Holey Terrifying

Trypophobia is the fear of clusters of holes and cracks. Its origin may be evolutionary but as awareness spreads online, is it becoming a social contagion?

Trypophobia, a fear of groups of holes, creeps into all aspects of life for those affected.

Julia was around 11 the first t ime it happened. She let herself into her dad’s apartment, dropped her school bag and flopped on to the sofa. She switched on the TV to her favourite channel in time for the cartoons. The screen filled up with a cartoon man with a huge head. On his chin were huge cracks. Suddenly, she felt like she was going to throw up in disgust.

She screwed up her eyes and fumbled for the button to turn off the TV.

Almost every three or four months she’d see something that she just couldn’t stand.

Something that made her feel disgusted and terrified. Sometimes it was cracks, but other times it was patterns of holes or dots, or scenes from underwater nature programmes showing groups of barnacles. She’d

shake, pour with sweat and end up lying on the floor in tears.

One time Julia was chatting on the phone when she saw something so awful she threw her mobile across the room. No one else she knew seemed to have this strange reaction. What was going on?

Then, one day when she was in her early 20s and living in London, her boyfriend came bursting through the front door after work. “Julia!” he shouted. “I know what you have!”

TRYPOPHOBIA is an aversion to clusters of holes or cracks that’s associated with feelings of fear and disgust. You might not have heard of it. But don’t worry: you won’t be able to forget it now.

Psychologists recognise a number of phobias that can have a huge negative impact on people’s lives. The new kid on the block, trypophobia, is not yet widely accepted as one of them. There is even debate about whether it is a phobia at all. That’s because while most phobias are synonymous with abject terror, a number seemingly provoke disgust as well as fear. Some researchers think that trypophobia is based only on disgust.

Asked what first triggered their trypophobia, people describe everything from a Christmas bauble to a picture of a wasps’ nest, pitted bricks in a wall, or bubbles in cake batter.

As well as such triggering objects in real life, many people with trypophobia describe certain images as being particularly problematic. Pictures involving lotus seed pods are often cited as initial triggers. If you haven’t seen one, the lotus plant produces large green seed heads that look almost like a shower head, with many large seeds.

Trypophobia is more powerful when holes are shown on skin than on non-animal objects like rocks. The disgust is greater when holes are superimposed on faces.

The internet has been linked to the rise of other conditions that have physical or behavioural symptoms but, many believe, have their origin in the mind – so-called psychogenic conditions.

Julia’s boyfriend grabbed his laptop and typed furiously into a search engine. He picked a video from the results and clicked play. She lasted ten seconds before bursting into tears and running out of the room.

The video was one of many you can find today that ‘tests’ if you have trypophobia. They tend to be a series of triggering images – everything from lotus f lower seeds to washing-up sponges.

Once she’d had t ime to calm down, Julia thought about what this moment meant. “I was really surprised but also kind of happy,” she says. “It felt comforting that other people had the same thing.”

There was just one catch. She couldn’t search online for more

information because the first thing you see when you search ‘trypophobia’ is triggering images.

So her boyfriend became her designated googler, reading aloud anything he could find on the condition. This was also how Julia discovered and joined one of the two main Facebook groups for people with trypophobia.

Skimming through the groups, it doesn’t take long to realise that trypophobia creeps into all aspects of life.

People affected live in constant fear of being accidentally or deliberately triggered by any number of seemingly innocuous pictures or objects. From crumpets to brake-lights.

A massage therapist tells me: “I can’t look at certain things… I have to send some clients away if they have triggering skin issues.”

“The hairs on my arms rise whenever I see MANY holes,” writes another. “I would come to think that I’m gonna die if I keep on looking...” They’re also troubled by anything with ‘hairy spikes’.

Talking about Facebook, one person says they’re “always wondering if I’m about to get slammed in the eyes with pods, or holes in rocks…”

One user, who describes himself as a 1.9-metre-tall “big guy”, was “absolutely flattened” by one picture.

ONLINE AND IN REAL LIFE, trypophobic people say they are also deliberately shown triggering pictures by people looking to elicit a reaction. “It’s never going to be funny to surprise me with a photo of tiny holes,” writes one. “Making me panic is just cruel.”

For these people, trypophobia is a question that no one wants to have to answer: What is in those holes?

Think of the last time you were disgusted, I-need-to-bleach-my-brainand-wash-my-hands-forever disgusted. Whenever it was, and whatever was behind it, we have something in

SOME RESEARCHERS THINK TRYPOPHOBIA IS BASED ONLY ON DISGUST

common. The face that you would have made is the same as mine when I last stepped in warm cat sick.

