Phobias, Great and Small

I always thought phobias were dramatic inhibitions that stopped your life dead, like the germaphobe who practically lives in Saran Wrap to avoid contamination or the guy who can’t fly to his sister’s wedding without having a panic attack. I know a few agoraphobes who mostly don’t go out. Period. Phobias were about fears so great that the person experiencing them would rather forego life’s pleasures—like celebrating with family or a VIP pass to Coachella—than face them. Phobias, I thought, were extreme in their neurotic dimension… until I recently realized I had one, if only a little one.

A lot of people probably have one or two little phobias. Like mine, they may be easy to hide, even from yourself, or easy to overlook. Especially if they don’t affect your life particularly. But I suspect that like mine, they might be psychologically significant, no matter how dismissible they appear.

I was in my college dorm room when it first dawned on me that I could never leave my bed unmade the way my roommate nonchalantly did. I didn’t disapprove exactly. In a rush, I could leave my clothes all over or my papers scattered on my desk. But the bed had to be made. Why, I didn’t know. Nor did it seem important enough to figure out.

Years later, I noticed that if my bed were unmade or I even thought about leaving it unmade, a strange dread would saturate me, a nauseous, sick feeling in my stomach that I couldn’t bear. I didn’t want to think about it. I just had to stop it from happening. So I made my bed, and that was that. Wherever I lived, whomever I lived with, I was always the one to make the bed. In the household chore-share with my husband of many years, I’m still in charge of bedmaking.

Obviously, this is a harmless phobia. Maybe even a good one, if phobias can be said to be good. Who doesn’t prefer a tidy bedroom? I never gave it a second thought. It would take a major life shift to create the psychological awakening that would make me think twice about it.

That life shift was my looming retirement and my wish to fully enjoy it. Not coincidentally, as I was also beginning to recognize that I was a pretty compulsive person all around, I began a psychoanalysis that would reach into the very roots of my consciousness and show me how I had grown from them. Therapy alleviated my deepest anxieties. In the process, it also liberated me from my compulsions, including my little phobia.

This bedmaking compulsion never seemed worth discussing with my psychoanalyst or with anyone. In fact, it explained itself in the course of my discovering my core problems, like the enduring effect of my father’s death when I was just two years old. Without words to express my fears or a mother who could provide explanations and comfort, I was distressed by my very ill father’s wasting away in our midst. I was terrified when, after some months, he died or, in my toddler’s mind, vanished. I was confused when no one spoke of him again. A life-and-death drama had unfolded before me in our three-room apartment, in the bedroom adjacent to the kitchen where my mother prepared his morphine injections, and in the bed where my father then spent all his time.

I now understand that my fears attached themselves to that bed, the one that never got made anymore. In analysis, I finally understood the power and dimension of that fear. And perhaps, too, my grief. I became intimately acquainted with those feelings. In my transference, I projected them onto my analyst. With her help, however, and my own adult resources, I was able to revisit that emotional turmoil, staying with it until I could fully take it in.

When I did, the dread of an unmade bed dissipated and only the habit of making it up remained. By the end of therapy, I could leave the bed unmade till lunchtime so I could be out hiking the trails in the cool of morning. Once or twice, I even left our bed in disarray till evening, though as soon as I noticed, I instantly made it up—with crisp edges and plumped pillows despite our going to sleep within the hour.

My phobia itself—that is, my irrational fear of leaving the bed unmade—was, you might say, minimally invasive. As a practical matter, I really didn’t need to deal with it. But however insignificant, most phobias express some feeling so uncomfortable that you want—or have—to avoid it. Which probably means it’s worth investigating, in a psychoanalytic spirit.

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The phobic object might seem trivial. But the accompanying feeling can probably tell you a lot if you follow its lead into your childhood or to a time when you felt that very sensation. On the way, it might occur to you, as it did to me, that the little phobia isn’t an anomaly. It might fit a bigger picture, one worth taking a look at. It might feel wonderfully freeing.

Coda: The night I wrote this blog, I unknowingly left the bed unmade and, without a second thought, just pulled the messy covers up over me at bedtime.