Theme
4:42am February 6, 2015

I’m looking up words for phobias I had growing up, or still have.

CW:  Discusses phobias in general, toilet phobia in specific, and gives specific and detailed reasons I’m afraid of various kinds of toilets and why some are worse than others.

Toilet phobia was the first one I looked up.  I couldn’t find it described as anything other than “toilet phobia” – no fancy names like you get for arachnophobia.  Or rather, there are some fancy names, but they refer only to specific kinds of toilet phobia that i don’t have.

To make matters worse, none of the types of toilet phobia I read about sound like me.  I have had a fear of toilets from a very young age due to the sound they made when flushing.  This is apparently not a kind of toilet phobia that anyone anywhere writes about.  They write about social phobias that take the form of toilet phobia.  They write about fears of specific things the toilet might do to them, like swallow them up.  But they don’t write about a pure, unreasoning terror of toilets themselves and the sound the flushing makes, which overpowered my senses to the point of sensory bleedover (like synesthesia only it seems to be just an autistic thing, and it differs in many ways from classic synesthesia).  

Public toilets were worse than regular toilets because the flushing was louder and more overpowerig – the entire world would blink out.  Toilets that flushed unpredictably while I was still sitting on them (we had a defective toilet at home that did this regularly0) were really bad too.  Portapotties were, and may forever remain, out of the question.  Outhouses a=were doable but not by much – something about looking down into the contents scares the crap out of me, pun not intended.  Overflowing toilets, even after they’ve been fixed, are utterly terrifying.

And I can’t find any mention anywhere of a toilet phobia caused by sessory issues.  I had a vacuum cleaner phobia growing up for the exact same reason.  I see my cat hiss at the vacuum cleaner whenever she sees it (often when nobody’s touching it, but worse when someone’s rolling it around, and if it actually turns on she runs and hides) and I know why.  She feels about vacuum cleaners exactly how I did as a child.  For some reason, that phobia has cleared up entirely but I still have remnants of the toilet phobia, especially malfunctioning toilets.

But it’d be nice if there was an actual term for phobia of toilets instead of there being names based on certain specific reasons people are afraid.  Nobody ever seems to divide up arachnophobia (as a concept, and a word) in this manner, but apparently it’s okay if it’s toilets.  :-/  (I’m also arachnophobic, but also not as bad as before because I put myself through my own hand-designed desensitization program.  But without doing the desensitization regularly the phobia comes back to some degree.  Milder, but still there.)