I fortunately don't have any phobias, though I am pretty scared of lightning and high winds. Roughing out a Category 4 hurricane, alone, can do that to you.
I do know a LOT of people, especially among our supposedly-educated teaching staff here at school, who are severely phobic of cats, though, moreso than of snakes, spiders, large dogs, or just about any other animal I can think of. There is also one teacher who is a general Zoophobe-she's phobic of ALL non-human animals.
The oddest phobia I've heard of was told to me a couple of years ago by one of my fifth graders, who told me that her then-16-year-old cousin, who lives in NYC, has a phobia of cheerleader pom-poms. The cousin and her family came down to South Carolina to visit over the Christmas holidays a couple of years ago, and it just so happened that my student, a girl, had gotten a cheerleader outfit for Christmas. The cousin walked in and saw the pom-poms sitting in a chair, and became hysterical, to the point that a neighbor called the police, fearing that someone in the house was being brutalized after hearing all the screams!
The bad thing about phobias is that most of the people who suffer from them do not realize that this is a very real mental illness, and a potentially harmful one at that, and that phobias can be treated and even cured. The people who have them, though, make excuses for them, and do not seem to want to get rid of the phobias, for some reason. THAT is the aspect that I cannot understand.
pitbulllady
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