The things we fear
Exploding microwaves, tomato seeds and moths are the stuff of nightmares for some of us, writes Andre Chumko.
Heather Murphy can’t stand the thought of, the sound of the word, or the sight of sweetcorn. She’s never eaten it. She gets goosebumps and cold sweats, and becomes physically sick by ‘‘anything at all’’ to do with it.
When new flatmates moved into her home in October she had to get her boyfriend to tell them they couldn’t have sweetcorn in the house.
‘‘I had to tell him fairly early on in the relationship as well. He’s got a huge Ma¯ ori family and everyone loves it, so the first time I was going over to meet his mum and dad he was like: ‘Listen, that can’t be on the menu’,’’ Murphy says.
She is sometimes annoyed at the way others ridicule and trivialise the issue. ‘‘Nobody ever really gives people any shit for people with phobias of spiders or heights or enclosed spaces, but you tell people you have a fear of [sweetcorn] and they just rip you for shit,’’ she says.
Tauranga-based Murphy is one of many Kiwis living with phobias ranging from debilitating, lifeinterrupting fears, to wincing at the sight of a spider.
Anxiety New Zealand’s chief executive Sarah Wollard says that although phobias may seem funny to those who don’t have them, the reality for Kiwis battling deep-rooted fears about things as irrational as animals and technology means their lives can be dramatically affected.
According to the Mental Health Foundation, the problem with phobias is that they can interrupt daily life through the constant worry; it takes effort to try to avoid the thing you fear. And, it can spiral into issues such as alcoholism, depression and other phobias.
Britain’s National Health Service defines phobias – the most common type of anxiety disorder – as overwhelming and debilitating fear of objects, places, situations, feelings or animals. Phobias can be specific (also called simple phobias), or complex.
Simple phobias often develop during childhood, and centre around a particular object, animal, situation or activity. Complex phobias can be more disabling, and usually develop during adulthood, the most common including agoraphobia (fear of open spaces) and social phobia (anxiety in social situations).
For Stuff business journalist Bonnie Flaws, tomatoes are ‘‘the grossest thing on the planet . . . squidgy, slimy, jellified, revolting, puke-inducing things’’.
If someone’s been cutting tomatoes and there’s ‘‘guts everywhere’’, she has to leave, otherwise she’ll begin dry heaving. She has a similar dislike for peach pits, passionfruit seeds and watermelon seeds. The peach in particular is ‘‘quite a revolting stone, covered in slimy flesh, shrivelled, and it looks a bit like a brain’’.
She doesn’t feed her daughter tomatoes because she can’t deal with cleaning them up. Intriguingly, once the tomato is cooked, it’s no longer a problem.
There’s no one cause for phobias, but factors can include specific traumas and incidents, a learned response from a parent or sibling, or a biological disposition. Almost all can be treated and cured.
One treatment is gradual exposure to stimuli – also known as desensitisation. But treating complex phobias may involve psychotherapy, counselling or cognitive behavioural therapy.
Psychologist Nadine Isler says phobias can be ‘‘very, very distressing’’.
‘‘The biggest misconception is that the best way to deal with a phobia is avoiding the thing that you’re afraid of,’’ Isler says. ‘‘A lot of people will say, ‘I’ve got this phobia, but it’s okay, it’s well managed, because I just avoid dogs’ . . . Of course, it’s the opposite.’’
Palmerston North’s Michelle Johnson has no idea why she fears turtles, tortoises and terrapins. ‘‘Everybody thinks I’m a screaming loon,’’ she says.
She recalls an incident at a friend’s house, aged five.
‘‘She had this tortoise, it was called Flash and seriously, that thing used to haunt me around the garden. It was like a racehorse, honestly it could move like the wind when I was around. Horrible, horrible thing.
‘‘My kids have called me over to a [turtle] tank a couple of times in different pet shops or an
aquarium and I’ve just gone over thinking I’m going to see a nice little goldfish, and they’ll do it just for a laugh and I’ll just squeal and run out.
