Telephone phobia (telephonophobia, telephobia) is reluctance or fear of making or taking phone calls, literally, "fear of telephone".Telephone phobia is also considered to be a type of Social Phobia or Social anxiety problem.
Sufferers typically report fear that they would fail to respond appropriately in a telephone conversation,and fear finding nothing to say, which would end in embarrassing silence, stammering, or stuttering.The associated avoidance behavior includes asking others (e.g. relatives at home) to take their phone calls and exclusive use of answering machines.As a result, the sufferers avoid many activities, such as scheduling events or clarifying information.
Another reason is the sufferers may believe that people who ring bear bad or upsetting news.
As it is common with various fears and phobias, there is a wide spectrum of severity of the fear of phone conversations and the corresponding difficulties.In 1993 it was reported that about 2.5 million of people in Great Britain have telephone phobia.
Among other occurrences, telephone phobia is a common symptom of bipolar disorder: the sufferers are nervous to talk to other people over the phone.
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Once upon a time, in a leafy, middle class suburb of Sydney, a family of good, God-fearing, bible thumping Baptists of a conservative nature raised a brood of children
under a eucalyptus canopy. The local church stood stoically and quietly one street behind their rambling, comfortable home that featured an enormous yard where children of all ages had played cricket, soccer and climbed trees, playing make believe in the huge boughs of a giant jacaranda tree, that had seen much, and remained silent.
The family told their own fables and folklore, as all families do, and the youngest of the clan had developed a chapter, exceptionally well written and grammatically correct, devoted to nothing but her tendency to converse, too frequently, too loudly, and about entirely the wrong kind of subject of matter for well-bought up young lady.
Like many an adolescent female of her generation, her interests morphed from dolls, to horses, to hours talking on the telephone, in hushed whispers to her closest confidante. Utterly normal and mundane that may have been, it nevertheless called for the constant repetition of the girl child's first word, which took on the proportions of an omen of things to come.
Her first word, you see, was spoken over the phone. Her mother, as the folklore would have it, had the child on her hip when she answered the telephone, and as people are apt to, said, "Hello?". The precocious child grabbed the phone and, most likely after thrusting said phone in her mouth and covering it with baby goo, also said, "hello, ho, ho!", because talking apparently takes a while to get really excellent at, and as a first attempt, the child had managed not just communication, but telecommunication, with both a greeting, and an insult.
The child grew, and her linguistic ability continued to develop as she learnt to string sentences together. Her first two sentence were, "Get Yost!", and, "Shuttup", which were roughly translated to adult English as, "get lost", and, "shut up, shut up now, or I'll hit you!". She asked questions, and then questioned the answers, she argued and debated, she was cheeky, and should not look at her elders in the that tone of voice.
She once was able to use the telephone, as any normal person does, until a series of events culminated in her seeing a simple method of communicating with those who aren't within earshot as a form of torture and humiliation.
If you're at all familiar with the habits of young women, you'll not be at all astonished to learn that she would call friends, family, and even acquaintances, to discuss current affairs and matters of extreme personal importance, or simply to while away the time. At first she would call them on big, heavy, rotary dial phones, with long, curly cords and a hand piece you had to hold to your ear, and then lighter, more modern looking units, with push buttons, and a primitive memory function that could store six numbers.
It all changed. She had been in the habit of calling Ms Voulez-vous, and as theirs was a close, one might even say sisterly, relationship, she called her often, and often for absolutely no reason. Over many years, this had been the practise, and our protagonist was stunned when the status quo abruptly changed.
Ms Voulez-vous had recently embarked upon a relationship with a man who loved a good singalong around a piano, in a variety of bars, after he and the other patrons had all partaken of a least a few beverages of the alcoholic variety. The Irish Maitre De, as we shall dub that long ago figure, would often forget the words and saw nothing at all untoward in substituting anything he failed to recall with a series of scooby-doo's and lah-de-dah's. Our young protagonist enjoyed both the company of these fellow people, and the locale they frequented, being one the more upward inner city enclaves that young people favored, nestled as it was in the very heart of the Sydney metropolis.
Ms Voulez-vous, though, became distracted. She would cut short the conversations, and seemed to have no time to chat any longer. Our protagonist felt slighted and shut out, and resolved to try harder, but it was to no avail. The distance grew, and became an abyss. And then all was revealed.
The phone calls were coming at what can only be described as a very inopportune time. A time at which the telephone ringing, answered or not, could only be described as an unbearable distraction. That's right, oh noble reader, our innocent, baptist raised protagonist had developed an uncanny ability to ring every, single time Ms Voulez-vous and the Irish Maitre De attempted to, as consenting adults often do, perform the act which is commonly known by a variety of uncouth terms in the widely used vernacular, and the one we will choose, is SHAGGING!
When the young lass in question became aware of this, she was mortified, and really quite disappointed in herself by the discovery that she had never really considered that the people she called may actually be busy, literally and/or figuratively busy. To add to her misery, Ms Voulez-vous had seemed really angry at her, and she had to not a clue how to make it up to her.
She ceased making phone calls, except for the ones related to her employment, as she was never herself whilst at work, wearing, as we all do, the mask of servitude, that obliterates the individual. And also the ones to her mother, whom she continued to check in regularly.
She no longer had a phone that you could dial out on, a development that occurred after a particularly brutal phone bill in the kind of share accommodation that made British TV series, The Young Ones look like clean living Mormons, and Ms Voulez-vous moved to northern pastures, unable to say goodbye. She didn't hear from her again until she received the invitation to the wedding of Ms Voulez-vous and the Irish
Maitre De.
By now, the subject of the inopportune timing of her phone calls had seeped into the family legend, making our sad protagonist the butt of many a joke, probably not mean spirited in intention, but further reinforcing her nagging intuition that the telephone was no friend of hers.
She successfully avoided the phone almost completely during her flirtation with alternative lifestyles, and resisted the urge to fall headlong into the mobile phone frenzy that began to engulf society, for a while, anyway. She did eventually give in, and would get $30 credit, that would last a year, and still have credit left when the term expired. The telephone had become a tool by which other people could contact her, and her superstition that the use of the phone would only cause humiliation and financial ruin continued.
Most people didn't even notice, and if she told them that ringing people made her feel anxious, and her palms would become sweaty as the fear of unavoidable social rejection enveloped her, they would laugh at her, so she learnt to remain silent. To this day, more than twenty years after the event, she still doesn't ring people, unless requested. It's kind of like how vampires can only enter your home if invited in, she can only call if she's invited to do so.
This doesn't stop people from ringing her. Her telephone rings constantly, the people on the other end of the line completely unaware of her inability to do the simple task they have no trouble with. She wishes it would stop, but manners prevent her. She does see the irony of the telephonophobic girl being at the mercy of a phone that never stops ringing, but she would probably rather it wasn't mentioned.
It's a stupid phobia, but it keeps the phone bills down.
Sent from my iPad, which, by the way is fantastic.
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