Where's Your Head At
I have a morbid fear of getting my collarbone bitten, slashed, fractured or smashed to smithereens by a mallet. It all started a few years ago. I don't know how or why I suddenly feel extremely vulnerable when I stretch my neck or any part of my upper chest feels a draft; sometimes the feeling of fragilty would just creep up on me for no reason. I would suddenly hunch up and wrap my pashmina around my neck at work, or wedge a pillow underneath my chin before I sleep. And when there's nothing to cover up with, then I just lay my hands there, Egyptian mummy style.
A friend theorizes that it's a result of some trauma which my brain has suffered in the past, or a disturbing dream which left something behind when I was suddenly awoken. I was thinking more along the lines of sustaining an injury there in a past life, maybe even dying from a vampire attack, public beheading or medeival torture device. (Indeed, being an X-Phile does leave its profound effects.)
The paranoia has flourished over recent months. It now annoys me on an almost constant basis and I don't know how to get rid of it. Heck, my collarbone is rattling as I type this out. Can someone just decapitate me and end my misery?
posted by disco-very @ 4:24 PM
11 Comments:
Start wearing turtlenecks?
i broke my collarbone.
oh yea, u didn't see me when i had that lop-sided shoulder thing goin on.
the collarbone is one of the target areas when administerin acupuncture/acupressure for certain anxieties and phobias. there's your lead.
aeric,
doesn't work. :(
honeybosh,
yeah i didn't get a chance to see you, but i think doing so would have worsened my jitters. come to think of it, maybe hearing about your case actually may have been a minor factor in my current paranoia so please don't tell me what it felt like.
habitualdamnation,
...cor. owe you one.
random-girl,
cool. where can i get em?
When I was younger I heard about this kid whose heart just exploded one day, out of the blue. So I was always paranoid about my heart exploding until the fear slowly went away.
Then, in college I joined a fraternity and had to drink a bunch of Red Bull and Vodka one night. I thought my heart was going to explode; it felt like it was sumo wrestling with my chest cavity, bumping into each other at an alarming rate. My childhood fear rushed back and the anxiety only worsened the feeling of my heart pounding a milllion miles an hour.
I don’t have that fear anymore, and I think it has something to do with never drinking Red Bull again.
I’d offer a solution to your problem, but my espertise is in exploding hearts, not collarbones.
Blake
COgnitive Behavioural Therapy.
You KNOW its an irrational fear. Expose yr collar bones daily, but on a gradual basis. eg, start by thinking about the times yr collar bone are naked and vulnerable (I would assume, showers, urm, swims), and reinforce the fact that nothing has happened to them.
then, start by exposing them for longer periods of time. its stupid, but it may work. good luck :)
ps. COllar bones sounds Awfully weird now. too many repetitions. :P
-ann-
Y'see :) -
CBT, Exposure therapy really does work, :)..
get used to the idea that it is vulnerable, and the idea becomes less important, and you'll spike less and less - the thoughts will just come and go without any emotional response..
works for me!
**BIG KISS**
I take it you don't like Ann Rice's books? :-)
Blake
i think if I tried Red Bull and Vodka, my heart would feel like exploding too.
Ann & Space Cowboy,
Thanks for the tips. I've noticed that it feels pretty bad when there's actually material rubbing against it, so i've been trying to expose it whenever i can and i have noticed a slight improvement.
emailhosting.com
you're telling me? :S
random-girl
he ran out of stock.
ah pink,
not really. :P
My biggest fear is to being smashed like an insect, being chopped into pieces, to explode or my head being chopped off. This might be becoz of too many gruesome news I watched or read about...other I cannot explain why !
... D'v, the idea, strangely, is that when you feel the material against it, don't expose the skin, that's just following the compulsion, and temporarily removing the sensation..
the "exposure" in CBT, is to expose yourself to that which makes you 'spike' until it gradually becomes unimportant :) - to overcome the obsession, you have to ignore what the compulsion tells you to do.
.. take an example I read - imagine an arachnophobe being covered in large house-spiders.. the obsession is that the spiders will harm, so the compulsion is to run, or scrape them off.. exposure in this case, would be to get used to the sensation of them, realise that they can't possibly harm.
eliminate the cause ;) - not the symptom :)
anyway, I always loved your clavicles !
Big Kiss!
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