I’m terrified of BUTTONS

... I can’t even touch or wear them, and it’s no laughing matter, says KATE BATTERSBY

FOR weeks, my friend Jane and I had been looking forward to our girls’ day out. There we were, flicking through the rails in blissful mid-shop, when Jane pulled out a classic white shirt.

‘You’d look good in this,’ she said. Taking one glance, I shook my head. ‘I don’t think it’s very me,’ I replied quickly. She waved it in front of me, the pearly buttons catching the light. I looked away.

‘Try it,’ she instructed. ‘You don’t have many shirts, do you? In fact, now that I think about it, you don’t have any.’ Then, she grinned. ‘Ah. Of course you don’t. It’s because of your weird button thing, isn’t it?’

Yes, I admit it. My ‘weird button thing’ is, in fact, a full-on phobia. The strange truth is that the very sight of those horrid little discs — especially mother of pearl or any small, shiny ones — makes my skin crawl and my stomach heave.

Like many women, I have far too many clothes, but very few of them have buttons. I avoid touching them unless absolutely necessary. I hate the tiny clicking sound they make when they bump against one another on a clothes rail.

The worst ones — the kind that make me want to throw up — are shiny ones hanging loosely, wobbling on a thread. I feel an urge to gag, as if I were being asked to eat rotting food.

It sounds crazy but, in fact, it’s not uncommon. Officially, it’s called koumpounophobia — from the Greek koumpouno, meaning button, and the Greek phobos, for fear — and is defined as ‘a persistent, abnormal and irrational fear of a specific thing or situation that compels one to avoid it, despite the awareness and reassurance that it is not dangerous’.

Having to write the word button in this article is difficult. Actually hearing the word is revolting, and I avoid saying i t unless absolutely necessary.

BUT I’m far from the only one. Model Poppy Delevingne, sister of Cara, admitted to the same syndrome in a recent interview. ‘I have a phobia of buttons, which I’ve had to work on because of my job. They freak me out,’ she said. ‘A friend once wore a pair of jeans with multi-coloured buttons on the pockets. ‘I was hugging her and thought: “Oh my God, what’s that?” When I saw them, I went green.’

Fashion designer Amanda Wakeley is a fellow sufferer. As a child, she wore a thick duffel coat all year round and refused to switch to her school mackintosh because, according to the strange common pattern of this phobia, she has no trouble with toggles or large metal buttons of the kind found on jeans.

But shiny plastic ones make her want to vomit. ‘Buttons!’ she shudders. ‘I just don’t like them.’ The late Steve Jobs really had it bad. The Apple tycoon’s phobia extended to push-button keypads on phones, and so he came up with the touchscreen iPhone — creating a technological revolution.

St Patrick’s University Hospital estimates that phobias affect around 10 per cent of the Irish population. Phobialist.com lists 69 beginning with the letter ‘A’ alone — and 543 in total. Still think the fear of buttons is weird? Ask radio DJ and TV presenter Fearne Cotton. ‘ I am beyond petrified of dry sponge and foam,’ she has said.

Yet much of her work requires her to carry a foam- covered microphone i nches f r om her face. ‘I just have to try to ignore it. It makes my neck tense up. I can’t bear it.’

Actors Johnny Depp and Daniel Radcliffe have the quite common coulrophobia — fear of clowns — while Nicole Kidman has lepidopterophobia, a fear of butterflies.

But the strangest celebrity phobia is surely Kylie Minogue’s: clothes hangers. ‘I hate putting things on them,’ she says. ‘I don’t like the way they sound when you put them in the wardrobe.’

What is at the root of such fears? Nicole Kidman recalls a huge butterfly sitting on the front gate of her house as a child and her need to ‘do anything’ to avoid it.

Experts say that many phobias stem from a traumatic episode, but I can’t recall anything happening to me that made me afraid of buttons.

‘We’re not born with any phobias other than the fear of falling and loud noises,’ says phobia expert Dominic Knight, who uses a form of therapy called neurolinguistic programming and hypnotherapy, on sufferers. ‘Every phobia we develop is from some other association our mind has come up with.’

To l earn t he r oot of mine, I went to see cognitive hypnotherapist Louise Prevost. She says some people are so phobic, it seriously affects their lives. ‘In extreme cases, their life is ruled by the desire to avoid the object,’ she says. ‘Phobias can be about anything: it’s all about someone’s subjective attachment to it.’

And, of course, in different people the same phobia stems f rom entirely different sources.

‘I know of another patient with koumpounophobia,’ says Louise. ‘ Under hypnosis, he recalled painful dental t r eatment as a child, throughout which his gaze was focused on the buttons of his dentist’s shirt.

‘We try to unpick where the phobia has come from. Often, it leads somewhere very unexpected.’

And so it proved in my case. First, Louise and I talked over my life, covering, among many subjects, my issues with rejection, stemming from my difficult relationship with my late mother, who was unable to show maternal love.

Then it was on to hypnosis. I was gradually guided back along a mental timeline of my life, winding back decades to my childhood and the key episode.

I remembered being on my mother’s lap in the armchair where she always sat, in the living room of the house where I grew up.

The swirling florals of the multicoloured Sanderson fabric were vivid in my mind’s eye. I was five or six, and I was trying to give her a hug. I wanted her affection, but she wasn’t giving it.

My head was below her chin, my face resting against the small, shiny buttons of her lavender twinset cardigan.

The recollection had me in tears. When Louise brought me out of the hypnosis, she had no doubt we had found the link. But while finding the root of the phobia is interesting, it is not a cure because the phobia was always illogical. And sufferers can be resistant to treatment, because it is easier to continue avoiding the hated object rather than confront it.

Yet Dominic Knight assures me I can be cured. All I need, he says, is one session of hypnotherapy at his clinic.

‘ The object of your phobia presents no danger. Your mind is responding with acute anxiety in the wrong place,’ he says.

SO IT’S about creating a positive new association. I’ll have you think about buttons and then I might talk to you about something funny, and then talk to you about buttons again. ‘Then your brain collapses the old association and creates a new one. You can’t be phobic and giggling at the same time — the two chemical responses in the body are completely different.’

The hypnosis proceeded as before. The room was hot and, for a short while, I went to sleep.

And when I came out of hypnosis? Nothing had changed. I still hated buttons.

Sometimes, apparently, more than one session is needed.

‘Still weird, then?’ said my friend Jane when I told her.

Ah well. It could be worse. I could have xocolatophobia — fear of chocolate. Now that really would be worth curing.