It’s the way their heads and jaws move that make her spine tingle the most, Johnson says. ‘‘They’re just ghastly things.’’
She can’t bear to look at cartoon ones, or watch them on television.
One Foot in the Grave’s opening sequence with giant tortoises in it, and the theme tune, makes her cover her eyes. She won’t watch BBC Earth documentaries featuring them either. ‘‘We all know how much Mr Attenborough loves his giant tortoises.’’
Johnson says she’d only seriously address it if she was moving to the Galapagos Islands.
Fear of animals, primates or lizards isn’t unusual.
Amy Dawson, a Napier beauty therapist, has a phobia of snakes which often catches her out while she watches television. A glimpse of something slithering across the screen can cause panic attacks and heart palpitations.
Her phobia stopped her moving to Australia in her 20s when her friends were crossing the ditch. Dawson can pinpoint her fear to an actual event – when she was in northern Queensland as a child, and she later learned a snake had been underneath the couch cushions of the home she’d been staying at.
‘‘It just played on my mind after that, that you never know where they are.’’
Navigating social media has proved an issue. Scrolling through Facebook, images and videos of people with snakes ‘‘around their necks’’ at tourist attractions are de rigueur. She’s considering undergoing hypnotherapy, as although she no longer wants to relocate to Australia, she does want to go on holiday without having ‘‘night terrors that they’re going to be crawling in my bed’’.
Napier’s Audrey Walker can relate. Her fear of spiders, especially tarantulas and the huntsman, is so bad that, when working in a bank in South Africa years ago, she triggered a major alert when staff heard her screaming and thought she was being held up. A black spider was running across the counter.
Her fear plagued her long after she moved to New Zealand. Once, Walker jumped from a moving vehicle to avoid a huntsman in the back seat.
Fortunately the car was moving slowly and she suffered only a few cuts and bruises, but Walker reckons she would have leapt at 100kmh. ‘‘Because when you’re faced with the object of your fear, you don’t think rationally at all.’’
Property manager Greg Watson’s worst fear is out of control moths, or having one land on him and being unable to get it off. From his late teens through to his mid-thirties, if he was sitting in a room and a moth came in, he’d be ‘‘extremely tuned into’’ its whereabouts. Often he’d run, without even being sure where it was.
Following years of self-exposure therapy, Watson no longer has the urge to run from rooms but if a moth with burnt wings started flying near him he’d still ‘‘jump back’’.
He believes the root cause may be from childhood, when a group of moths flew into him. When he had children, he didn’t want to tell them in case it affected them, too. ‘‘They know I don’t like moths – that’s the story we told them.’’
It’s not all bugs and food. Casey Thomas runs for cover whenever she turns the microwave on, because she fears it will explode in her face. The ‘‘sudden’’ noise of the machine is the trigger.
And media solutions adviser Georgia Hart is scared of falling, after being thrown off a horse and nearly trampled as a teen. She tried to go bungy jumping to conquer her phobia, but this ended up making it worse after an instructor pushed her off the ledge as she was taking too long.
Waipukurau’s Michelle Mexted has phobias of the dark, heights, confined spaces and the dentist. Living rurally is a challenge, as there are no street lights. If she has to leave the house after dusk, it’ll be brief and she ‘‘immediately’’ runs back inside.
If she’s staying elsewhere and forgets her night light – which she sleeps with – she has to curl up under a window with the curtain open, or focus on a light, otherwise she can’t doze off. ‘‘I haven’t sought treatment because I feel like I’m strange.’’
Isler says it’s important for people to feel the opposite – that they can talk to someone. She believes the message is getting through that mental health issues – including anxiety over phobias – aren’t something to ‘‘suck up’’.
‘‘When they go and tell a manager or colleague or friend – they’re really surprised and they get a much better reception.’’