I'm not sure when it first occurred to me I had a phobia. Labelling it as such simply didn't marry with the system of avoidance, embarrassment and – when incidents made it urgently present – acute panic, I'd developed over the years.
The first of these incidents, though, is easier to pin down. I was ten and at the cinema watching the innocuous-sounding Bean: the Movie. Halfway through, as the hapless Mr Bean is mistaken for a surgeon, I began to feel queasy. As he drops a sweet into a patient's open chest – and promptly plunges his hands in to retrieve it – my breathing thickened, and the white shutters of a faint began closing over my vision. I got as far as the aisle before waking to find my concerned father at my side, and a line of faces now less interested in the screen than the child-shaped lump on the floor.
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If that version of haemophobia (an irrational fear of blood) and the biology class faints that followed sound textbook enough, add in a couple more details. One, on occasion I've screamed while passed out, and two, as a vegetarian since age six (the consequence of an encounter at a French market, of which more later) my phobia has steadily grown to disrupt more scenarios than these. A rare steak and talk of raw meat at the dinner table has been enough to do it, but so has simply being told a gruesome story. By the time I've left my seat or requested a change of subject, it's normally too late.
In between these definitive moments are the shades of fear: the apprehension that keeps me from attending certain events, the near misses where I've scuttled away just in time to put my head between my knees. Or the daily flinches at stimuli as small as walking past a butcher's, or reading a blood-filled paragraph – the anxiety manifesting as a physical pain in my body.
This is ridiculous, I tell myself, but it's here.
Looking nationally, it's also no small problem. Around 2.4% of adults in England have a phobia, according to NHS England's most recent psychiatric morbidity survey.
Phobias are rooted in emotional memories
But what actually are they, and why are they so hard to shake? Harley Street hypnotherapist Christopher Paul Jones (aka 'The Breakthrough Expert') is well versed in phobias, having cured his own fear of flying sufficiently to fly through the Pyrenees strapped to the outside of a helicopter. Thankfully his methods for clients are less extreme – and he moreover believes that therapies based upon exposing someone to the object of their fear can be counterproductive, unless you first remove "the emotional charges from the past", he tells me.
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Put simply, a phobia is a case of the brain linking danger to a specific trigger event in your past, Jones says. This could be having a turbulent flight, watching a giant spider on TV, or – for me – skipping up to the cherry stall, aged six, to find my favourite vendor brandishing a skinned lamb.
"In that moment the subconscious mind goes 'this equals danger', and then your flight, fright or freeze response becomes triggered," Jones says. "The mind is designed to generalise, it's designed to keep you safe, and so whenever you see that thing in future, it says 'oh I need to avoid this', even if it's not logical, or rational."
Indeed, the original event can be far removed from the apparent object of the phobia. For example, a fear of flying could result from a fear of heights, of being trapped, or of not being safe – all stemming from different personal triggers.
And because phobias are rooted in emotional memories, talking therapies which try to rationalise the thought pattern can fall short. While a genuine belief that planes are dangerous might be alleviated by reading about their statistical safety, "with a full blown phobia, it's emotional, it's that survival response," Jones says.
The original event can be far removed from the apparent object of the phobia
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