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PhobiaJanuary 18, 2010

Several years ago I was told that everyone has a phobia of some sort to some degree. I think this is probably true, even though the phobia might be of a very small degree. A phobia is an irrational fear of something, be it an object or a situation/activity. At the time, I couldn’t think of any personal phobias. I thought about it for a few days and then replied with a very very stupid angsty “this will sound cool” teenager answer: the moon. Keep in mind that I was 15 or 16 years old, lol…

In fact, I believe I LOVE the moon. I really like it when it’s full and you don’t need a flashlight to see. What a stupid answer! But hey, I was all into wolves and being cool and stuff. Plus, I had completely forgotten my actual real phobia that I have had since a small child. As you readers may have gathered from the photo, my phobia has to do with sewage in general. I think this sort of bleeds into my slight germaphobia as well. That phobia seems to be localized to my hands, but it is very common. A lot of people can’t stand having dirty hands. I’m not really afraid of it, unless it has to do with sewage, lol.

When I was very young, we lived in a house that had a poorly installed septic tank. When it would back up I had to be accompanied in the bathroom and would become upset when I needed to go because I really really didn’t want to go in the dirty toilet! I would sometimes resort to going in the bushes in our back yard. Other times I would pee in the bathtub and “flush” with the shower head. Gross, I know, but keep in mind that I was very young and terrified!

The roots of my phobia might go back even further to my potty training days. I believe I was training fairly early, but I’d have to confer with my parents on that matter. Once I was out of diapers, I only had two accidents. I only wet the bed once. My other accident happened while I was standing next to my mother, who was kneeling on the floor for one reason or the other. She says that she saw I had begun to wet (there was an audible terrified gasp from me), looked down to what she was doing and began to give me a gentle verbal correction, but when she looked up, I had scampered off to the bathroom, in obvious distress. I don’t know if my phobia started with a general fear of accidents or not.

To exacerbate my phobia, when I was around 9 or 10 years old, I watched the movie It. Granted, watching it again as a teenager revealed that it is actually quite a stupid/corny movie, but as a child who already was terrified of toilets, it was very scarring. It caused my toilet phobia to expand to everything that had to do with bathrooms! I became scared of drains; especially of stepping on them or having to get anything out of them. There are a few scenes in It of blood coming out of the showers and of It (the clown) coming out of a shower drain. I believe there is also a scene of blood bubbling out of a sink drain, but I wasn’t afraid of sinks, although I didn’t like that slit that allows water to drain out so it doesn’t spill over. Oddly enough, the movie didn’t make me afraid of clowns at all, lol.

I remember when automatic flushing toilets were a (scary) new thing. And as with many new technologies, there was some tweaking that needed to be made with most of the new sensors. The early models would flush if you got anywhere near the thing, never mind sat down on it. I was in a bathroom once that once you were in the stall, any movement across the sensor would make it flush. That toilet must have flushed 15 times by the time I got the heck out of there. My first meeting with an automatic toilet was when I was 10 years old when Andrew my dad and I were on our way to Colorado for a ski vacation. We stopped at a rest stop for everyone to use the potty. As I was the only girl on the trip, no one could take me into the bathroom and calm me down enough to use those darn things, so I ended going in the bushes! The worst are the ones that flush if you just lean foward too far while you’re STILL SITTING DOWN. Even now it takes immense will power to keep from freaking out. That happened when I was little and I jumped off the potty and plastered myself against the stall door until I willed myself to sit down again. I can just picture myself catapulting headlong into a stall door and falling out into the isle, heh.

When Alan and I moved into our Waurika apartment, the toilet got stopped up really badly. We tried to fix it ourselves, but it didn’t work. At one point, my friend Dustin was here with us and while Alan was working on the toilet, I heard water start to hit the floor. I went into a panic attack—tearing up and breathing hard. Generally freaking out I guess. Dustin told me to stay put and they both cleaned the floor so I wouldn’t have to go in there, lol.

When we moved into our house in Duncan, I was under stress for about two months learning to live with a septic tank again. I hadn’t dealt with one since I was a kid, and my fears were still apparent (and highly irrational). We weren’t even having really bad problems, but I still had a very hard time of it. We did have a clog in the pipe below the bathtub, and it took a few days for the plumber to come out. It was actually somewhat therapeutic, even if it was stressful. I was forced to face my fears and use a stopped-up toilet and shower while standing on a small plastic footstool. I am a little better from the whole experience. I’m sure if the whole thing backed up and sewage overflowed everywhere that I would have come out WORSE from the experience.

So, while I still view an easily plungged stopped up toilet as a crisis, still hate automatic flushing toilets, and sometimes have nightmares of backed-up septic tanks, I believe I am on the mend from this phobia. I can’t imagine what having kids is going to do… Maybe it will serve to further desensitize me to the whole thing…hopefully without scarring any of my kids in the process.

Sorry for the potty post! It’s my blog afterall. :)

— Ruth Henager

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