What was your biggest childhood fear and do you have it to this day?
Interestingly enough, I had a big fear of dogs. I don't really know why because I've never had a traumatic experience with them (thank God I never got bitten).
I also feared being alone, darkness (but not much) and heights. Woah, I was a fearful kid.
Today, well, I only fear those big, aggressive dogs like kangals and rottweilers. As for darkness and loneliness, nah.
Crippling fear of social interactions with strangers. Especially making phone calls.
I'm not afraid of it anymore but still don't like it either. Turns out that exposing yourself to your fears helps you get over them. Who would've thought?
I just learned about five years ago that my fear is called thalassophobia, but specifically dark water. Its strength has waxed and waned, but it’s never gone away. I even know what event made it happen and realize it’s irrational, but it doesn’t make a difference.
I used to frequent a subreddit for this, as I have it too. Even when people read the description of what it is, they think you're just afraid of water. It's the unknown of what might be down in the dark that terrifies.
Yeah, my imagination goes into overdrive, and it’s terrifying.
I guess I have this too but only when I'm swimming. I don't mind when I'm in a ship.
Also doesn't have to be deep, kicks in as soon as I can't see or touch the bottom.
Yeah, it’s definitely about the part of the water where you can’t see that triggers me. I guess “deep” enough for that.
Please tell us more about the event! This is the internet, should be mostly anonymous…
When I was less than five years old, my dad would direct my attention to the outlines of the trees in the dark night sky to scare me into putting the covers over my head, so I’d fall asleep.
Once me and my wife went down to the ocean at night and I went in. After a few minutes I came out and told her that I fully understand the fear of the ocean at night now.
Yeah, it’s a hard phobia to fight because the ocean is dangerous and full of monsters.
Nuclear war. 80s kid here, so past the nuclear close calls and “duck and cover” of the 60s but the Cold War and nuclear arms race were pretty scary to me.
It’s never gone away and Putin’s current saber-rattling have not helped, but it calmed down in the 1990s and 2000s.
It just seemed like a given we were all going to die in a nuclear war, it was just a matter of time.
There’s still time! :-D
Same! We lived under a flight path when I was growing up for an international airport. I always thought the planes were the bombers coming.
water thats to deep for me to stand (pool vents and grates and such stuff as a bonus)
i still have it, and for the longest time i didnt know why.
i fell into a pool as a little kid,
and had forgotten that incident.
same for me. I still don't like deep waters, especially when me and my family go on a trip that has roads near big bodies of water.
Oh god the grates in pools! A local rec centre has a wave pool and there's this wall long grate protecting swimmers from the wave machine. The grate is tall as I am and is in deep water, it honestly still scares me.
From about 5 I've had coulrophobia, a phobia of clowns. It's not as bad as it was then, I would break down crying just at the sight of one as a kid.
I was never afraid of clowns but I was never amused by them either. Think humanity should just abandon the whole clown thing. No one seems to be enjoying them.
Aliens abducting me. Not even in my top 10 as an adult.
Abandonment. Which happened several times throughout both my youth and adult life, so yeah...
The fear of open water such as lakes, beaches, and rivers. I've always had a fear but would some times just suck it up. Hell a family friend once dragged me by my foot against my will into a lake where it was bitch black and even then I still had times where I'd swim around that area willingly. Not sure when it started but late into my adulthood I began being truly afraid of it so I keep my distance.
lmao
How can one be afraid of something and still enjoy doing it? I like snorkeling and have done it many times, love the feeling of weightlessnes and how quiet it all is, I plan vacations around the whole thing BUT everytime I am about to do it all of my body starts shaking like crazy, blood pumping, ears ringing, the works. Nothing has ever happened to me while doing it and I have never witnessed like an accident or something traumatic like that.
Oh! Also, not a fan of black dark places in water, like you go on by yourself and explore that place where a gigantic eel probably lives I'm gonna stay put right here.
My older siblings orchestrated a fake haunting in our house for a month that absolutely terrified me.
The plus side is now I know ghosts and spirits aren't real, and also that it's pretty silly to believe in supernatural entities in general.
I also have an issue with dogs, I grew up in a neighbourhood that had a handful of aggressive dogs. Biggest thing for me was walking by tall fences in my neighbourhood and getting jumpsscared by dogs banging on them. Didn't help that I got chased down/bit by my next door neighbor's dog as a teen.
I enjoy being around dogs of friends and family, but if it is unknown and unleashed I am very guarded and will plan out a fight. I still flinch if a friendly dog barks unexpectedly but I work hard to keep it under control.
I don't know how to explain it exactly. You know how when a restaurant goes under the sign about prices and hours is still there? I one time was looking at a place like that and imagined myself standing there waiting for it to open unable to process that it was closed. Then coming back the next day and doing it again. And once I imagined that I thought about school. What if I didn't understand that the school was closed that day but I was still acting like it was. Me sitting in an empty classroom at a desk waiting patiently for the class to begin. Still following the bells moving from room to room.
That somehow I would lose the ability to adapt to the obvious wandering around like a robot. This is summer in summer I wear short sleeves, but it is raining today, doesn't matter in summer I wear short sleeves. And this would continue until I fell over dead because of it not even screaming or asking for help. Just laying there telling my legs to work.
Guess I still have it to one extent.
Cheese. I have no cheese :(
Mine was the inevitability of getting looked at by a dinosaur through un-curtained windows at night, thanks to watching Jurassic Park at far too young of an age.
I can safely say that I am no longer worried about getting looked at by a dinosaur, through a window or otherwise, although if it did actually happen it probably would be pretty scary.
As an adult that's honestly funny, but I could see myself also having the same fear.
yeah, there was a clerestory in my childhood home that had windows just the perfect height in my child-brain for a T-Rex to look though; unaccompanied nighttime journeys through those lofty halls were very harrowing.
Yeah, the dog thing for me too. I got bit by a dog like once and now even the smallest dogs really scare me. I actually feared cats too but I have one now and the fear is totally gone. I still have this crippling fear of social interactions. Face to face, yeah, but especially phone calls. I got over the darkness thing when I got my own room. Now I can't sleep with lights on. Still got the fear of heights I also had a fear of insects and rodents like say cockroaches or rats. Mostly OK now. I also got a fear of basketballs for a while because some kid hit my face with one in 5th grade. I was really a scaredy kid lol.
Spiders, and yes
Flying, stinging insects. I hate it when I suddenly hear the buzzing next to my ear. They can move faster than me and there is nothing I can do against them other than try to dodge them.
War
You could say just about anything I had to deal with. I still have the second one which deters me, in turn which had not bode well for me.
When I was a kid I was afraid of snakes for two reasons: one of my cats would always hunt them then bring them into my room as gifts. So I would wake up to a snake between me and the door. The other is that around here, some of them are fairly aggressive. Ive been chased by snakes while out fishing before.
As a small child, I feared that humanity would go extinct. I knew the following:
I stayed up at night worrying about this. I was precocious in this very difficult way, and it was hard for my parents.
As a teen, this fear was somewhat replaced by an increased understanding of entropy and a fear of the eventual end of the universe.
As an adult, that fear has been somewhat replaced by an increased understanding of human nature and a fear that we will ruin ourselves before either other fear can come to pass.
Looking to the future, I see that my oldest wants to be an engineer for NASA and has the chops to pull that off of his interest maintains. My youngest compulsively helps people. Maybe there are enough people like the two I was blessed with. Maybe one day we can get off this rock and scatter like seeds on the wind. Maybe raising them right will be my small contribution to the continued success of humanity.