Philophobia is a phobia of loving, of opening oneself to the other person without reservation and in a conscious manner. This condition prevents one from fully experiencing relationships, sometimes creating insurmountable barriers.
Love and phobia, in the person suffering from philophobia, are two seemingly inextricable realities. Being afraid of love can make it complex, if not impossible, to let go and lose control, in a healthy way, within the relationship.
The first step then is to understand how this closure, which can also lead to real symptoms typical of anxiety, such as tachycardia and shortness of breath, leads nowhere, and risks precluding a happy emotional life.
How do you define philophobia?
Philophobia is defined as
the inability to experience feelings and moods inherent in loving.
The term derives from the Greek philia, meaning love, and phobia, meaning fear.
In summary, we can say that this condition has to do with the fear of falling in love. It can also have to do with the fear of entering into a relationship or the fear of not being able to maintain an important emotional relationship. Many people, for example, sometimes experience small fears when faced with the possibility of falling in love with a potential partner at some point in their lives.
In extreme cases, philophobia can make people feel isolated, lonely, and unloved.
Does this phobia feature in the DSM?
Philophobia is not a condition that we can trace within the DSM. However, an attentive and thorough clinician can help the person out of this state of suffering and immobility.
How to tell if one suffers from philophobia?
The most recurring symptoms are different for each person. However, many people with philophobia experience a lack of intimate emotional relationships, always feeling anxious in relationships and emotional involvement. In relational situations one might experience
accelerated heartbeat
shortness of breath
actual panic attacks
anxiety
People who have persistent or more extreme cases of philophobia may have an increased risk of
depression
substance abuse
suicidal ideation.
The symptoms of philophobia tend to be automatic, leaving the sufferer feeling that they have little or no control over the way they feel.
This often results in the use of avoidance or safety behaviours and an attempt to prevent exposure to what are considered triggering events. Unfortunately, safety behaviours tend to produce a paradoxical effect and end up reinforcing the phobia and associated discomfort, rather than improving things.
What can philophobia be caused by?
Phylophobia can be the result of previous traumatic experiences that may be directly or indirectly related to the object or a situational fear, but this is not always the case because phobic responses can also be inherited as learned behaviours from the social context in which the person grew up.
Over time, the phobia may have become normalised or accepted as part of a person's life. In that case, some people may not seek help for many years because they have learnt to live with it.
In just as many cases, however, philophobia can become much worse and start to get in the way of normal life. This is especially true if safety and avoidance behaviour has increased in frequency and sophistication.
How does a philosophical person behave?
The philosophical person tends to distort reality and invent it a certain way based on his or her own thoughts. Thoughts that in turn are the result of their own past experiences. And if the experiences were not particularly good, this will turn the present into a kind of clone of that past, making it happen again in a relapsing form.
The problem is not the present we are experiencing with one or another partner, but the future we think we will have if we move on. In this sense, the person suffering from philophobia thinks too much, his or her reality is lost within a mental fog without anything being done to live the relationship, to appreciate it, study it or enjoy it.
People often waste their energy in overthinking. It is also true that if a person has experienced a failure in a past relationship such as a divorce, this can be considered a trigger for philophobia. Philophobia can also be the result of an upbringing in which the person experienced ups and downs in their relationship with their parents.
How to relate to a philophobe?
As the physician and psychoanalyst Heinz Kohut states, the sense of self is crucial in those patients with narcissistic issues, where there is a profound defect in empathy.
How do the anaffective love?
Pilophobic individuals are most often in search of constant confirmation. They might struggle to feel empathy, and relationships with others are usually experienced as a confirmation of their own being adequate and capable.
At the same time, they fear the judgement. They tend to underestimate themselves and sometimes end up self-sabotage so as not to expose themselves too much emotionally.
How to intervene with therapy?
Psychodynamic therapy, for example, works on aspects related to anxiety, the phobic aspect of the disorder, but also on aspects related to self-esteem, the ability to hear others and to make contact with oneself without fear or conditioning.
It is important that the therapist creates a trusting, non-judgmental relationship whereby the analytic relationship can fluorish.