It may happen to you suddenly, again and again: you want to enter an elevator and you are so afraid that you don’t and you take the stairs instead. Or you see a spider and you freeze or run away. In your diary you see an appointment with the dentist three weeks away and you start to shiver and get pale. To think of an aero plane or to even hear one above you, to enter an airport, to see a cow, to talk about bugs, there is practically no subject that some people may not be afraid of. And although the fear is completely irrational, it may be so strong that it spoils you life.

The technical name for this kind of condition is called phobia. For those who have a phobic response experience it is as some kind of unpleasant feeling: getting hot, freezing, sweating, trembling. A person who stands next to the phobic person does not experience anything out of the ordinary, but notes something in the companion, asks: is there something wrong, are you feeling all right? Very often the phobic person will say: I am all right, it is just the heat (or the humidity of the cold or….) and is often ashamed of being afraid and wants to act as if nothing is wrong. But there is a subjective something, for the person quite real, as real as what a person feels who gets hold of a live electrical wire and just as sudden.

It is somewhat similar to getting in a panic or reacting allergic. It happens in the body but it remains unknown how it works. The human sufferer feels powerless and helpless. And above all: if, later on, you think back, you are quite certain that it will happen again and again, for the rest of your life. And it will happen, as a self fulfilling prophecy often does.

Like many things in life it is not quite certain how a phobia is caused. The psychologists and psychiatrists have their theories but theories are not the truth.

At the moment the best guess is that it has to do with getting in a panic like a small child seeing a large spider for the first time, or hearing a person shouting at him very loudly, or when a grown-up says something disagreeable. The child, getting afraid, afterwards remembers only part of but not the total experience, like the spider, but how large it seemed and already gets afraid at the first sign of the feared thing, seen or heard or felt.

Sometimes such reactions happen years later. A phobia is born. Such things can happen at all ages.

PHOBIA THERAPY IN ASWAN, EGYPT

This winter I am going to be in Aswan for three months from the beginning of December till the start of March 2003.