Lastly this research has seen that if someone gained a phobia, that if it was not a common phobia seen in their family that said phobia came following a traumatic experience to a person, such as if a 15 year old girl was attacked by a snapping turtle at the pond near her home she may soon be afraid of going into water fearing it may happen again. If phobias are truly caused by traumatic experiences, it could be seen to be due to our survival instincts striking note into your brain for the body's survival. (Mayo Clinic, 2011).
With the variety of different of phobias that have been observed by psychologists, they have been able to separate them into three different categories: agoraphobia, social phobia, and specific phobia. Agoraphobia is the most disabling of the phobias one can get, which results when one has an intense fear of being in a situation from which immediate escape is not possible or in which help would not be available if the person should become overwhelmed by anxiety or experience a panic attack or panic-like symptoms. Treatment for agoraphobia is quite difficult due to there being a great deal of associated fears with this condition. Most phobias that one can gain are classified as specific phobias, which have four different categories: situational phobia, fear of natural environment, animal phobia, and blood-injection-injury phobia. Between these four categories are more than 350 different types of specific phobias, which range from cathisophobia-fear of sitting to something as severe as arachnophobia-fear of spiders. Lastly social phobias, fear is extremely intrusive to the social lives and work lives of those that have it due to the person begins to fear social communication with people, which leads most who have social phobias to seclude themselves to avoid their fears. While the different types of phobias vary in how they affect people, they all are quite severe in how they limit the person's life.
