Lupophobia
In my early teens, I used to read lot of festival-special Marathi language magazines during Diwali holidays. Dhananjay was my all time favorite magazine. It used to have quite a good collection of thriller stories- detective, suspense, science fiction, horror, crime, war & so on.
I remember one such story, where the protagonist is experiencing presence of a wolf around him randomly throughout the day – howling & ready to charge towards him. He is terrified by this repeated experience & hence has totally lost all the confidence in life. He keeps on going to many psychiatrists for a possible cure but hasn’t got any relief so far.
Finally, it is revealed that his own wife is behind creating this wolf-phobia (lupophobia) by means of using some hypnotism techniques (as part of revenge for settling some old grudge). The story ends with her arrest & his rekindled hopes for a complete cure. That story has stayed in my mind mainly because of the way it was presented to the reader (Christopher Nolan style 😊).
At some point of time, many of us would probably have experienced different versions of phobias or fears in our own lives. Fear of something going wrong, fear of something left behind (car key or house key for example), fear of being discarded/isolated & so on. Some even have weird phobias like end of the world is near or fear of mirrors, fear of long words, etc. Children sometimes have fear of sound of Pressure cooker’s whistle or sound of mixer/grinder.
In the Harry Potter series, Harry’s best friend Ron has fear of spiders.
For me, the ‘fear of something will go wrong’ was always there during my Engineering days - especially while attempting the practical exams 😊.
After getting my degree, I started working as a commissioning engineer where I used to go to customer’s factories & get their machine automation working.
I was sent out of India for one such project. It was my first overseas commissioning job, so I was quite excited as well as equally nervous. Luckily, the entire commissioning activities went quite smoothly & the day came when I was all set to return to India. That day, the Customer suddenly started insisting on learning about taking backup of entire automation system (while the machine was in production).
In my nervousness & (hence) fear of anticipating that something would go wrong, I clicked ‘Download’ button on one of the electrical drives instead of ‘Upload’… that resulted into a communication fault and the entire machine came to a staggering halt with the ongoing production reducing to complete wastage in a matter of 5-6 seconds.
The customer was clueless & naturally upset while I was on the verge of crying myself - already ‘seeing’ the flight taking off without me in my mind’s eye.
Luckily, I could restart the machine fast, ran it in production mode for next 3-4 hours without any issues, convince the customer that machine stopped ‘only’ because of my mistake & finally catch the flight to India 😊
Over the years, I have been able to come out of this fear of something would go wrong - thanks to my regular practice of Vipassana meditation.
Some years back, I came across the concepts of affirmation & visualization. If you can reword the expected end result positively (called affirmation) & regularly ‘visualize’ it in your mind clearly, then the chances of its success improve dramatically (although you still need to work towards that). I have used these two amazing techniques while learning car, getting rid of the habit of nail biting, etc.
While learning the car, I kept on telling myself that I was a cool-calm-composed and safe driver. I kept on visualizing myself enjoying my driving in hills, sitting ‘stoically’ in my car in peak traffic (without venting my frustration out on others) while listening to some great music, going at 100+ kmph on Mumbai-Pune expressway & so on. While getting rid of my habit of nail biting, I kept on visualizing my perfect nails, cutting those regularly by a nail cutter & so on.
It took time but worked perfectly in the end.
Since then, I have used these techniques for getting various things in my life.
Unfortunately, the reverse is also true. If one keeps on thinking about negative thoughts, fears, phobias and (even worse) keeps on re-playing those in their mind, then these thoughts also tend to get stronger over a period of time.
The Buddha says that whenever we suffer any misfortune or experience some unpleasant thoughts, then two arrows fly our way. Being struck by the first arrow (of sorrow) is many times inevitable and undoubtedly painful. But being struck by the second arrow brings even more misery (by reliving the painful memory)- something which can be avoided by acknowledging it and not reacting towards it.
The more we practice acknowledging the existence of 2nd arrow (painful memory) & don’t allow it to bring misery, the more we are able to avoid its ‘long term’ suffering due to it.
Regular practice of Meditation helps in this in a big way.
In that earlier Lupophobia story, someone else was creating that phobia in the protagonist’s mind. But day in day out, we ourselves are often responsible for creating and festering many smaller or bigger fears in our own minds with our own thoughts (by willingly allowing the 2nd arrow to hit us repeatedly).
It is like an act of (negative) self-hypnotism.
Have you identified your fox of fears and are working towards eliminating that?
My recommendation - try meditation, affirmation & visualization techniques wholeheartedly. These work wonders in long term.