Telephone Phobia Fear of making phone calls

I thought I'd have to call someone today to get some information, and I got that old familiar dread. I was relieved when the person emailed me before I had to pick up the phone, though my anxiety is a fraction of what it was even a few years ago. My phobia started in highschool. Calling someone meant an ache in my chest, tightness in my stomach, and delaying dialing as long as possible. It evolved into sitting staring at the phone, and doing nothing else in my life, while trying to work up the courage to call, and mentally rehearsing what I would say.

When I started ERP therapy, I realized that when making a call for information or to ask someone a question, I wanted to be certain that I would know how the conversation would proceed. My mental rehearsal could go on indefinitely, because I was attempting to predict the impossible. I couldn't know exactly what the other person would say, and the anxiety I felt about this put me into a suspended state. It wasn't so much that I expected the phone call to go badly, although at times this was the fear, but that not knowing the script in advance created a storm of anxiety.

I remember when an extraverted friend of mine told me she loved making phone calls and connecting with the person on the line, and delighting in having a phone interview for a job; I thought she was crazy! My mantra when calling was always, "don't answer. don't answer. don't answer." It was a revelation when I realized that I was not going to feel "just right" enough to call--that in fact setting it up as an exposure, dialing the number and letting the anxiety be there until it dissipated was the way to break the prison of dread that could engulf a day if I needed to make a call.

One time in session with my therapist, I told him I'd been avoiding calling my doctor about my elevated blood pressure numbers. He challenged me to call right there in his office. My adrenaline surged! But I recognized the opportunity to face the fear head-on. He also said it would be helpful to let myself stumble through what I had to ask, rather than trying to rehearse and talk with omniscient knowing. My heart was pounding. The receptionist freaked, and said I had to talk to the doctor on call, even though the numbers were not dangerous, just trending higher. But I survived it. And I glimpsed the possibility that lurching through a call could be less painful than spending weeks of avoidance and rumination about making a call.

My heart goes out to anyone who has difficulty making phone calls. It truly sucks to have this phobia. I didn't even call my friends or people who I really wanted to make contact with. People who loved me and didn't expect me to give an Oscar winning performance on the phone. I am grateful for the lessening of this anxiety as I practice tolerating the dread and calling anyway.

Fear of Thoughts Getting Stuck The Challenge of Reading OCD Self Help Books

I had several responses to my review of J.J. Keeler's I Hardly Ever Wash My Hands: The Other Side of OCD, expressing fears that reading the book would give them ideas or cause anxiety.  I've been mulling this over, because it's a challenge to respond.

The simplest answer is that I don't know if J.J. Keeler's account of her OCD, and the specific things she worries about, will "stick" in your mind or create new OCD obsessions.

This is the nature of OCD that one person's trigger can seem completely harmless to someone else with a different form OCD; it's not only those without OCD who think that a particular obsession is incomprehensible.  There is a tendency to assume that other people's obsessions are easier to bear.  Conversely, if we suspect that a person's obsessions might be similar to ours, then there can be a desire to quarantine them, and not get anywhere near, as if the fears were contagious.  Or we are afraid of adding a whole new category of obsessing, and again, stay away.

This is OCD's mode of operation, to convince you that you can avoid the contagion of life, if you just screen out all things that might set you off, and enlist those around you to help in this task.   I know this from the inside.  Public health campaigns to raise awareness about various illnesses seemed designed by very cruel folks to torment me.  I was already highly aware of things that could go wrong, and I didn't want to know of any additional ways to monitor and worry about.  When I was a kid there was no internet but there were posters on the bus, public service ads on tv, special episodes of programs where someone had a disease, and magazine articles.  Women's magazines were the worst, and my mood would plummet if I was in a waiting room, reading one(which I picked up because I was anxious to be in the waiting room to begin with).

In college I was doing fairly well for awhile, avoiding obsessing about moles, until a classmate opened up his datebook, and I could see he'd written in an appointment for a mole removal.  I couldn't have predicted this.  Now, it might seem that you could at least keep yourself safe by avoiding what seems obvious, like Keeler's book or other OCD self-help books, or my blog, or the OCD Yahoo Group, or OCD support groups, but what is your definition of safe?  Avoiding all possibilities of help is not safety.  OCD would have you believe that it is possible to maintain complete quarantine, but triggers are part of life.

The irony is that when I was in an anxiety spike, I would then search out articles about whatever symptom was catching my attention, in order to reassure myself that I didn't have something serious.  There would be an initial calming effect if my symptoms didn't match, but then as I'd keep reading, I'd find something that again put doubt into my mind, or introduced an even more scary possibility.

I am not minimizing the abject fear of being seized by an OCD obsession.  I've been there.
But getting help for OCD is where the true hope of living beyond your obsessions resides.  OCD wants to maintain the status quo.  Don't get help.  Don't learn about how other people have coped.  Don't risk new pain.  

If you can't read a self-help book or OCD memoir because it's too terrifying, then this is a signal to find an exposure therapist, or a self-help group, where other people can help you.  I understand the irony in this.  I was once incredibly shy and my therapist suggested group therapy, and I was appalled.  How could I go to a group for help if I was terrified of groups??  But eventually, I realized that I didn't want to go on the way I was going:  the cost of my fear was too much, I was missing my life.

Keeler, in the preface to her book, writes of having severe fears of harming someone while at Disneyland, and self-loathing for what kind of person she must be, when a toddler ran over and hugged her leg.

It felt like she was telling me I wasn't what I feared.

I have no idea who this toddler was and I never saw her again.

But she saved part of me that day.  

Hopefully, this book can save part of someone else. 

 

 

Google Doesnt Have the Answer for Every OCD Fear

This photo is called Uncertainty by Rieke Photography.  From the time I had access, over 20 years ago, I was searching on the internet for answers to my uncertainty.  I know the feeling of the keys under my fingers, the gentle give of each key when I depress it, the hope that I will get THE answer for my fears.

For a long time, I was glad I had dial-up because at least I was thwarted in compulsive web searching at home, even though I still had it at work.  The fact that I have high-speed internet at home now, and do not spend all my time searching, is quite amazing to me.  

In the thick of my OCD, before I got any treatment, I couldn't imagine stopping my searches.  If I had a health symptom, I searched for answers.  If I was trying to figure out an unanswerable question, I searched for answers.  I remember when Google first appeared.  I was a librarian, and word spread fast that there was this new search engine with a magical algorithm that worked exceedingly well.

But even Google couldn't solve my OCD, because the reassurance I was seeking was a mythical oasis that vanished as soon as I got close.  I will grant though that it was through Google that I found the International OCD Foundation.  I joined, and started receiving their newsletter.  The irony is that I subscribed to the newsletter for 5 years, all the while compulsively searching about OCD, instead of seeking treatment.

Eventually, when I reached my lowest point in 2006, I finally put it together that Exposure Therapy might work for my mental obsessions and health anxiety, and found an Exposure Therapist.

Part of my Exposure Therapy involved stopping a search before I felt "done" and staying with the wave of anxiety until it ebbed.  There are still days when I am feeling stressed, and search Google as a way to dull the anxiety, but it is not my default position, hands poised on the keyboard.