Phobophobia: symptoms, causes and treatment

Phobophobia is an anxiety disorder in which fear calls for fear.

Phobias are characterized by the great variety of forms they take. If there is an element of reality or even a phenomenon imaginable by human beings, probably at some point someone will have developed a phobia of it.

For example, there are cat phobia and spider phobia, forms of fear that, although irrational in the vast majority of cases, make some sense; but there are also clown phobia, hole phobia, or bird phobia, which are more difficult to understand without feeling them in one's own flesh.

However, beyond all this variety of forms, there is a type of phobia that seems the purest of all, the most basic. It is the phobophobia, or the phobia of fear itself.. In this article we will see how it is, what symptoms characterize this psychological disorder, and how it is treated in psychotherapy.

What is phobophobia?

As we have advanced in the previous paragraphs, the simplest way to understand what is the phobophobia consists of considering it the phobia to the fear, or the phobia to the phobic crises. In other words, it is a fish that bites its own tail, a vicious circle that is fed back at the expense of the anxiety that the person who suffers it maintains latent by various circumstances (the latter will be discussed later).

The person suffering from phobophobia can live normally for most of the time, but occasionally he/she will notice that several things happen to him/her: he/she will avoid places and contexts in which he/she believes he/she can have fear attacks, and on the other hand he/she will suffer from these extreme fear attacks... or rather, anxiety.

What kind of situations will trigger phobic crises? Potentially, any. This is because in this case the root of the fear is fear itself, a phenomenon that does not emanate from the environment: fear does not "sprout" from a barking dog in a threatening manner, nor at the top of a steeply sloping mountain.

In any case, fear, what triggers anxiety peaks, is something contextual, a process that occurs in the interaction between the individual and a situation that will be interpreted and valued subjectively by the former. Because of this, that which can be scary is both everything and nothing.

Because of this, phobophobia is one of the most unpredictable types of phobiasbecause it is not tied to any type of concrete and easy to objectify stimulus, but arises from something as subjective as the idea that each one has about what is scary depending on the occasion.

Symptoms

What are the symptoms of phobophobia? Quickly said, they are typical of almost any phobia, since the main differences between them are the type of situations or stimuli that trigger them. For example, mouse phobia and driving phobia generally manifest themselves in very similar ways.

Among the characteristic symptoms of phobias we find dizziness, nausea, tremors, cold sweats, elevated Heart rate, catastrophic thoughts, and a feeling of fear.catastrophic thoughts about what will happen in the next seconds or minutes, and the intense desire to run away from the place where one is, 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 of why some people end up developing phobophobia. 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, making the fear of fear progressively generate a snowball downhill, bigger and bigger as new unpleasant experiences are added to this set of anxiogenic memories.

Treatment

How is phobophobia treated in mental health centers? Psychotherapy has proven to be very effective in dealing with this kind of anxiety disorder. What psychotherapists do is to 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 how bad it is to have great crises of fear or anxiety.

In this way, the unconscious part of the mind of patients with phobophobia ceases to establish a relationship of equivalence between "having the expectation of being afraid" and "suffering an intense anxiety crisis".

In 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 be applied are always to enhance the autonomy of patients by making them, little by little, be able to see for themselves that when exposed to that which gives them so much fear nothing happens.

Thus through the experience in therapy, changes for the better are achieved, both in the way they behave (and in the way they feel). both in their way of behaving (not avoiding objectively harmless situations) and in their way of interpreting reality.

Bibliographical references:

• American Psychiatric Association (2013). Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (5th ed.). Washington, DC: Author.
• Griez, E.J. & Van den Hout, M.A. (1983). Treatment of Phobophobia by Exposure to CO2-Induced Anxiety Symptoms. The Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease 171: 506 - 508.
• Mark, I.M. (1978). Living with fear: understanding and coping with anxiety. USA: McGraw Hill.