L200

Last week, I read a story about a 34-year-old British woman who is extremely afraid of metal forks.
She’s been using plastic ones for 17 years because the sound of a fork rubbing against a panic attack.

Strange, right? But She’s not alone. While popular phobias (恐惧症)about snakes and spiders might get
all of the attention, there are a wide variety of not-so-obvious horrors that make people nervous.

While some phobias might seem a bit silly ,they can cause serious emotional distress. My co-worker
Magda is terrified of pigeons ,a phobia that is taking over her life, She won’t walk in certain parts of the
city and runs screaming from the subway when one of these “rats with wings ”finds its way onto the
platform . Another friend is disgusted with cheese. Once I saw her run away from a slice of it .So where
does an irrational fear of cheese come from ?

Are phobias something we inherit from our genes or do we acquire these unusual anxieties over time?
Ever since I can remember we inherit from our genes or do we acquire these unusual anxieties over
time?

Ever since I can remember I have been unreasonably frightened of elevators. There was no terrible
childhood experience and I am fine with confined spaces ,but something about elevators makes me
nervous .And so ,when my boyfriend and I found ourselves trapped in an elevator last year -because
these sorts of things always happen eventually -I was anticipating the worst .

While he gave me a suggestive eyebrow raise and proposed we “take advantage of the situation ,”I
began screaming uncontrollably. I was far from turned on by the whole facing my worst nightmare thing.
However, after the fear subsided (消退)I realized that, yes, t his was my greatest fear come true, and
yet -it wasn’t all that bad. Nervous and inconvenient maybe, but terrifying? Not so much.

Liberating yourself from a deep-seated phobia can be a long and difficult process, but sometimes it
can be as simple as confronting it head on.