Trypophobia - fear of dots - no pictures in this article!!!

Any sufferer of this phobia will immediately understand why this article contains no trigger pictures. I am a sufferer, and have been to varying degrees my entire life. During times of increased stress my phobia can kick into hyperdrive. When this happens, I long for a doctor in a white coat with a big injection to shut me, well medicated, in a secure padded room.

Actually trypophobia is not really the fear of dots, it is more the fear of organic, dot like patterns. The lotus flower is an good example of this. Google it yourself!!! I did venture into the deep dark realms of Google to try and explore my phobia a little more, which truthfully I regretted. How crazy is it for images to pop up when a sufferer of this disorder related to images is trying to obtain more information about their condition?!

What I did  discover, while searching links with half closed eyes, occasionally seeing what cannot be unseen and suffering the ensuing palpitations, is that about 15% of people suffer from this condition. It is thought not to be a true phobia, but rather a vestigal disgust reaction to organic stimuli. It is an evolutionary survival trait that protected people from conditions, or situations that could prove dangerous to their health. A few examples are infectious skin conditions, spoiled food, and food contaminated by worms. 

The first serious experience I had with this condition was while cooking. I was browning meat in a pot on the stove and left it a few moments to long before I turned it over. When I did, some of the meat fibres stuck to the bottom of the pot, looking exactly like a swathe of upright worms. Oh my, I can't believe I'm actually reliving this!!!  Another time I was sharing a takeaway meal with a newish friend, and I had to ask her to move her empty takeaway container, as it triggered my disorder. There is nothing like having to ask someone to do something like that to put your crazy on full display!

My latest trigger prompted this article. My nephew is staying with us and has a pet tarantula. I have nothing against spiders and quite like his specimen. On Thursday he came to show my husband and I a shell that the spider had shed. It was perfect, with all the legs intact. So far, only great interest on my part. THEN I leaned forward to take a closer look, and saw the shell, with oval like sections. I was done. That is the image keeps flashing in my mind at inopportune moments.

I have been trying very hard to find a way to describe how this condition makes me feel. Perhaps the best way to describe it is when I'm having an attack, I feel like dunking my head in a bucket of petrol and setting it alight. As it is I make do with 3 large glasses of wine in quick succession. At work, I just suffer. Oh, and I went to yoga on Thursday evening, and that did help for a short while. Eventually the meat in the pot thing faded. Hopefully this spider thing will too.  Unfortunately, it is our human nature to try to hurry things along. If we have a sore tooth, we stick our tongue into it if it starts to feel better, just to check if it is actually better. It is the same with the image. If I haven't thought of it for a couple of hours, I will conciously recall it just to check if I still need to burn my head to a crisp, and as it turns out, I still do.

Thank you for reading, see you on the other side of the padded cell! Please follow me @onetree