. And that seems to be how phobia treatment works--you deal with what you're so afraid of and have been avoiding in a controlled and safe setting, gradually learning to control your panic response and force yourself to stop avoiding it.

I'm not sure what 'the' reason it. Probably a bit of the above and something else.

This site has a nice summary of phobia theory, with references. http://www.phobialist.com/class.html