The xanthophobia It is the irrational and sick fear of the color yellow that a human being can suffer. A person with this phobia can go to the extreme of feeling fear or fear of both the color yellow and the word yellow itself.
The word xanthophobia comes from the Greek xanthous which means "yellow" and from phobos which means "fear". Some of the things that a person suffering from this phobia may be afraid of are: the sun, yellow flowers, yellow cars, yellow fruits or, in short, any other living being or object that is of this color.
As in all cases of phobias, this fear begins to be harmful to the person when it limits him to do what he wants. This is where you should ask a healthcare professional for help.
The person who suffers from a phobia cannot control the fear and requires treatment to overcome it. Since the phobia controls the sufferer, this can significantly affect your life. And since any living being, object, situations, and even thoughts can trigger a phobia, there are hundreds of them..
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As with other specific phobias, xanthophobia develop from some traumatic experience in the person's past. This traumatic event, probably linked to childhood, ended up being an irrational and exaggerated fear generator.
The color yellow is associated in many cultures with bad luck or even death, so social identity has a fairly close relationship in this phobia. In fact, the starting point of the phobia is usually the association of this color with illness, bad luck, or even death..
The origin of the belief that yellow is bad luck is believed to date back to the 17th century. Jean-Baptiste Poquelin, better known as Molière, died while performing "The Imaginary Sick" on February 17, 1673, dressed in yellow..
Before this event, yellow had had a good social acceptance, since it was related to gold or its representation of the sun, of light. Since Molière's death, all this has changed and bad luck appears linked to the color yellow, sometimes in a generic way, but very especially in the world of the stage..
Another anecdote is that the actors are strictly forbidden to go on stage dressed in a yellow garment because it gives bad luck.
Another cause may simply be that a child learned to imitate negative responses to other people's fears..
As in many other phobias, irrational fear can be a fear learned from a role model person they have had in their childhood. This is called vicarious learning..
The person affected by xanthophobia can suffer from serious anxiety symptoms that occur together with a great emotional disturbance, which can greatly affect their quality of life, limiting them considerably..
Next, I will go on to describe some of the many symptoms that someone affected by this phobia can suffer when exposed to the word or the color yellow:
In case of suffering from any phobia, it is necessary for the person to go to a health professional to begin effective treatment and be able to overcome it or lead a life with the fewest possible limitations..
In the treatment of xanthophobia there are several psychological therapies that can be effective to overcome it. Next, I will go on to detail some of the most effective treatments:
Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) is quite effective in overcoming specific phobias. The techniques used in this type of therapy for phobias are:
It is the most effective behavioral treatment to deal with the behaviors of anxiety produced by phobias. It is based on the exposure of the person with a phobia to the feared stimulus, in this case to the color or the word yellow. The key is to prevent the escape route from becoming a safety sign.
Exposure interrupts the chain of flight behaviors and allows to cope with the psychophysiological and cognitive symptoms produced by anxiety. These symptoms will decrease the longer the subject is exposed to yellow.
With this technique, the patient can learn to face feared stimuli and situations that are threatening to him, exposing himself in a real or imaginary way to stimuli that produce anxiety.
With this exposure, the subject learns to relax and once the anxiety is controlled through imagination, the feared object will be desensitized live..
Some of the cognitive techniques that are often used to treat specific phobias are the following:
This technique helps us to visualize, go back and correct the problems that we develop in fears and phobias.
It is not about hiding problems, but about facing them in a more useful way by learning a more appropriate line of confrontation. If you have been able to create something as complicated as phobias and fears, you can learn to use those abilities to carry out different behaviors.
It is a method of transformation through which people review, develop and optimize their modes of behavior that they carry out in the world.
With hypnotic regression, the first manifestation of fear can be located in the subconscious of the subject, locating the situation, the reason ... On this you can work through hypnosis, which allows associating these manifestations with other positive ones that make the irrational fear of that object is reduced and even disappears.
Thanks to hypnosis, the negative associations that make the subject suffering from phobia continue with that irrational and exaggerated fear are broken. At the end of the hypnosis process, the subject has total control and mastery of the situation.
In case they are considered by the health professional as necessary due to the intensity of the problem and the disorder it causes in their daily life, they may resort to psychiatric treatment with drugs..
This pharmacological treatment will help to cope with the physiological symptoms related to anxiety, which may appear due to psychological techniques such as exposure or systematic desensitization..
It will always be necessary to combine this drug treatment with psychological therapy, since drug treatment alone does not cure the phobia. It helps to remit or decrease the physiological symptoms of the therapy, but it is not completely eliminated.
The most commonly used drugs for the treatment of specific phobias such as xanthophobia are antidepressants and anxiolytics.
In addition, there are some behaviors that can help reduce the anxiety generated:
Finally, I would like to explain the objectives that are tried to be achieved in a therapy aimed at facing xanthophobia, so that, in case this is your case, you can see that there is a solution to your problem:
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