HOW TO TREAT PHOBIAS

By Paul Salkovskis, professor of clinical psychology at the University of Oxford

Exposure is the key to overcoming phobias. That might begin gradually by talking about the thing that scares you, then perhaps putting a triggering object – a cartoon image of a necklace, for example – in the same room with you. It’s about helping people make sense of it first, then when you’ve prepared in the appropriate way, you can slowly work up to being exposed to the real thing, then touching it. It’s a sort of full-on cognitive behavioural therapy which takes about three hours to get rid of the phobia completely. contamination fears is fascinating for Victoria because she runs her own cleaning business. ‘I don’t suffer from anxiety, but I do have to hoover my house before I leave it in the morning, and if I haven’t been able to I’m desperate to get back and do it,’ she says.

‘I can’t sit down in the evenings until the dinner plates are away. I do like things clean. But I’d never have linked that to an aversion to jewellery.’

Natalie Oxford has the same reaction. The 39-year-old says she feels ‘disgust and hatred’ towards jewellery, particularly if it’s gold. ‘Dangly stuff makes my skin crawl,’ she says. ‘It’s hard to explain, but I feel sick and want it to go away. If a friend is wearing something I just hope it doesn’t touch me when I go in for a hug. My family and friends don’t know how bad it is. It’s a weird thing to hate, so I keep it to myself.’

There’s little agreement among experts around how phobias develop but they usually start in childhood with a traumatic moment or a fright. Most people, like me, won’t have any recollection of what that triggering moment was.

‘They’re exacerbated by running away from the problem,’ explains Trilby Breckman, who runs the charity Triumph Over Phobia. ‘The discomfort you feel is adrenaline kicking in and your body activating its fight-or-flight mechanism. Your head might be saying that it’s only a necklace but your body thinks you’re in a dangerous situation and you need to escape.’

So when does an aversion become an all-out phobia? ‘You might start off feeling uncomfortable around a friend wearing a necklace, but if it then stops you from seeing that person – or from going out at all – it turns into a phobia,’ she says.

The good news, however, is that such phobias are easily treated – in fact, they’re among the easiest anxiety disorders to resolve. ‘You can recover from any phobia, but it takes hard work,’ Trilby says. ‘Because you’ve got to face your fear. And that’s the one thing you really don’t want to do.’

So do I sit out this summer’s love affair with jewellery (shuddering inwardly every time a friend embraces it… or me), or do I feel the fear and fasten the necklace anyway? Maybe I’ll just hang on for the colder months when jewellery isn’t quite so on display or in touch with the skin (yuck!) and hope that summer 2023 will be a bit less blingtastic.

BEING AFRAID OF JEWELLERY IS SURPRISINGLY SIMILAR TO A PHOBIA OF SNAKES OR SPIDERS