036. I am so scared of belly buttons

Hi. My name is Sue. I have a very weird phobia: I am afraid of touching and even looking at belly buttons. I know it's silly. In fact extremely silly. But it is what it is. The belly button that we all have is the thing that turns my life into hell. "What do you mean exactly?" you might ask. Here, let me break it down for you. One... I can't touch my own belly button. Two... I don't let anyone–not even my mom– touch my belly button. Three... I can't touch anyone else's belly button. Four... I can't look when somebody is touching their own belly button. Five... –and this is the worst–when I see someone whose belly button is exposed, I can't look at their belly because I fear that they will touch their belly button. They are all really bad but the last one –not being able to look at other people's bellies - has really affected my life. 

I'll tell you why it's the worst in a moment. I began my story by saying that I have a belly button phobia, but some of you may not know what phobia means. Phobia is having an intense and irrational fear of something. Well, what's the difference between a regular fear and a phobia? Here's a good example: Let's say you're 5 or 6 years old and you're playing with a dog. The dog bites your hand and of course you get really scared. After this, you might develop a fear of dogs. You don't want to touch them because you're afraid they'll bite. This is called being afraid of dogs and it's normal because it's based on a negative experience that you had. Having a phobia of dogs is a different thing. You might have a dog phobia even if you haven't had any bad experiences with dogs. And if you have a dog phobia, you'd freak out even when seeing a tiny cute puppy. Let me tell you how it goes with me. What do I feel when I see someone else's belly button? First my heart starts beating really fast. I start sweating all over and I can't breathe. I feel pins and needles in my hands and feet. This is what simply catching a glimpse of a belly button does to me. If ,God forbid, I see someone touch their belly button, then I go completely insane. I cover my face with both hands so I don't have to see what they're doing. But it's as if an invisible force makes me keep looking, and I start to make really weird noises. 

Once, a friend of my mom's came over with her daughter who is the same age as me. We were hanging out in my room. Suddenly, she pulled up her shirt and showed me her belly button. "I got my belly button pierced last week. It was so painful but worth it. Do you think it looks good?" she asked. While she was saying this, she was touching her piercing. It all happened so fast that I couldn't tell her to stop. My first reaction was to close my eyes. But I could still see the image of her belly button in my head. I clenched my fists and started making noises like a wild animal. I sat on the floor with my head in my hands. I kept making these noises as I rocked myself back and forth. When I came to myself, my mother was in the room. She said that the girl had run out from our house. Her mother had gone after her to see what was wrong. After half an hour, they still weren't back. If I were her, I'd be scared of me too. I'm all flushed just talking about it now. Obviously, I'm not the only one with this weird phobia. It's called omphalophobia. Like most medical terms, it comes from Greek. Omphalophobia is most common among women and it often starts in adolescence. Mine started 2 and a half years ago. 

At first, I didn't understand what was happening. In the summer, I often sleep wearing shorts. I began feeling uncomfortable with the waistband touching my belly button. I started waking up in the middle of night because of this, and I realized that something was off. One morning, I thought, "Maybe there is a wound on my belly button and that's why it feels uncomfortable", and I touched my belly button very lightly. It felt like I was touching my internal organs. I immediately felt like I was going to faint and I blacked out. I never touched my belly button again and never let anyone else touch it either. Until the day that I'm going to tell you about. Unfortunately, this phobia affects my life more than you'd think. For example, I used to really enjoy taking showers but now it's like torture because I'm always afraid of touching my belly button. I can't go to the beach or the pool anymore. Just imagining seeing dozens of belly buttons around me gives me stomach cramps. But these are things I can control. I can stop going to the beach, and that's that. But sometimes I come across belly buttons by accident like when I end up in an elevator with someone whose belly button is exposed or see an actor's belly button on a huge movie screen at the theater. I'm sure you'd pity me if you saw me in these moments because I'd be having a panic attack. So how can I speak so comfortably about something that I'm so sensitive about? I keep saying "belly button" over and over. Do I not feel uncomfortable? I do, but not as much I used to because I've been going to therapy for four and a half months. I avoided going to therapy for as long as I could. But it took a really bad experience for me to finally start going. One night, I was studying for a test. I felt a pain around my belly button. 

