Blogosaurus Vex

August 21st, 2009

Just a little update on last night’s spider madness: it turned into a loooong, sleepless night of tarantula dreams, primarily focussed on the aforementioned rapid movements of the tarantula.  Tarantulas running across the bed, tarantulas running across the floor, tarantulas running at me… harrowing!  I am tired today.

So now I decide: do I never go to JBrydle’s house again because of its evil occupant, or do I return to the lair of the monster?  Both choices have consequences for the development of the phobia.

I am largely persuaded by learning/operant conditioning models of phobias.  This is based in notions of punishment and reward.  When something scares you, your anxiety rises.  Fleeing the scene of the frightening stimulus brings relief in the form of reduction of anxiety, and this is experienced as a reward.  The reward feels great, and increases the likelihood that next time you will be even faster to flee, or might flee from a lesser but related stimulus.  In this way the phobia becomes self reinforcing, and stronger over time.

The other option for phobia sufferers is to tolerate the anxiety and remain in the presence of the frightening stimulus until the anxiety extinguishes.  In this way, the reward from fleeing is absent.  Part of the definition of a phobia is that it is an irrational fear – truly, I have nothing to fear from a caged (or even loose!) tarantula.  Sticking out the anxiety can provide a new learning experience wherein my fear is demonstrated to be patently irrational, and I will experience the rewards of self efficacy and pride in ovecoming my hindbrain’s urging to flee.  In this way the phobia can be lessened over time.  But the key is tolerating the anxiety until full extinguishing, otherwise you are still rewarding fleeing from fear.

So last night I stuck it out, sitting on the couch in front of the spider’s glass tank and keeping a running monitor on my anxiety.  It lessened significantly as the evening wore on, but obviously there was lingering fear as demonstrated by a night of bad dreams.  If I want to  keep making progress on this fear, I should keep hanging out with Mr Spider – not my idea of fun but unavoidable if I want to stop being afraid.  And if I want to be free to visit my friend.  And this is the real crux – I don’t want to be prevented from living my life the way I like because of a stupid phobia.

As a side note, I don’t think learning models are the whole story for phobias.  They are tenacious buggers and tend to creep back over time – why should that be if there are no new frightening learning experiences?  In fact there cannot be new frightening learning experiences, because as I stated above, all phobias are irrational.  We use the word “irrational” because there is nothing objectively frightening about the feared object or situation – once the phobia is treated once, it should not be possible for the phobia to come back because the object/situation is not frightening and therefore cannot provide frightening new learning experiences!

But phobias do come back.  And learning models are pretty bad at explaining the genesis of the phobia, for the reasons in the previous paragraph among others.  I think it is much more likely that there is a psychodynamic component to the origin of the problem.  Analytical writers propose that phobias function as a sort of specialized displacement for certain types of unnamed or unacknowledged fears, and this strikes me as probable.  Learning models work if you commit to repeated, ongoing iterations of the treatment, but there is clearly more going on.  Another piece is the evolutionary element – only certain things can become phobias, and these are largely things that would have been dangerous in the early evolutionary environment.  Phobias probably represent an overactive state of something that was useful for our ancestors.  But we are still left to figure out why this person and not that, why this phobia and not that.

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