Many phobias are related to food and that adds more dangers because to the psychological consequences of any phobic disorder is added the physical risk of eliminating a certain food from the diet. Can you live without eating meat? Vegans do it that way, but in that case it is not a phobia. We tell you everything about Carnophobia or fear of meat in our, 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 clear that in this case meat disappears from that person’s diet with all that this implies. One could argue that if vegetarians live perfectly without eating meat, there is no problem with this phobia, but this is not the case.
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 when you see that plate of meat in the diner next to you? Neither eats meat, nor sees meat, nor imagines 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, you have a feeling of unreality, your extremities fall asleep, you start to sweat, you are afraid, so afraid that you can suffer a panic attack. Does it seem excessive?
Excessive, excessive and irrational is fear when we talk about phobias. This is something that the person who suffers from the phobic disorder knows deep down and that is why it also has psychological consequences in the form of low self-esteem and limiting thoughts about oneself. It’s the feeling that something is wrong, but you don’t quite know what. But the fear of meat persists, meat becomes a stimulus surrounded by danger and those around you cannot understand it. What danger can there be in a piece of meat?
Causes of Carnophobia
In principle, neither meat nor eating meat is something dangerous. But maybe in your childhood you ate a dish of meat that was in bad shape and you spent time in the hospital, for example. This 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. And there’s 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 state of permanent 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 neither is it an aversion to this food that you don’t 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.
Therapy is the most effective when it comes to phobias, although it works for many other disorders. It is an interesting technique that works in the first place on distorted thinking, the one that makes you see meat as a danger, in order to later modify behavior.
It does not matter if you really do not want to eat meat, because the phobia must be treated anyway to prevent the appearance of new fears. If you don’t want to eat meat, let it be by choice, don’t fear.