At first I tried ignoring it, but it soon became unbearable. I couldn't google it because I was scared that when I typed in "belly button pain", thousands of belly button photos would come up. I was going crazy. I finally called my sister Callie and told her what was going on. She panicked when she saw how much pain I was in and wanted to tell our parents. "Can you google it first? Let's see if it could be something serious" I said. Callie started looking around on health sites. One website had a list of reasons based on the characteristics of the pain. She asked me what kind of pain it was. "I feel like my stomach is being cut with a knife" I said. According to the website, this type of pain could mean that your appendix has burst. My appendix bursting? That was the worst thing that could happen to someone like me. My heart started pounding. Think about it–the doctor was going to examine me by touching my belly button. My mom, my dad, the nurses–everyone was going to look at my belly button. And the worst part is the appendicitis surgery. I couldn't breathe. My whole abdomen, including my belly button, was going to become the center of attention. Lots of people were going to be touching it, looking at it and talking about it. I blacked out at that moment. I remember telling Callie, "Don't tell mom and dad, I'm ready to die" as I was about to faint. I was in a hospital room when I woke up. Callie's diagnosis was correct. The problem was really my appendix. The funny thing is, when the doctor started examining me, I woke up. In fact, when he was touching my belly button, I opened my eyes and watched him. They took me into surgery right away. But I don't remember any of this. My brain probably took control of the situation and decided to knock me out. Which is for the best because there's no way I could have gone through this consciously. The surgery went well but things were really difficult afterwards. You know enough about me by now to figure out how it went. I don't need to say it all over again. 

Let me just say this: we had to go back four times to change the wound dressing. This alone may have cost me 4 years of my life. Once I recovered, my parents didn't waste any time taking me to a special psychiatryclinic. It's a center for the treatment of phobias. They created a treatment plan after the first meeting, and I started seeing a therapist regularly. The clinic has been around for 12 years, and I was only their second patient with a belly button phobia. During the treatment, I met with a lot of other patients. I noticed that the most common phobia is the fear of heights. It's called acrophobia. These people can't even look at a photo that was taken from a high place. Another common phobia is the fear of flying. These people are terrified of getting on a plane. People were really surprised when I told them about my phobia. They found it hard to believe. Only two of them didn't react like that because they had such unusual phobias that they thought mine wasn't so strange. Should I tell you quickly? They are really interesting. One is called gelotophobia. It comes from the Greek work gelos, which means laughter. You guessed it, right? Yep! Fear of laughter. 

People with this phobia are afraid of both laughter itself and people who are laughing. This makes them terrified of things like jokes, and anything that can make people around laugh them because they are so scared of laughter. The person who had this phobia was a 40-year-old academic specializing in ancient Egyptian history. He said that he found history boring, but still decided to pursue it as a career because he thought that people who are into history are boring people who rarely smile. Basically, he chose this profession to be around people who never laugh! When I met him, he had made a lot of progress during his treatment so he was doing okay. He even asked me to tell a joke to prove that he was much better. The other really interesting phobia is cacophobia. It comes from the Greek word "caco" which means bad or unpleasant. What do you think this phobia is about? This one's harder to guess. It's the fear of ugliness! People with cacophobia can't look at the faces of people who they think are ugly. In fact, they can't even be around them. For example, if someone who they think is ugly sits next to them on a plane, they have a physical reaction. The woman who was being treated for cacophobia was in her 30s. She said she rates everyone's looks on a scale from 1 to 10, and has to stay away from those whom she judges to be lower than a 7. Don't get angry with her over it because it's totally out of her control. Please remember what a phobia is: having an extreme and irrational fear of something. My treatment is still in progress and as you can see, it's going pretty well because I don't have any difficulties talking about belly buttons. I still can't look at other people's belly buttons but I've made peace with mine. I even started touching it once in a while. 

Thanks for listening to me. If you want to hear more stories like this, subscribe to this channel. Bye.