jawjaw,
Kudos for figuring out the "fear of long words" question. Jeanne and I had a VERY LARGE version of this word that we used at one of our book signings - sort of a guess the meaning of the word and win a Paic Diaries t-shirt. We got some very funny responses - one I remember was "fear of gaining weight or being very fat" - probably the prefix "hippo."...

Anyway, I think it's great that people are posting their fears. AT the end of a week, I'll put a post up with all the named fears and although some of the fears will be scary for some people - no one will have every fear on the list. Then there will be a list of fears and each of you can look at that list and see the fears you don't have. That can be very freeing and informative - it shows you that you have the capacity not to fear. In fact, if I asked you to list all the things you're not afraid of - you'd be surprised at how long and endless that list would be (but we'll save that for later). This little exercise of listing fears also helps to show how personal fear is. Yeah, there's things most of us are afraid of, but those are usually linked to survival and our fear is programmed into our biology. But the particular fears that each of us settles on shows us how different fears can be from one person to the next. I'm not talking about fears that can be traced to a known origin - I"m talking about fears that seem to be...just there, and it's interesting to me why one person has this fear and another that. It reminds me of a quote we use to open Chapter Four of our book. The chapter's subject is PTSD and in its early diagnostic years, PTSD was usually only diagnosed in veterans. Here's the quote: "There is a core of anger in the soul of almost every veteran. In one man, it becomes a consuming flame that sears his soul and burns his body. In another, it is barely traceable."

So keep those phobias and fears coming in - the more fears we list, the more fears each of us will be able to point to and say that it is barely traceable.

Warm regards to all,
Julie