#76

I get terrified going over bridges over main roads unless I have my earphones in.

#77

Bugs and creepy crawlies. And trypophobia which makes me feel ill just even thinking of the word.

#78

Burger sauce. People think it’s hilarious and joke about putting burger sauce on my food or near me and it makes me proper panic and I freeze up when I see a bottle of it.

#79

Something you want to share with us? :wink:

#80

Haha oh god. A sales call when I was a Sales Rep! Selling construction materials… honest!

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#81

I’m not convinced that fear of spiders is irrational. It wouldn’t be if you lived in, say, the Australian Outback.

#82

I wouldn’t class that as arachnophobia

Fear of your harmless UK house spider is, though

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#83

I wouldn’t call it a phobia as such but nuns really creep me out. I would have to cross the road if I saw one walking towards me. Nuns on television, no problem. Just in real life.

#84

I have a wasp phobia too

used to be very much at the level yours is at but I found that, after enormous difficulty, the thing that helped most was actually challenging myself to pick up (by the wing) any dead wasps I ever encountered

It helped a lot. I mean, I am still irrationally spooked by their presence but can consciously override much of that fear nowadays

#85

That probably would help but even the thought makes me shiver. Got stung for the first time since a kid during the summer (was in the middle of running a parkrun) and only the fact that I was running surrounded by lots of people stopped me having a complete meltdown. Thankfully wasps seem to be having a decline so I haven’t been pestered by too many over the last few summers.

#86

aha, so your fear isn’t totally irrational ?

I have never actually been stung and am paranoid that because of it, if I were ever to be stung I would go into anaphylactic shock and die - totally reasonable right? And somehow this only works for wasps & not bees or hornets

yeah

#87

My balloon phobia has gone from bad to worse since having my kid. I can’t go to kid’s parties, I can’t be in the same room as one, and the thought of him touching a balloon makes my skin go cold and clammy. I’m going for hypnotherapy in Jan to see if I can fix it (although I won’t lose any sleep if it fails, and I just have to avoid children’s parties for life OH WHAT A SHAME)

#88

Well up until that point i hadn’t been stung since I was a young child so I didn’t have any memory of what it was like. To be honest the pain doesn’t bother me that much, it’s the fact that they won’t leave you alone and keep buzzing in your face that gets me. Why then I should be so bothered by the sight of dead ones/picture I don’t know.

#89

probably the attachment to the childhood trauma

#90

I was like that too. I never got stung by a wasp throughout my childhood. First and only time it happened to me was when I was on my way back from shopping in a retail park in Bracknell (a true natural wilderness) in my mid-twenties. Little fucker just landed on the back of my neck and stung me. Agony it was.

Mrs F disturbed a wasps’ nest in our garden a few years back and got stung above the eye. Her face swelled up like she’d done ten rounds with insert name of heavyweight champion of the world here. She needed drugs and stuff and it took days to go down.

So in short, wasp stings are just as painful as you think they might be, they can make you alarmingly unwell, so being scared of the little fuckers is definitely not irrational.

Especially if you’re a caterpillar.

#91

did you ever witness anybody else get stung - family or friends - when you were a kid?

#92

Yeah my little brother was a right careless twat. He got done by a wasps’ nest once, and also once swam through a jellyfish. Made a big song and dance about both.

#93

I reckon that’s where it comes from then

It took me years to remember two episodes from my childhood that probably are directly responsible for my wasp phobia - one a family trip to Cricket st. Thomas (Near Chard) when I was about 10. My dad got stung on the elbow and it swelled up and went red/purple so we had to cut short our family day out in order to drive around to try and find a pharmacy that was open in order to treat him.
Not long after that my mum got stung on her left hand while gardening and it swelled up so much that they had to cut her wedding ring off at a&e

shit goes deep

#94

Yeah this, has got a bit better over time but I would do everything in my power to try putting it off when I was younger.

#95

It’s not a phobia though is it, if you’ve seen two of your favourite people get really hurt by one of the bastards, been hurt by one yourself and also watched all those Attenborough programmes where the wasp paralyses a caterpillar, gnaws off its legs, lays all its eggs in the caterpillar’s testicles and then texts selfies of it laughing and giving the wings-up next to the victim to all its relatives.

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