As long as I can remember I’ve had an irrational fear of anything touching my neck. Cords, scarves, hair, other people… even I can’t touch it myself without cringing. The slightest pressure against my neck will send me shaking into uncontrollable fits of coughing and gasping for air until I can calm myself down. It is so bad, seeing other people contact their neck can make my squirm. I’ve always known it was all in my head – I know I’m not actually choking, but once the idea enters my mind it becomes hard to convince myself I am okay. But I never understood why I had this phobia. What happened in my childhood that brought this on? Or was it just something I was born with? It took a look into Sigmund Freud’s work to give me a better perspective on the situation.
Sigmund Freud believed in the unconscious mind to control people’s behavior. He studied psychoanalysis, a look into the early and developing mind. It is the belief that childhood experiences can impact personality and psychological problems that develop later in a child’s life, that it was nurture over nature that shaped who a person became as an adult. This study emphasized the effects of childhood traumas on one’s unconscious conflicts with themselves.
His ideas, along with other scientists that focused on psychoanalysis, gave me an idea about a possible cause for my need to avoid contact with my neck. One night I asked my parents if they remembered anything happening to my neck when I was younger, that would have been severe enough to stick with me over the years. Turns out that when I was four years old, I was running around and playing with my sister, and ended up getting the house phone cord (throwback to those days!) wrapped around my neck. I tried to pull away from it, which only made it tighter, and I ended up screaming so loudly that my mom heard me from out front, ran inside, and had to pull my head out from the cord. Apparently I had pulled it so hard I had a burn mark that lasted over a week on the left side of my neck.
Ever since then I haven’t let anything get too close to my neck in fear of another life threatening crisis. This childhood trauma impacted me psychologically as I grew up, giving me an intense fear of anything wrapping around my neck.