280- Casadastraphobia/ Phobias: Does Knowing It’s A Thing Make It Worse?

So Peyton says, I have a distinct childhood memory related to castastrophobia that I've forgotten about for a while.

I never knew that there was a name or a phobia for this feeling until just a couple hours ago.

I can remember myself around seven years old, lying down in my backyard one night staring up at the stars remembering uh or i remember the anxiety that i felt when i did this i felt my heart start to race i began to feel dizzy and nauseous and i would lose my sense of spatial awareness i even recalled recall telling my brother to come try staring at the stars with me because it was such a strange and foreign feeling to me at that time that i wanted to know if he would have the same experience as me I'm pretty sure he told me something along the lines of, I don't feel anything.

I have no idea what you're talking about.

Personally, I wouldn't describe the feeling as fearing gravity would switch off all of a sudden and I would fall into the sky because that was never a thought in my mind.

Or wait, I wouldn't describe the feeling.

Okay, so how would you? Another, let's see, or they just, they wouldn't.

All right, here we go.

Another trigger that I've read is related to this phobia is with skyscrapers.

Reading that this also has been a trigger related, or trigger reminded me of a time less than a year ago when my girlfriend and I took a trip down to San Antonio.

We passed through Dallas, or we passed through Dallas and Austin.

When it was her turn to drive, she asked me to take some pictures of the skyline for her.

And while I was taking them, I mentioned that I felt super nauseous and uneasy looking at the buildings towering over the moving cars, especially the mirrored ones.

I tried best to explain what I was feeling, but it was difficult because I didn't really understand what I felt myself, they say parenthetically, considering I didn't even know it was a real phobia at the time.

They go on to say, I'm realizing every time I've had these intense feelings of anxiety, which I now link to Cassidastrophobia, I've pushed the memories deep into the recesses of my mind because I sort of gaslit myself into believing I was crazy and making it all up.

I'm not extremely concerned with my phobia, since I can say my phobia isn't really debilitating for me.

And I'm very grateful and thank God for that.

I consider myself an outdoors person, and I've been attending slash working at an outdoor summer camp for eight years where we have campfires and tell stories about constellations above us and go on night hikes and even go ziplining at night.

There's a lot of tie-ins with me and Peyton.

Regardless, I still absolutely sympathize with those who have it worse than I do.

And two, does becoming aware of the phobia ever make it worse, similarly to the Bader-Meinhof phenomenon or the frequency illusion? Will cognizance of the fear in this case make symptoms worse or occur more frequently? All right, Peyton, I love these questions.