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Nervous Habits and Snake Phobia
Question:Why do I bite my fingernails or pick at my cuticles until they're bleeding? Is it just nerves? Hyper-grooming? Is it a form of "cutting" that some kids do? Attempting to control my environment? Or just something oral?
Letting your fingers do the vexing, eh? While some textbooks suggest it's about perfectionism, this is potentially a more serious problem. Like monkeys and dogs, we're programmed to groom, but your hyper-grooming is much more, says Joseph Himmelsbach, a psychologist at the State University of New York Upstate Medical University. "It's a primitive way of releasing anxiety. Or you're probably mad about something, and you're protecting yourself against acting with a more appropriate display of anger. But this is an infantile or immature way of coping." If you're regularly injuring your hands to the point of bleeding, you should make an appointment with a psychologist, and soon thereafter, a manicurist.
Question:
Snakes freak me out -- anywhere, anytime, any snake. If I see a snake on TV, I can't sleep that night. I once saw a snake in the park. My husband told me it was just a little garter snake, less than a foot long, but I won't go back to that park again. My husband tells me I'm nuts, and he wants to take me to the pet store to look at snakes. No way. He's the one who's nuts.
"Neither of you is nuts," says Nando Pelusi, a clinical psychologist with a practice in Manhattan. You have a classic phobia, and snakes and spiders are the most common objects thereof. "These fears are somewhat hard-wired into us," he says, and it's highly illogical, because cars and cigarettes and electric wires of our modern day are far more dangerous.
Conquering phobias of this sort usually calls for a behavioral approach, and your husband is on the right track. What you need is gradual exposure, starting perhaps with pictures of snakes, combined with relaxation exercises. Glance at the picture; breathe deeply. Once you can do that, move on to a TV image. Again, breathe deeply. Once you can do that, you might try being in the same room with a small snake in a cage. Take it slow, though. Going too fast will backfire. Then again, notes Michael Gitlin, professor of psychiatry at UCLA, maybe it doesn't matter. "If you live in a city and you're afraid of snakes, so what? It's like living in the desert and having a fear of elevators. It doesn't come up, so it doesn't much matter."
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