Having a phobia is not a sign of weakness, it just means a natural process has gone a step or two too far.

NOT being scared of a scary thing is stupid. For example you're scared of fast-moving traffic, and you'd be stupid if you weren't. A phobia is the same mechanism but taken a stage too far, such as being scared of fast-moving traffic, even when it's 100 yards away, or being extra scared of the blue cars.

Different sources will give different numbers but approximately 70-95% of your brain's activity is subconscious. Most of what you think you're thinking is not thinking at all, it's just a script running on auto-pilot - and that's the 'CONSCIOUS' side! Most of us know that stuff like breathing, digestion, sweating and maintaining your heartbeat etc is subconscious. Fewer realize that much of your conscious actions and thoughts are actually unconscious.

So when something gets entangled, such as the rightful fear of fast-approaching cars getting tangled with stationary blue cars, you cannot consciously fix that. You can no more decide you're not going to be scared of a parked blue car than you can decide not to be scared of a silver car approaching you at 50mph. It's the same circuit, firing at the wrong time. Likewise such a circuit can be accidentally triggered by something that seems entirely unrelated, such as shower heads.

Not all phobias are from childhood trauma, though a lot are. For example you may have come close to being run over by a car with chrome headlights. At the time you may have laughed it off, perhaps from embarrassment. Later, maybe while sleeping, your mind connects the 2 - round chrome things nearly killed me! You walk into a bathroom one day, see the round chrome shower head FUCKING HELL! and you're scared of it...

You don't know why, and your subconscious will actually protect the conscious by not re-living the near-death experience, so you just have a crazy, irrational, nonsensical fear of shower heads. The fear reaction itself tells the subconscious it's right to be scared and it creates a loop.

Can it be fixed? Sure, and I offer a type of therapy to do just that, as do others, but there's more to the topic than 'Cures are available'. Not everyone can afford it, believes in it or even believes they have a phobia until some event reveals it.

Sometimes just talking to others with the same fear, or being able to put a name to it, can help people. The very act of talking about it can sometimes untangle the mind and - poof! It's gone.*

*Your results may vary

:P