I Had a Childhood Phobia

There was a time when I was about three or four that I was deathly afraid of quicksand.  It seemed like every time I watched TV someone was falling into quicksand.  It was always the same scenario.  They’d be walking through the jungle and the next thing they’d know, they were up to their waist in quicksand.  Then, after they had discovered their predicament, they would begin to panic and struggle, only making things worse.  There was usually one guy who had somehow avoided falling into the quicksand.  He would kneel down on the edge of the solid ground and offer his hand to the others who were sinking.  More often that not, he would be pulled into the quicksand himself.  For a three-year-old child this sort of thing can be terrifying.  It took a certain root in my mind.  The sudden unreliability of the solid ground beneath my feet; the memory of the shameless, desperate horror on those peoples faces as they were being dragged down to some unspeakable fate beneath the Earth; these things all stuck with me.  In my mind I can still see a picture of a screaming man up to his chin in quicksand with a butterfly net over his head.  In short, I developed a phobia.

I wondered where these people went, if they sank completely into the quicksand.  By the looks on their faces I figured it had to be to where Devil was.  There was a certain logic to this, as Hell was under the ground.  So I asked my brother about it.  He considered the issue and told me, “No, they don’t go to Hell.  They just go to a big room filled with sand.”  That was worse, so much worse.  Now, instead of the fiery pit, I imagined a quiet room with candles and landscape paintings on the wall with a growing pile of sand in the middle of the room being fed by a stream of sand flowing through a hole in the ceiling like the grains in an everlasting hourglass.  It was an unbearable thought.  Hell seemed like a busy place, at least.  But the idea of spending all eternity in this quiet room of sand, so desolate and lonely, so empty, was a nightmare.  My fear grew worse.

One night I stayed up to watch an old vampire movie and my thesis on quicksand expanded to include mud holes.  In the movie this man was out in the woods walking across a dark piece of ground in a clearing that was scattered with fallen leaves.  Suddenly he began to sink.  Two men stood a ways off just watching the man sink into the mud.  The sinking man cried out for their help but they did nothing.  The man held up a crucifix and called out curses to the men watching him die.  The last shot was of the man’s hand holding the crucifix just above the surface of the mud.  Then the hand and the crucifix sank away and the man was gone.  So now there was something else to watch out for.  Mud holes.  Whenever I was outside playing and I saw a muddy patch scattered with leaves, I avoided it as if it were cursed ground.

So why do I bring this all up?  Well, I was thinking about this recently, along with other similar episodes during my childhood when I developed strange preoccupied fears, and I noticed a principle or common theme that connected them.  There was also a situation a few years back with someone I knew who had also had a problem with a fear that was overwhelming their life.  The details of this situation provided further evidence of my theory. Out of all this data, a pattern emerged that suggested something about the nature of phobias.  I'm not sure at this point whether my theory has any relevance to chronic, life-long phobias or even phobias in general, but it does seem to apply to those temporary and inexplicable phobias that seem to become almost an obsession for a brief period of time and then evaporate, leaving the sufferer to wonder why it all ever bothered them so much.  Hopefully, you, the reader, have some idea of the sort of thing I'm talking about.

The common wisdom on the subject of phobias generally maintains that the phobia is usually related to some tragic event involving the object of the phobia.  For instance, if someone has a strange fear of balloons, then the assumption is that something bad must have happened to them involving balloons.  Since it's not "normal" to be afraid of balloons and since there's nothing inherently threatening or dangerous about the balloons themselves, then something unusually traumatic must have happened with balloons or at least in close association with them.  In any case, the assumption is generally that the balloons themselves are closely connected to the root of the fear.  My theory suggests that the relationship between the object of the phobia and the root of the fear is a bit more complicated and indirect.

Again, I want to repeat: I'm not sure if my idea applies to chronic phobias, and I don't mean to be presumptuous about the psychological histories of people who have such phobias.  Because of this, the balloon example above might have been a badly chosen illustration since it involves a chronic phobia, but I used it because it was a simple and recognizable form of phobias in general.  A better example, possibly more appropriate to my idea, would be someone who becomes briefly obsessed with the idea that they're going to choke on the their food.  Or perhaps someone who becomes gripped by the fantastical notion that there's a man lurking behind their garage.  I'm talking about those strange fears that seem to come from nowhere or seem to be planted by apparently innocuous little suggestions; the things that grow from a remark casually dropped in a conversation or a passing event that would normally seem inconsequential at the time, and finally come to take an insidious root in the mind.

So, let's return to my childhood fear of quicksand.  At the time that I developed this obsession, my parents were separated.  There was a whole chaotic whirlwind of events involved in the situation. I won't go into all the details, but the important point was that as result of these developments my little world felt very uncertain and insecure.  Employing a metaphor, you could say that it felt like the ground was giving way beneath my feet.  Naturally, I didn't make this connection at the time, nor did I have the introspection at the age of three to fully comprehend how I felt about my parents separating.  All I knew was that I was terrified of quicksand.

No, it wasn't until recently that I was able to see this connection.  My first reaction was amusement.  I wanted to laugh at the poetic appropriateness of it.  But then I took a deeper look.  As I said, I thought about other, similar situations, and I saw the same pattern.  Then someone close to me developed one of these kinds of fears.  I knew all the details of their predicament, and again I saw the same pattern.  There seemed to be too many corroborating circumstances to just dismiss the whole thing as simple coincidence.  I felt like I was on to something.

It seemed that I had discovered a common thread in these cases.  It worked out the same way every time.  It started with a traumatic event or an extremely distressing situation in the person's personal life.  During the ensuing period of emotional crisis, the seemingly unrelated little seed of the fear would get planted in the manner suggested above.  This fear, which is oddly always more "abstract" than the actual source of the emotional distress, becomes the fixation of the person and the real, personal crisis gets pushed to the back burner.  Although this fixation appears to be completely unrelated to the crisis, it is actually a metaphorical or symbolic representation of it.

It is almost as though the mind has an immune system to it, similar to the body's.  Emotional trauma and distress lowers this immunity, making the person susceptible to infection.  It might seem like an incredible coincidence that something could just happen to come along and provide a conveniently symbolic representation of the person's distressed state of mind.  That's probably the most incredible part of this whole idea.  But really, it's no more incredible than the idea that the germs just "happen" to be there when a person's physical immunity is vulnerable. The seeds of these fears lay all around us.  In a normal, healthy frame of mind we shrug them off without giving them a second thought.  There is no soft spot in our mental defenses for them to penetrate.  Someone tells a story about a ghost in their basement; we're momentarily "creeped out", but then we go on about our business.  But for someone else, someone in a state of emotional stress, the idea of this lurking subterranean presence might hold a particular, peculiar fascination that takes hold of them for months to come.  It just might take the perfect, solid shape of their state of mind.  

So the next time you find yourself disturbed by something you can't shake, something you can't get off your mind, consider where you are in your life.  Consider that what's bothering you might not be hiding out there in the bushes, but may instead be something more personal and more real.  You might find that it's a smaller problem than you thought, if you're willing to face it and deal with it and put it behind you.  You might save yourself a lot of sleepless nights in the process.