OPINION: I Have A Phobia 

What if I told you fear could be dissolved in under an hour? Completely – gone in a matter of minutes. Would you believe me? Asks Ray A-J.

Sitting in a brightly lit little waiting room, I was nervous. My phone yelled at me the time – it was four o’clock and I had just made it to the building with minutes to spare. Anxiety brewing at what I might have to face, I stared at the coffee machine in hopes of seeking some comfort studying the mundane object. I didn’t know exactly what I was in for. But before I could make a break for it out of the door, footsteps came from around the corner and with them a familiar face.

I was in therapy, seeking help for my phobia. It had been 13 years that I’d suffered with it, and I’d had enough. Luckily there happened to be a therapist near my home in Brighton, so I went with hopes I’d leave with one less thing holding me back. Rightfully so.

In the smaller session room, I felt like an imposter – my phobia isn’t that debilitating compared to others, I can still go outside and carry out my life as normal. Thoughts crept up on me like a sudden rising tide; did I deserve to be there? But as the session continued, I realised it doesn’t matter how severe your phobia is, it still holds you back.

The therapist asked how I was – the normal niceties, and I relaxed a little. But then the topic of Peter Pettigrew came up. That character from a ridiculous movie (Harry Potter) has plagued me for my entire childhood, right into adulthood. It was just one chance encounter of the rat man, when I was five, and I was tortured for years. His face imprinted itself into my whole life. But, of course, we had to talk about it. In order to move on and bring up the suffocating feelings of terror for the therapy to kill, I had to remember.

I was back in my house with my family. Five years old, and we were watching a film before it was bedtime (as we usually would). Blinds were shut, curtains closed, and a shroud of nighttime darkness filled the room. My often overactive imagination had already taken hold of my brain, painting its own little creatures and monsters out of the dark shadowy room.

All of a sudden my pulse elevated. Hands began to sweat. A burning sensation rose from my throat and flooded itself into my eyes and cheeks. A simple rat (the pet of Ron Weasly) had leapt from his hand. Scurrying along the floorboards of the attic room, it darted forward into a crevice. Slowly, his face grew outwards, stretching and stretching until his nose was long and teeth busting out of his mouth. Gradually, he took on a more human form; with puffed out cheeks, long coarse hair wildly sticking out at all ends, sharp unforgivingly angry eyebrows digging into his face he gnawed at the air in a rat-like pose. It was this transition that got me.

Like the rat he was quick, and hurled himself across the room to escape Harry, Sirious and the other characters. But they found him, named him Wormtail and held him so he couldn’t move. Sirious told the story of this crazed figure. It was he who had killed Harry’s parents, he who had made an attempt on Harry’s life. He was their childhood friend, and he betrayed them. As soon as that word ‘betrayed’ was spoken, a flurry of panic overcame me. Helplessly I clung to a pillow, blocking the TV screen from harming me further. But the damage had already been done.

Back in the therapy room, my eyes burned with the panic and fear of that memory. Tears came pouring down my face with no regard for my integrity. The therapist could see I was distraught, debilitated. She asked what the emotion felt like and I tried in vain to answer.

It was an ice cold, turquoise block in my chest. My hands were sweating out a river, and my heart pounded a stampede of horses, but that wasn’t emotion. She explained that those were the fight or flight responses, and what was really the problem was the energy from my emotional reaction. When you feel fear as intense as a phobia’s, your body reacts – not your brain. An emotion gets trapped in your energy lines, if you’re not allowed to process it fully. If you can’t truly feel it and let it go by itself. Forcing it down and suppressing emotion is what we’re told to do if it’s negative. But we shouldn’t.

Mine had been trapped in my body for years, forever knocking at the door each time Pettigrew’s face appeared, in hopes of it being answered and understood. It was being retriggered every time. It needed to go.

She then asked for me to give the emotion a colour and shape; a turquoise block of ice for me. And words were selected to describe the feeling (I think I just said “oh cr*p” and “I need to look away, this isn’t making me feel good”). I felt ridiculous saying it, but that’s what my brain was telling me. We were now ready to begin Emotional freedom technique (EFT).

EFT aims to rid the victim of their lingering negative feelings around their trigger, dislodging them until they are fully acknowledged and can leave. We had to tap on the ends of the meridian lines whilst reciting a mantra of “even though I’m scared, I still love and accept myself” in order for the emotion to be released. It was about four rounds of this, each time checking my reaction to the character and noticing the intensity quickly decreasing, in total that got me.

It felt stupid, I felt stupid, but it was beginning to work…