DRIVE PHOBIA: What is it, Symptoms, Causes and Treatment

You have had fear of losing control and doing harm your partner or your child? Have you been afraid of hurting yourself or running over someone? This fear is known as an impulse phobia and implies that people develop a fear of losing control and doing something they really do not want to do.

Fear is an adaptive survival reaction, but what happens when you place the feeling of danger inside your person and your thought and you have the recurring idea that you could harm yourself or another person? If you want to know more about this disorder, continue reading this Psychology-Online article: Drive Phobia: What It Is, Symptoms, Causes And Treatment.

Index

1. What is Drive Phobia
2. Drive phobia: symptoms
3. Drive phobia: causes
4. Drive phobia: treatment

The drive phobias are the thoughts, feelings or impulses that a person has about lose control and damage to other people or to herself. This phobia implies unpleasant intrusive thoughts

Therefore, in impulse phobia, thoughts appear that develop a high level of visualization, since people they imagine doing it, and refer to the loss of control and execution of actions that the person himself qualifies as negative and undesirable.

This phobia can manifest itself in isolation or be part of another disorder. Impulse phobia has been associated mostly with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD), although it can also be present in Depressive Disorder, Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD) or in the Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.

Some examples of drive phobias common that facilitate their understanding are:

• A person is waiting for the subway and suddenly thinks he could get out of control and hit the tracks or push someone else to them.
• Intense fear of a person to be near knives because of the fear that she feels at the possibility of taking one and harming herself or another person.
• An example of an impulse phobia in motherhood is experiencing involuntary bad thoughts about harming babies, dropping them when held, etc.

The symptoms that are present in impulse phobia are the following:

• Presence of intrusive thoughts (those thoughts that are not voluntary, automatic and with unpleasant content) that become obsessive thoughts, so they appear recurrently and persistently, without the person being able to control them.
• In these thoughts the person imagines or visualizes herself carrying out an action, an impulse. They are thinking with a high level of visualization normally.
• The thoughts presented by the person with an impulse phobia are egodystonic, that is, they are not acceptable, congruent or coherent with the person. This leads to the person experiencing them with intense guilt and shame.
• The person consciously knows that you don't want to do what you think about, for which he develops an intense fear of loss of control and execution of the actions or impulses that lead the thoughts.
• Violent intrusive thoughts. Normally the content of these thoughts tends to be aggressive, towards oneself or other people, sometimes vulnerable and defenseless, moral or sexual.
• The person goes to great lengths trying to resist, suppress, and avoid these thoughts. She is overly focused on the obsessive thought or image and feels that she is struggling with herself.
• Development of avoidance behaviors before the impossibility of controlling these thoughts.
• It is also common for people with drive phobia to examine their thoughts and life stories, as well as ask people close to you in search of reassurance, that is, confirmation that the thought you fear will not happen.
• Thoughts generate elevated levels of suffering and distress in people who suffer from it, as well as anxiety and sadness. In extreme cases, suicidal ideation and intention may appear.
• Alteration and interference in various vital areas of the person and decreased quality of life due to drive phobia.

The most common explanations and Most common causes of drive phobia are as follows:

