So you think you have Rabies.....

[MyNameIsTerry]

Now I kinda wanna get a bat house...

Me too. But not to get them out of any house, I want them in my garden!

Great for keeping the moth population down.

Something NervUs and Paranoid-Viking were explaining about the myth of rabies down the generations across a couple of threads got me thinking about how bats have been seen as vermin or evil. In cinema they have been portrayed as the vampire bat or a swarm of killer bats. Then their is the vampire myths they became attached to.

I guess it adds onto it at some level in the same way we think about spiders & snakes.

[claire92]

I'm having another rabies fear too. I was at a beauty salon last week and the owner had a dog who was pawing all over me. Sent my anxiety a bit haywire, but I let it as i'm trying to do exposure. Then i found a small cut on my ankle (nowhere near where the dog even was) and now i'm getting concerned it's scratched or bit me without me realising. I know it's ridiculous. I can feel myself slightly less obsessed about this than I have been before so I guess that means the therapy is working a bit. But still having this doubt isn't nice :/ btw i'm currently in Mexico not the UK, that being said dog rabies is nearly none existent here due to stringent immunisation programmes. Obviously my OCD is latching on to the 'nearly' part of that and is ignoring the fact that the dog wasn't even near my ankle! This illness is so cruel!

Not really sure why i'm posting this on here haha as I know the fear is ridiculous, but it's nice to be able to tell people who understand HA just to get it off my chest!

[AntsyVee]

Me too. But not to get them out of any house, I want them in my garden!

Great for keeping the moth population down.

Something NervUs and Paranoid-Viking were explaining about the myth of rabies down the generations across a couple of threads got me thinking about how bats have been seen as vermin or evil. In cinema they have been portrayed as the vampire bat or a swarm of killer bats. Then their is the vampire myths they became attached to.

I guess it adds onto it at some level in the same way we think about spiders & snakes.

Makes sense. Spiders are so good. They eat all of the annoying bugs.

[Crevan]

I was doing really well until I wore sandals yesterday which I knew would be a mistake. Now I’ve found these two marks on the top of my foot and of course I immediately let my mind drift back into this rabbit hole

https://ibb.co/jnfEp9

Please tell me this kind of marking happens all the time to everyone ugh. Just needed a place to say something.

[AntsyVee]

It looks like you're in the US, so you're fine.


If your location said Romania, I would say vampire.

[MyNameIsTerry]

I was doing really well until I wore sandals yesterday which I knew would be a mistake. Now I’ve found these two marks on the top of my foot and of course I immediately let my mind drift back into this rabbit hole

https://ibb.co/jnfEp9

Please tell me this kind of marking happens all the time to everyone ugh. Just needed a place to say something.

It could be a bite BUT lots of things can bite us and we may never realise, or just not care, unless we get an infection or reaction of some kind. We never realise because they can be insects which don't cause much pain at all.

A bat would be noticeable. It would have to attack your foot for a start. You would see this. The bite would probably hurt.

And remember the odds of anything like that happening. I wonder what the odds are of bites from insects? A lot higher I bet and how many are never reported?

I have problems with bad skin and I'm a skin picker. I have been covered in marks like that from scratching, sometimes in my sleep. It's likely the edge of a nail that is sharp at the time. I may get one, two or several marks like that close together and I bet it's more there are two there that you have though this (along with the obvious subconscious thoughts and negative thinking patterns of anxiety).

[Crevan]

Yes, it's definitely because there are two marks. I was moving hay around yesterday for my animals and most likely poked myself with hay. If there were 3 marks or 1 mark I wouldn't be thinking anything of it!

Thanks for your feedback. I will also bring this up with my therapist tomorrow - I was doing so well, too!

[MyNameIsTerry]

Yes, it could be that as the stuff is quite sharp in the ends.

I remember someone on here posting a pic of their perceived bites. They had about 5 or so marks and some were close together. They could easily have been a graze type mark, I just wake up with these patterns from scratching, but his mind saw two sets of marks in close proximity and jumped to conclusions get were bites, then jumped further to bats.

The subconscious is trying to keep us safe by raising the issue of "potential bat" but it's passing this "data" to the conscious mind which makes the decisions because it just isn't sure what to do.

It can be useful to learn how to see thoughts with less attachment (if that makes sense?) to be more objective, just as Mindfulness teaches you thoughts are just that and are allowed to exist but we choose which we want to be involved with and which to let go of. It's very hard with anxiety as it's the opposite of what the whole process should be about but when you learn to see these incoming thoughts with less emotion you find yourself dismissing them as pointless stuff being blurted out by an overactive mind.

[Crevan]

So just updating because I found this a little funny... I was bad and decided to google "small bite marks on foot" and most of it was on spider bites... but then one was saying it was due to alien abduction LOL Perhaps more likely than a bat biting me without me knowing it

(and side note literally no mentions of bats anywhere in this search, it was all bug bites... and aliens) Also, if the aliens are watching, if they planted this anxiety in me, they can have it back.

[MyNameIsTerry]

You never know...