Fear of undressing (disablephobia): causes and symptoms

Human beings feel many emotions, some of them pleasant, and others that are not so much but that, although sometimes they may not seem like it, are adaptive and have a functionality. Fear is an emotion that puts us on alert, so that, in the face of danger, we can react quickly. Therefore, it is an adaptive emotion, but in the current context, it can appear many times irrationally, causing a great feeling of anxiety and discomfort. In these cases we speak of a phobic disorder.

Phobias are of many types and appear in front of many stimuli. Today we will talk about the phobia of undressing, a phobia that can be disabling and that can seriously harm a person when it comes to having sex..

Related article: “Types of phobias: exploring fear disorders”

What is the phobia of undressing

Phobias can be classified in different ways. There are usually three types of phobias: agoraphobia and specific phobias and social phobias. Disabilityphobia belongs to this group. If you want to know more about what a social phobia is, you can read our article “Social phobia: what is it and how to overcome it?”.

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The phobia of undressing also belongs to those known as sexual phobias, which are those that interfere with a person's normal sexual behavior.. People with a fear of undressing can have a really hard time in situations where they have to take their clothes off, either in a gym or when having intimate relationships with another person. In extreme cases, the phobia can appear despite the fact that there is no one around, simply by imagining someone looking when the affected person is naked or when there is someone nearby but not necessarily in the same room.

Causes of this phobia

The most frequent cause of the development of this phobia is having suffered a traumatic experience, usually in the privacy of a bathroom or locker room, or in a situation related to the nakedness. This fear is produced, therefore, as a result of learning, specifically by classical conditioning, a type of associative learning initially investigated by the Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov.

Now, one of the most important experiments in the history of psychology and in which john watson caused a small child, named Albert, to develop a phobia, occurred in 1920 in the United States.

You can know all the characteristics of classical conditioning in our article "Classical conditioning and its most important experiments"

Other causes of fear of nudity

Now, this phobia is complex, like the rest of social phobias. Some experts affirm that there is a relationship with low self-esteem and a distorted image of one's own body, which is known as body dysmorphic disorder. A disorder in which the sufferer feels exaggerated concern about some defect (usually imagined) in a physical feature of the body. These people suffer from great anxiety when they have to show their bodies to other people and try to avoid those situations in which they have to undress in front of other people.

Phobias can also develop through vicarious conditioning, that is, by observing unpleasant experiences in other people.. Vicarious conditioning has different characteristics than observational learning. You can check it in our article “Vicarious conditioning: how does this type of learning work?”.

Lastly, experts affirm that human beings are biologically predisposed to suffer from phobias, since fear is an adaptive emotion that does not respond to logical arguments. The reason for this is that it is produced by primitive and non-cognitive associations.

Symptoms of disabilityphobia

Phobias, despite having different types, share the same symptoms. These symptoms are usually of three types: cognitive, behavioral and physical.. As for the first, fear, anguish, shame, lack of concentration or catastrophic thoughts stand out. Regarding behavioral symptoms, the person with this disorder tends to avoid the feared stimulus. The most prominent physical symptoms are: hyperventilation, headache, dry mouth, increased heart rate and nausea.

Treatment

Fear of nudity is a complex situation that requires psychological treatment, as it can cause great discomfort and an inability to not only have sexual relations, but also love. There are many types of psychotherapy, but according to scientific studies, the most effective for the treatment of phobias is cognitive behavioral therapy.

There are many cognitive behavioral techniques, but the most effective have proven to be exposure techniques and relaxation techniques. Desensitization is a very popular and widely used technique in the treatment of phobias. systematic, which contains the two previous ones and which exposes the patient to the phobic stimulus in a gradual. Before but, it is necessary for the patient to learn a series of coping strategies.

You can learn more about this technique in our article “What is systematic desensitization and how does it work?” However, there are other types of therapy that have also proven to be very effective in the treatment of these pathologies. Mindfulness-based cognitive therapy and acceptance and commitment therapy are some examples.

In addition, today, new technologies have also positively influenced the treatment of phobias, since virtual reality is used to simulate the presence of the phobic stimulus.