• Obsessive thinking mechanism: Unpleasant intrusive thoughts are more common than we think and all of us have experienced them more than once. Usually, in the presence of one of them, people do not give it greater importance, they discard them and when considering them only one thought does not spend time to analyze it and they play down its importance, which favors its extinction in a way natural. Instead, when a person pay excessive attention to this intrusive thinking, analyzes it and questions and values ​​it based on this, the thought or image will tend to appear in a recurring and persistent way. There is, therefore, a transformation of intrusive thinking into obsessive thinking, due to the catastrophic interpretation done. In this case, the process of analysis and examination of intrusive thinking is not carried out from curiosity and objectivity, but rather is a emotional evaluation, since the thought has triggered the feeling of alarm and caused a state of activation in which the person feel fear, anxiety and guilt. This state favors an excessive focus and emotional importance on this thought, which favors a loop in which the person tries to avoid this thought, feeling anxiety and fear due to the impossibility of controlling it, but paradoxically it makes it appear in a recurrent.
• Overestimation of the importance of thinking: cognitive error that implies an attribution of personal and negative meaning to a thought, this is conceived as revealing the very nature of the person and their characteristics; the person is everything that he thinks.
• Thought-action fusion of a moral type: Another thought distortion in which thoughts are believed to be morally equivalent to actions, therefore, thinking about doing something negative is equated with doing it.
• Thought-action fusion of probability type: erroneous belief that thinking about something increases the probability of it happening.
• Excessive responsibility: cognition that the person himself has the power of influence and decision regarding the provocation and avoidance of certain negative and catastrophic events.
• Importance of thought control: believing that absolute control over thoughts and images is possible, as well as overvaluing the importance of having complete mental control.
• Vital situations: the vital moments in which they are experienced very high levels of stress and anxiety, which are difficult to manage and cope with, can be vulnerable contexts for intrusive and obsessive thoughts. Stressful events favor the appearance of involuntary and unwanted thoughts and the emotional state of anxiety itself can make it easier for excessive attention to be directed towards they.
• Personality traits: some personality characteristics such as hyper-responsibility, perfectionism, excessive need for control, high self-demand, strict morals and neuroticism have been associated as risk factors for obsessive thoughts and impulse phobia.
• Impact of some event or news: In some cases, seeing or hearing some unpleasant news with great emotional impact is the factor that triggers that a person begins to wonder if she would be able to do the same, if she could lose control of that shape.

How to overcome the fear of hurting someone? A person suffering from an impulse phobia may avoid seeking specialized care. This is due to feelings of guilt and shame associated with the thoughts and / or images that she tries to avoid without success. However, to treat drive phobia it is important to see a specialist.

How to overcome drive phobia? The drive phobia treatment includes the following lines of work:

1. Psychoeducation: theoretical explanation about impulse phobia, its symptoms, intrusive and obsessive thoughts, as well as the mechanism of obsessive thinking, thinking errors and circumstances that favor the appearance of this disorder. Likewise, awareness and information about the normality and frequency of intrusive thoughts in most people with the aim of promoting their normalization.
2. Exposition: It is necessary to explain the reinforcing role of avoidance behaviors in this disorder and to identify those that the person presents. Subsequently, the person face gradually and it exposes itself to those situations that it actively avoids. For example, the exhibition can take place in the subway, in the event that the person avoids using this transport for fear of throwing or throwing another person onto the tracks, or at knives if she is afraid of harming herself or others people.
3. Exposure to obsessive thoughts: Another variant of the exposure technique is to apply it to obsessive-type thoughts, since there is also an attempt to avoid and control them. To do this, the person can be asked to repeat the thought mentally, to write it several times on a piece of paper or to record it and listen to it several times.
4. Relaxation and breathing: training in Relaxation and breathing techniques prior to exposure can improve the effectiveness of the exposure technique.
5. Cognitive restructuring: is applied in the approach to cognitive distortions and catastrophic interpretation of thought, with the aim of generating more realistic and functional cognitions and interpretations. Personal disidentification of thought is encouraged and beliefs and their incongruity are questioned.
6. Mood: Mood is often affected in people who suffer from this phobia. Likewise, a negative state favors the irruption of unpleasant thoughts, therefore an intervention that contemplates it is necessary. A promotion of Healthy habits, diet, sleep hygiene and sports, as well as a list with rewarding activities and that are of interest to the person, all with the aim of generating a schedule of tasks.

This article is merely informative, in Psychology-Online we do not have the power to make a diagnosis or recommend a treatment. We invite you to go to a psychologist to treat your particular case.

If you want to read more articles similar to Drive Phobia: What It Is, Symptoms, Causes And Treatment, we recommend that you enter our category of Clinical psychology.

• Belloch, A., Barber, E. C., & Rodríguez, C. C. (2017). OCD: obsessions and compulsions: cognitive treatment. Editorial Alliance.
• Nardone, G. (2012). Fear, panic, phobias: the brief therapy. Herder Editorial.
• Vellosillo, P. S., & Vicario, A. F. C. (2015). Obsessive compulsive disorder Medicine-Accredited Continuing Medical Education Program, 11(84), 5008-5014.