Many phobias are related to food and that adds more dangers because the psychic consequences of any phobic disorder are coupled with the physical risk of eliminating a certain food from the diet. Can you live without eating meat? Vegans do so, but in that case it is not a phobia. We tell you all about carnophobia or fear of meat in our dictionary of phobias , a very common gastronomic phobia .
What is carnophobia
Carnophobia is the fear of meat or eating meat. As the main reaction to a phobia is avoidance, it is evident that in this case the meat disappears from the diet of that person with all that this implies. One could argue that if vegetarians or vegans live perfectly without eating meat, there is no problem with this phobia, but it is not.
Fear of meat not only prevents you from eating meat, but you also try to avoid seeing meat. Can you imagine attending a wedding banquet and having to get up from the table because you panic to see that plate of meat in the next person? Neither eat meat, nor see meat, nor imagine meat .
Symptoms of carnophobia
Any of these three situations, eating, seeing or imagining, can trigger a series of symptoms that are the same as those of anxiety . You have difficulty breathing, you get dizzy , you have a feeling of unreality, your extremities go to sleep, you start to sweat, you are afraid, so afraid that you may have a panic attack. Does it seem excessive?
Excessive, excessive and irrational is fear when we talk about phobias. This is something that the person suffering from the phobic disorder knows deep down and that is why it also has psychic consequences in the form of low self-esteem and limiting thoughts about oneself . It is the feeling that something is wrong, but you don’t really know what. But the fear of meat persists, meat becomes a stimulus surrounded by danger and they cannot understand it around you. What danger can there be in a piece of meat?
Causes of carnophobia
In principle, neither meat nor eating meat is dangerous. But maybe in your childhood you ate a meat dish that was in bad condition and you spent a season in the hospital, for example. It is the classic traumatic experience that, having generated a great negative emotional charge, may have been recorded in your mind as a real danger.
Or maybe on some occasion you had a domestic accident while preparing meat . And therein lies the dreaded association with danger again. In cases of phobias, we never rule out a previous anxiety disorder as the origin, since anxiety puts you in a permanent state of alert and any stimulus can be considered dangerous.
Treatment of carnophobia
At this point it must be clarified that carnophobia is not the choice for ideological reasons not to eat meat . And it is not an aversion to this food, that you do not like its taste, its texture or its smell and you avoid eating it. Carnophobia is a disorder and as such should be treated with the help of a professional psychologist.
The cognitive behavioral therapy is most effective when it comes to phobias, but serves many other disorders. It is an interesting technique that works in the first place on distorted thinking, that which makes you see the flesh as a danger, in order to later modify the behavior.