The ligirophobia It is the irrational, intense and persistent fear in the presence or anticipation of loud and unexpected noises, such as explosions. A specific phobia is an irrational and intense fear of something that is either not dangerous, or if it is, it is not as dangerous as the person suffering from the phobia perceives it.
That is, when a person suffers from a specific phobia, it tends to catastrophize the consequences that staying in contact with said feared stimulus may have..
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People who suffer from irrational fear of loud noises, that is, who suffer from ligirophobia, may have fears of:
These people cannot bear the fact that a balloon explodes. Sometimes the person feels unable to stay in the same space as the object.
People have an irrational fear of firecrackers. For example, situations in which other people throw firecrackers, hearing a firecracker from a distance, or the simple fact of thinking that they can throw one at him generates an anxiety response.
People with ligirophobia may fear these objects.
To know if we are facing a specific phobia or fear, we must attend to the guidelines provided by the DSM-5 criteria. For him Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5), we would find ourselves faced with a phobia of loud noises if:
People who suffer from this phobia fear stimuli that produce loud noises, such as firecrackers, fireworks, balloons when they explode ...
People who suffer from ligirophobia, when they hear a sound with these characteristics, develop an immediate anxiety response that could lead to a panic attack.
In children, anxiety could manifest itself through crying, tantrum, or immobility, for example.
People who live with ligirophobia tend to experience the holidays with great fear, since traditionally, many of them are celebrated using firecrackers or rockets, as at Christmas, in the Fallas in Valencia, on New Year's Eve, at weddings or communions ... noise is usually assured.
In addition, some individuals are unable to observe a person inflating a balloon, and depending on the intensity of the phobia, some subjects cannot stay in the same room as an inflated balloon since they fear that it will explode..
However, this irrational fear allows people to lead a normal life, since they are able to avoid most situations in which an explosion is going to occur..
Fear is a basic emotion that saves us from potentially dangerous situations. Thus, fear is not in itself negative. Basic emotions are legal and necessary and fear is necessary for our survival.
This emotion is experienced from the second month of life and the situations we fear vary with age. Fears are very common in childhood and are temporary, that is, they will appear and disappear.
The function of these evolutionary fears will help the child to adequately cope with difficult and threatening situations that they will encounter throughout their growth..
However, they can sometimes lead to phobia when they generate clinically significant discomfort and interfere in different areas of the individual's life..
The fear of loud noises arises around the first year of life and is expected to disappear after 3 years. Sometimes these fears persist and become disproportionate and maladaptive, that's when we would be talking about a phobia.
How parents handle childhood fears will affect their maintenance or recovery.
For example, if a mother when her child is afraid, becomes nervous, begins to protect the child so that he stops hearing the explosions, runs with her child to a safe situation, the child will interpret that his mother is putting him except for firecrackers that are potentially dangerous, thus maintaining the problem.
Although this irrational fear may disappear, it is common for it to persist into adulthood without proper treatment..
Specific phobias, in our case ligirophobia, may have originated after a direct aversive experience, that is, we find the case of people who after a situation developed an irrational fear of loud noises.
This process by which a phobia can be acquired is called classical conditioning. the person associates an event that is initially not dangerous to an anxiety reaction.
For example, an adult who explodes a nearby balloon and has an anxiety response. From that moment on, every time he sees a balloon an anxiety response is triggered, since he has associated this stimulus with fear.
Another way in which a phobia can be acquired is through the information that third parties may give you about a bad experience with any of the feared stimuli (firecracker, balloon, rocket, etc.).
Seeing someone having an aversive experience with the dreaded stimulus is also a trigger for the onset of the phobia, for example, seeing a friend of yours explode a balloon and hit him in the eye
Many people wonder why they have developed a phobia if at the time of the incident there were more people and not everyone has happened. The question may arise of: "and why does it have to happen to me?".
This is due to individual vulnerability. When we talk about vulnerability, we refer to the predisposition that each individual has to develop a certain pathology.
Talking about biological vulnerability refers to the fact that some characteristics of our body can favor the development of a certain pathology. In the case of specific phobias, it is likely that the people who find it easier to develop them have a more reactive autonomic nervous system.
The autonomic nervous system (made up of the sympathetic nervous system and the parasympathetic nervous system) is the one that is involved in the anxiety response.
Psychological vulnerability refers to the stable or situational psychological characteristics of the individual that facilitate the development of a pathology.
For example, the fact that the person has a premorbid anxiety disorder or that the person was going through a stressful life situation at that time makes it easier for the phobia to be established..
After living an unpleasant experience with a loud noise and developing ligirophobia, the person tends to avoid any situation in which the dreaded situation may arise.
These avoidance behaviors, if maintained over time, impede the habituation process. A person with a fear of loud noises will use avoidance and escape strategies to alleviate their discomfort..
Some of the strategies used are:
This behavior of the person to be safe is a natural mechanism that the individual develops to alleviate their discomfort.
What this individual does not know is that each time he avoids this situation, he strengthens the connections between the stimulus and the fear that it produces, since the sequence is automated.
The person learns that leaving the feared situation or avoiding it directly produces relief, so our brain accepts this behavior as an adaptive behavior that puts us safe.
Our brain understands that noise is very dangerous and that it is important that whenever it occurs or we think that with a high probability it may present, we must flee.
In addition, when people with ligirophobia emit this escape behavior in a systematic way, they do not allow themselves to verify that the noise is really not dangerous, that is, they do not allow the avoidance process to develop.
In order to adequately address the treatment of a specific phobia such as ligirophobia, it is important to carry out a thorough evaluation of the problem. The basic objectives to evaluate it are:
The psychological evaluation is the process by which we obtain information about the problem knowing all the parameters. The most used tool to evaluate is the psychological interview.
In the interview, data will be collected on:
The treatment of choice for treating ligirophobia is in vivo exposure. Exposure is a psychological technique that consists of presenting the feared stimulus without allowing the individual to implement escape / avoidance strategies.
That is why it is so important to evaluate all the responses made by the subject as an attempt to alleviate the anxiety they suffer.
When the exposure procedure is started, anxiety increases and if we do not start escape and avoidance behaviors, there comes a time when anxiety stabilizes and begins to descend until it reaches low levels, that is, anxiety has gaussian bell shape.
Each time we use this procedure, anxiety will rise to lower levels and decrease faster. There will come a time when after numerous presentations, the feared stimulus will not produce an anxiety response. It is then that we will say that the phenomenon of habituation has developed.
To carry out the exposure procedure, the first thing is to rank the situations. We ask the person to rate all situations from 0 to 10 for anxiety and we order them.
An example of hierarchy would be the following:
Once the hierarchy is made, we start with the first situation. In our case, the person must remain in front of the half-inflated balloon on the table until the anxiety is 0.
The person cannot perform any of the safety behaviors, such as stepping away from the balloon, leaving the room, etc..
At the beginning of the exhibition we will ask you your anxiety level and then every 10 minutes we will ask you your anxiety level.
When the subject says that his anxiety is equal to zero, we will leave a few more minutes and close the session. This procedure will be repeated as many times until the person gets a half-inflated balloon on the table and does not feel anxious..
When the person achieves that his anxiety before this specifically designed situation is equal to 0, we will go to the second situation.
Exposure treatment has been shown to be effective for phobias, although it seems like a difficult treatment for the patient, it can be graduated as necessary.
The important thing is to reach the end of the hierarchy because staying in intermediate levels means risking relapse into past fears.
And you, did you know ligirophobia?
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