I understand. For me it’s my whole abdomen. I have no idea how it popped up (the fear, not the abdomen), but I know it was in the last 5 years. I can’t even stand to let my husband touch my abdomen, which has led to some awful fights as he’s a belly stroker. Learning abdominal massage in massage class was torture because I had to let my practice partner touch my belly. I seriously zonked myself out on Kava Kava and herbal muscle relaxants to get through it. Not a good thing.
Yet I don’t tell many people about it, not because I’m ashamed of it, but because telling people immediately leads to someone trying to touch my belly! WTF? Gerroff! :mad:
There’s no telling what a traumatic incident, brain wiring, or simple chemical imbalance will cause a fear of.
In my case, I suffer periods of somniphobia (fear of sleep) where I will go *days * without sleeping, literally pass out from exhaustion, sleep an hour only to repeat the cycle. The worst incident lasted a few weeks.
It would be really interesting to see a list of phobias together with case histories, or some statistics as to how frequent they are in the population. Because most of the ‘phobia’ terms seem like they were coined in just the way seosamh suggests, without anyone actually having been diagnosed with them.
I brought it up in the other thread about phobias, but my fear of lightbulbs has gotten to the point where it does affect my life. I can’t handle them, someone else has to change them for me, which leads to blown lights being left blown until I can get Hubby to change them for me, even though I’m physically capable of doing so myself. If I lived alone, I think I’d be in the dark by now.
Not to make “light” of any phobias (pun…must resist reference to lumenophobia), but if you take the Latin or Greek meaning of a word…example: lumen = light, + phobia = fear)…you can make up your own word for a phobia. (Hmmm, guess I didn’t do so well in resisting the pun…)
This does not indicate that the phobia is common (or rare). I personally have a phobia about dogs because of a childhood experience. So I have to use a lot of self control in the presence of strange dogs. Totally irrational, but there it is.
Have you considered replacing them with fluorescents, which can last for years? At least then, you wouldn’t have to go through the hassle of finding someone to change them for you.
That’s very interesting - thanks for sharing that story. I’ve always read these lists and looked at things like “fear of haircuts” and just scoffed, because who on earth could be afraid of just sitting there, having a haircut? I never thought about the fact that it could be the sitting there, and NOT the actual cutting of hair, that could be the problem. Fascinating.
Not to be an armchair diagnostician, but this sounds more like hyperactivity or mania to me, not a specific phobia. If anything, the phobia here would not be of the haircuts or the standing up, but of the damage caused by the raging impulses. There really are people who are scared of haircuts (Howard Hughes was one), and they are afraid of the cut itself, not something tangential.
I don’t doubt that most of those phobias could exist on a theoretical level, since after all, it’s possible to brainwash someone to be averse to any sort of stimulus, and a phobia is nothing more than a brainwashing that’s taken place over an entire lifetime (possibly helped along by brain chemistry). However, I doubt that some of them have actually existed “in nature;” I think in many cases the word precedes an actual case study.
There was a lady on one of those Maury Povich “phobia” shows who claimed to be scared of olives because they look like dead people’s eyes. People are strange all over.
olifactophobe checking in. Especially any type of chemical odor, I panic as if I’m in a gas chamber or something.
They don’t seem to have one of my other phobias, so I’ll coin anaphylactophobia: fear of developing a severe allergic reaction. Seems to be irrational in my case, since it’s never happened and I tested negative for all food allergies.