Your eyebrows contract, your eyes narrow, your nose wrinkles and your upper lip curls. That disgusted snarl is controlled by a muscle called the levator labii superioris – the movement of which is seen as the unique facial expression for disgust.

Researchers suggest that we have evolved disgust to help us avoid pathogens – things that can cause disease – found in everything from spoiled food to poisonous plants, from vomit to dead bodies. Faced with things we associate with disease or decay, we instinctively screw up our faces, to try and stop them entering our bodies through our mouth, nose and eyes. We retch, say ‘yuck’, and back off to protect ourselves from exposure to them and their disease-laden possibilities.

This pathogen avoidance reaction is now being seen as a key part of what’s called the behavioural immune system. This describes our thought processes and behaviours when we try to avoid parasites and infectious diseases. Tom Kupfer, an emotions researcher at Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam, thinks that trypophobia is linked to our evolutionary adaptations to avoid parasites that live on our skin – things such as head lice and sand fleas.

Just as the typical disgust response evolved to stop us consuming things that could make us ill, skin-based responses like feeling itchy or that our skin is crawling may have evolved to protect us from these ectoparasites. A study co-led by Kupfer suggests that you don’t need to feel parasites on your skin to get that response. “Just those images [of parasites] can trigger the skin-protective response, even though that would normally be triggered by something actually crawling on your skin,” he says.

IT MAY BE LINKED TO OUR EVOLUTIONARY ADAPTATIONS TO AVOID PARASITES

While people without trypophobia were grossed out by disease-related images such as ticks clustered on a dog’s ear but not by images of an innocuous thing like holes in bread, people with trypophobia reacted in exactly the same way to both sets of images. Kupfer suggests they could be overreacting in response to things that resemble pathogens or parasites but that are, in fact, harmless. Like someone scared of snakes getting a fright when they see a garden hose out of the corner of their eye.

THERE’S AN AMBIVALENCE within trypophobia. Some online support groups ban the posting of images that could trigger people, but over on Reddit, the subreddit for trypophobia is quite the opposite. As ‘Ratterstinkle’ told another user: “So the way it works in this sub is that people post pictures that trigger trypophobia.” This was in a thread called “That’ll do it”. Below was an image of a screengrab showing a man with ragged, holey skin on his face.

Could clusters of holes actually appeal to some people? Just as there are tarantula owners as well as arachnophobes; skydivers as well as people too terrified to climb up a stepladder? Perhaps. On one of the two main trypophobia Facebook groups, one user explains their own love-hate relationship with trypophobic material: “Since I realised I wasn’t alone I tried to desensitise myself to the images that affect me horribly. In trying to do that I came across a YouTube video of a vet clinic in Gambia. Now I’ve become obsessed with watching their videos of a specific condition. I’m not exaggerating when I say I’m obsessed; it’s one of the first things I watch when I wake up. I have to watch it several times throughout the day.”

Another writes: “I almost feel drawn to look at the images of it because maybe my brain is telling me that if I look at it enough it will stop bothering me.”

There is a fair bit of discussion about this kind of exposure therapy in the online groups, especially given that different forms of it are used to treat psychiatric issues including phobias, post-traumatic stress disorder and obsessive-compulsive disorder. However, there doesn’t seem to be any published research on its success or not in treating trypophobia.

There is an aspect of social contagion to these online communities, says communications Professor Adrienne Massanari, who says the sharing of such experiences is “profoundly human”. We can feel this sense of connection even if the thing we’re sharing is something that seems revolting at first glance.

Julia doesn’t go online much, for fear of seeing something triggering. “It takes a long time to let go of it afterwards,” she says. She’s careful about triggers offline, too. She loves TV and movies but avoids anything

with underwater scenes in case she sees barnacles or animals with patterns of dots that look like holes. She doesn’t swim in the sea for the same reason. She once made a friend change a jumper because it was full of holes.

Once you know about trypophobia, whether you have it or not, you start to spot potential triggers everywhere. For many, it sounds too strange to be true. Just another socially contagious internet non-disease. Media coverage plays up populist angles – a Kardashian who goes “public with her trypophobia battle”, a celebrity chef who posts trypophobia-inducing images of beef Wellingtons, or the student too scared of bubbles to do the washing-up.

What you don’t see – unless you go looking – is the debilitating power of one picture to ruin someone’s day or week. A compulsion to look at images that make you feel sick or panicky. Having to vet the movie you want to see with your child, the new boxset you’ve downloaded, the adverts on the bus, just in case something holey terrifying is waiting there.

Whether or not it’s officially recognised as a phobia or another kind of condition, trypophobia is real for the people experiencing it.