Phobia of Emotion Relief and Recovery
WHAT’S THE ISSUE: Emotion phobia, also known as fear of emotions, is when someone feels intense discomfort or fear when experiencing or confronting their own emotions. Having a phobia of emotion isn’t a mental illness. It’s a condition that a lot of people aren’t even aware of because of how common intellectualization is in their family culture or work environment. Family and work cultures that over-value intellectualization can create a blind spot in inidividuals. This is because when someone intellecualizes everything, they become unaware that they even have a fear of emotion. Some adults have made avoiding situations that may stir up emotions such an automatic behavior that they don’t realize they have this blind spot even though they are in their 50s, 60s, or even 70s or 80s.
Phobia of Emotion Characteristics
“Phobia of emotion is a survival strategy in a world in which emotions are punished; it is not safe to be angry, sad, afraid, or unsafe in an abusive environment” – Dr. Janina Fischer presenting at the 2025 Psychotherapy Networker Symposium
Avoidance of Emotional Experiences
People with emotion phobia are scared of feeling their feelings. It’s that simple. So much so, that they often go to great lengths to suppress or avoid situations that might evoke strong feelings, such as sadness, anger, or even joy.
This avoidance can manifest in behaviors like withdrawing from social interactions, avoiding discussions about personal issues, or even engaging in addictive behaviors like excessive alcohol consumption, workaholism, gambling, food addiction, exercise addiction or shopping addiction in order to numb emotions.
A fear of emotions can also lead to intellectualizing everything. This avoidance strategy can negatively impact the quality of your relationships with your family members, such as your relationship with your children, as well as hindering your love life satisfaction.
Fear of Losing Control
Emotions can feel overwhelming and unpredictable for someone who is experiencing an emotion phobia. This can lead to a fear of loosing control over their reactions (e.g., crying, yelling).
Parents who have an emotion phobia can pass their fear of emotions on to their children by inadvertedly shutting down expressions of emotion that cause them distress to witness. For example, the child may then learn to walk away/withdraw to their bedroom if they are upset and start to feel teary because they feel ashamed. Essentially, they have been conditioned by their emotion phobic parent(s) to hide their sadness.
Examples include:
- “Don’t cry, I can’t stand seeing you cry.”
- “Stop crying or I’ll give you something to cry about”
- “There are kids who are starving, and you think it’s OK to cry over something like this?”
- “Stop crying, you are embarassing me. Boys don’t cry.”
Parents can pass on their distorted beliefs about emotions onto their child, who can internalize unhealthy and untrue message like “strong” people don’t cry. Or “weak” people feel emotions. Complete and utter nonesense! Yet if you’ve been socialized to believe this to be true, in your mind, these beliefs can feel like facts.
Physical and Mental Symptoms
A fear of emotions can lead to physical symptoms like increased heart rate and tension in the body. It can also lead to mental symptoms such as irritability, insomnia, and a pessimistic outlook.
Meanwhile, algorithms can pick up on this negativity bias and continue to feed the pessimistic outlook by suggesting videos to watch that confirm this world view. As a result, people who have a fear of emotion can end up consuming content designed to evoke the very emotions they fear experiencing most – sadness, anger, rage.
Impact on Daily Life
A long-term consequence of suppressing emotions is that it can interfere with relationships, work performance, and overall health or well-being. It may also lead to emotional outbursts when suppressed feelings become too overwhelming.
Meanwhile, pain management can become a daily battle. Suppressed emotions caused a build up of stress in the body, as do addictive behaviors that can creep in to soothe chronically high cortisol levels in the body that have become your ‘new normal’. So much so that you aren’t even aware you are too stressed until a medical diagnosis like heart disease or an autoimmune disorder comes knocking on your door as a wake-up call.
How does a PHOBIA of emotion connect with TRAUMA OR negative experiences?
“We made what I think was a mistake, early in the trauma treatment world. It was the 1980s, early 1990s. We didn’t know how to treat trauma. We were just learning that it existed. And the obvious (it seemed ‘obvious’) way to treat it was through the talking cure. And so that’s just what happened. We had no other options. And so we started having people talk about their events, and lo and behold, a lot of them got worse.” – Dr. Janina Fischer presenting at the 2025 Psychotherapy Networker Symposium
Often rooted in past trauma or negative experiences, such as abuse or loss, emotion phobia develops when individuals associate emotions with pain or danger.
Yet while emotions can be uncomfortable, they are natural and essential for processing life experiences. Learning to safely experience and express emotions through techniques like mindfulness or EFT Tapping therapy is an essential part of the recovery process.
What’s great about EFT therapy is that you don’t have to talk about what happened to you, which may only make you feel worse as it can increases the chance of experiencing what’s called re-traumatization. You don’t have to talk about the event when you are doing EFT. We can work on the consequences of what happened to you – the trauma or negative past experiences – such as your fear of emotion, and what negative beliefs you formed about yourself or the world that stayed with you.
We now know how to work with the imprint of horrible things that happened in the past because we know that trauma lives in the body. We now know that we need somatic therapies like EFT to process trauma, not traditional talk therapy modalities.
If an unpleasant experience or an unresolved trauma has left you with a fear of emotion, and you are ready to face your fear for a better quality of life, consider the following.
SELF-REFLECTION EXERCISE
Is your fear of emotion low enough to be able to work through it on your own through self-help tapping exercises? Or would you be better off working together with a qualified EFT Practitioner?
Generally speaking, if you were to rate your fear of emotion on a scale of 0-10, with 10 being the most intense it could be and 0 being ‘I’m not at all scared’, if your fear is an 8 or more, it might be worth considering working through your fear with an EFT Tapping specialist.
If your fear of emotion is a 7/10 or less, then the following tapping exercises are for you. They are available in three languages: English, French, and Greek.
Self-help tapping for Phobia of Emotion relief (ENGLISH)
Self-help tapping for Phobia of Emotion relief (French)
Self-help tapping for Phobia of Emotion relief (Greek)
A key benefit of succeeding in overcoming your fear of emotion is the joy and comfort of connection with people who you feel safe with on a whole other level than you have ever experienced before.
Invest in your well-being. Give your quality of life an upgrade. You are worth it.
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ABOUT Eleni Vardaki
Eleni Vardaki’s EFT therapy and coaching services for individuals are available worldwide via telehealth. You can book an introductory consultation via www.doctoranytime.gr or by emailing her directly eleni@elenivardaki.com. Her fees are €70 for a single therapeutic EFT session, with a 4-session saver option available. Languages: English, Greek, French.
