Phobias are characterized by the great variety of forms they take. If there is an element of reality or even a phenomenon imaginable by humans, probably at some point someone will have developed a phobia about it.
For example, there are phobias of cats and spiders, forms of fear that, although irrational in the vast majority of cases, make some sense; But there is also a phobia of clowns, a phobia of holes, or a phobia of birds, which are more difficult to understand without feeling them firsthand.
However, beyond all this variety of forms, there is a type of phobia that seems the purest of all, the most core. This is phobophobia, or the phobia of fear itself In this article we will see what it is like, what symptoms characterize this psychological disorder, and how it is treated in psychotherapy.
As we have advanced in the previous paragraphs, the simplest way to understand what phobophobia is is to consider it the phobia of fear, or the phobia of phobic crises. In other words, it is a whiting that bites its tail, a vicious circle that feeds on itself at the expense of the anxiety that the person suffering from it keeps latent due to various circumstances (we will see the latter later).
Those who suffer from phobophobia can live normally for most of the time, but occasionally they will notice that several things happen to them: they will avoid places and contexts in which they believe they may have fear attacks, and on the other hand they will suffer from these fear attacks. extreme… or rather, anxiety.
What types of situations trigger phobic crises? Potentially anyone. This is because in this case the root of fear is fear itself, a phenomenon that does not emanate from the environment: fear does not “spring up” from a dog that barks in a threatening manner, nor from the top of a steep mountain. pronounced.
In any case, fear, which triggers anxiety peaks, is something contextual, a process that occurs in the interaction between the individual and a situation that will be interpreted and evaluated subjectively by the former. Because of this, what can be scary is both everything and nothing.
Because of this, Phobophobia is one of the most unpredictable types of phobias since it is not tied to any type of concrete stimulus that is easy to objectify, but rather arises from something as subjective as the idea that each person has about what is scary depending on the occasion.
Symptoms
What are the symptoms of phobophobia? To put it quickly, they are typical of practically any phobia since the main differences between them are the type of situations or stimuli that trigger them. For example, generally the phobia of mice and the phobia of driving manifest themselves in a very similar way.
Among the characteristic symptoms of phobias we find dizziness, nausea, tremors, cold sweat, increased heart rate catastrophic thoughts about what will happen in the next seconds or minutes, and the intense desire to run away from the place where you are, or to hide.
Causes
As for the causes of phobophobia, these are partly unknown, although it is known that there are many and each of them probably contributes little to the development of this type of anxiety disorder.
It is assumed that genetic predispositions explain part why some people end up developing phobophobia, and also that certain unpleasant experiences are capable of leaving a kind of imprint in our emotional memory, causing the fear of fear to progressively generate a snowball down the hill, getting bigger and bigger. At the same time, new unpleasant experiences are added to this set of anxiety-producing memories.
Treatment
How is phobophobia treated in mental health centers? Psychotherapy has proven to be very effective in dealing with this type of anxiety disorders. What psychotherapists do is create situations in which the patient learns to weaken the link that keeps two memories linked together in the emotional memory: the memory of how one reacts to the possibility of being afraid, and the memory of what bad thing that happens when you have major attacks of fear or anxiety.
In this way, the unconscious part of the mind of patients with phobophobia stops establishing an equivalence relationship between “having the expectation of being afraid” and “suffering an intense anxiety crisis.”
At the Psicomaster psychology center, located in Madrid, we have a team of psychologists with extensive experience in the treatment of anxiety disorders such as phobias, and the principles to apply are always to enhance the autonomy of patients, making them, little by little, little, they will be able to verify for themselves that nothing happens when they expose themselves to what scares them so much.
So Through experience in therapy, changes for the better are achieved both in their way of behaving (not avoiding objectively harmless situations) and in their way of interpreting reality.
