Hafephobia what is, causes, symptoms and treatment

In the current western world body contact is often replaced by verbal. One hugs above all in very emotional and ritualized situations, such as marriages, funerals, sports victories. Even where it is allowed and tolerated, rarely hugs with fullness and spontaneity.

Many social taboos limit body contact to few intimate situations and quite elusive. In addition, body contact is also perceived as hostile due to fears and distrust of others. When this fear becomes phobia, avoidance forces the person to perform a leakage behavior.

Fear of body contact, defined in technical terms such as hafephobia, is quite frequent but also masked. In this psychology-online article, we will discover What is hafephobia, its causes, symptoms and treatments Recommended.

1. What is hafephobia
2. Causes of Hafephobia
3. Hafephobia symptoms
4. Consequences of hafephobia
5. Hafephobia treatment

What is hafephobia

We all have our phobias. There are those who are afraid of blood, who of the spiders, who is afraid of dogs, claustrophobia or agoraphobia. Those who suffer from hafephobia are afraid to be touched and/or establish any physical contact with other people.

Exactly, ¿What does hafephobia mean? Specifically, it implies great discomfort, if not repulsion, regarding physical contact, both given and received. Such phobia is given by a subject's prosemity hypersensitivity, interpreting physical contact in the subconscious as an invasion of itself or another intimate zone. Sometimes, repulsion is limited to contact with a person of the opposite sex.

Causes of Hafephobia

The person with hafephobia Try to protect yourself from the invasion by others, of its intimate and emotional sphere. Often, in fact, at the base of this fear there is a trauma that has not been overcome, generally of sexual type, as a past abuse never approached that makes the echo himself feel; This is the case of hafephobia towards people of opposite sex. Let's see in detail the main causes of hafephobia:

• Memories of sexual assault: They prevent the person from leaving or trusting someone, for fear that he can return again and unexpectedly feel damaged.
• Emotional negligence: consequence of situations lived with parents or childhood or, on the contrary, a defense against the intrusion of these in their own life.
• Absence or excessive parental presence: It can harden the person as a piece of wood, tending to get used to the presence of the other or, on the contrary, to equip themselves against overflow in the spaces themselves.
• Fear of being contaminated: to feel dirty or dirty, or more intimate fears, of the sexual sphere, such as the fear of penetration or the high threshold of perception of pain during the sexual act that are treated in the field of psychosexology.

Hafephobia symptoms

Hafephobia enters the classification of specific phobias, clinical conditions characterized by strong anxiety and/or fear Towards an object or specific situation. Being with someone on the train or in the elevator, embrace or touch the hand of others can destabilize the person, thus causing a sense of uncontrolled rejection.

Anxiety caused by exposure to phobic stimulus can also manifest itself in the form of a true panic attack. Therefore, hafephobia symptoms may be related to anxiety or stress. Let's see what are below:

• Tachycardia.
• Sweating.
• Chest pain.
• Suffocation.
• Nausea.
• Vertigo.
• Shaking.
• Hyperventilation.
• Tingle.
• Feeling of fainting or going crazy.
• To lose control.
• Constant alert.
• Fear of dying.

Consequences of hafephobia

The person with hafephobia can feel physical contact as excessive or even painful for someone of the opposite sex or, generalized, for all. In these cases, the consequences of hafephobia can be the following:

• Hafephobia can leading to agoraphobia, that is, the avoidance of situations or places where you can touch.
• The person is induced to believe that the other constantly wants to touch or violate it.
• Not being very prone to interpersonal relationships, Avoiding meetings.

In any case, in order to formulate the diagnosis of specific phobia, it is necessary that the discomfort raised by said phobia interferes significantly in the social, school or labor functioning of the individual.

Hafephobia treatment

¿How to treat hafephobia? Psychotherapy is elective treatment for this type of disorder. Within the therapeutic relationship it will be possible give meaning to distance and contact with the rest. This happens by rebuilding what has driven the subject to build this defensive reaction to the other.

Fobia to touch is a fear linked to trust. Psychotherapy allows Identify and process traumatic situations or of emotional carelessness that may have destabilized trust towards others.

Psychotherapy recovers, facing trauma, past wounds and restores a new perspective of events. Avoid physical contact does not allow to protect yourself, but to create more distances, compromising interpersonal relationships. In this article, we tell you how to maintain good interpersonal relationships.

This article is merely informative, in psychology-online we have no power to make a diagnosis or recommend a treatment. We invite you to go to a psychologist to treat your particular case.

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