A New York woman was once so terrified of snakes that simply reading the word for the reptile would derail her into panic mode. Yet, the cause of her phobia wasn’t initially clear. “What was fascinating about it is she grew up on Long Island, which has no snakes as far as I know unless you had a pet snake,” says psychiatrist Liat Jarkon, who saw the woman as a patient several years back. “She never traveled to an area that was indigenous to snakes, she’d never been bitten, nothing.”
Eventually, the two decided her phobia stemmed from watching a movie that featured a snake. “It horrified her so much that it started her thinking, ‘what if, what if, what if,’” Jarkon says.
