I Have Trypophobia. It's a Peculiar Condition

I was eight or nine and my mother had let me out to play in the front yard after it snowed. As children sometimes do, I had purposely fallen down into the soft snow, and while on the ground, I heard a distinctive dripping sound.

I looked over a few feet to where melting water was dripping down from the gutter into a large mound of deep, drifted snow and making pinprick, closely packed, irregularly shaped holes in the snow.

There were hundreds of these clustered holes, interspaced, non-uniform in their shallow depth and tiny width. I shuddered. What I saw skeeved me.

Recognition of something vague but dreadful enveloped me. The word "icky" jumped into my head as my heart began beating faster and I started sweating, though it was just over freezing outside and I was bundled in a winter coat.

I started taking deeper breaths; I felt the need to run away but kept looking with a compulsion to stare at these gross, troubling holes. It was causing real distress.

Without knowing exactly why, I had this overwhelming desire to destroy the pattern, to make it go away.

Compelled now in a different way—from staring to eradicating—I jumped up and then pounced on top of this section of clustered holes with a crazed purpose to attack it, using my gloved hands to break up the pattern.

In five seconds, it was over. I felt immediately relieved that the holes were gone in a slushy mess. I made a mental note not to look at holes like that in the future.

A few months later while riding the bus with my mother, I saw a woman sitting across from us with what I later, when older, looked back and realized had been really harsh pore holes and acne scars. It was as if her entire face had been stabbed thousands of times with an ice pick. I couldn't help but stare.

Again, a great discomfort possessed me: My normal breathing quickly changed into quick pants, a coat of sweat rose up on my face and neck. This time, I knew I couldn't run and smash her face and make it all go away, but that's what my mind told me I needed to do.

My mother saw something was affecting me, and she intervened, and just as we reached our bus stop, she half-carried, half-pulled me off.

Once outside the bus, she asked if I was alright, and only with the then departing bus carrying away the lady and her face full of holes did my body and mind calm itself.

Looking back, in clinical terms, I had experienced a mild panic attack brought on by a specific trigger. I wonder now if my mother saw what I had seen and had experienced a similar dread.

Of course, life goes on and minor subplots in one's life take long intermissions before reappearing in a much later chapter.

I'm sure in the decades that followed these childhood incidents I must have seen the occasional disturbing image that repulsed my mind and body, but I don't have an independent recollection of such occurrences.

But there's nothing like fatherhood to make one sit up and force one to become resourceful.

Years later, when my then four-or-five-year-old son was looking at a computer screen and saw a certain picture and said in an excitable voice: "Oh, daddy, get it out of here; take it away!"

I came over and looked at what he was looking at on the computer. I'm not sure how he stumbled on such an image (parental controls evidently don't identify and block psychologically disturbing images) but this picture on the screen immediately made my anxiety trigger. It made me recoil and cringe.

It was a close-up image of a spore—so many of those icky holes and small irregular shadows within the holes. To me, it was almost traumatizing, just looking at that image.

First, I stared and stared and then this momentary paralysis was over, and I grabbed at the mouse and clicked the image away. Only then did my pulse and breathing slow down.

But this time the stakes were higher. This time this affliction had invaded my home and had picked on my kid.

As a parent who had experienced this before, I was upset with myself that I didn't know more about this strange reaction to what I rationally understood to be just a harmless picture.

What I did know was that both my son and I had reacted so violently—and not just psychologically, but also physiologically. So, I set about to try to understand more. The internet, of course, helped.

I quickly discovered that the condition has a name, trypophobia, though it was only given this name in 2005, and the scientific literature about the condition only goes back to the 1980s and is very sparse.

The condition is defined by strong feelings of disgust or fear and causes aversion and avoidance when one sees patterns with clusters of irregularly shaped holes.

These same images may produce no response in persons unaffected by the condition, as contrasted by an intense and completely disproportionate response in those who do.

Examples of triggers include sunflowers, honeycombs, spires, sponges, seedy fruits, and different biological images in the animal kingdom such as bee hives, and the skin of snakes, lizards, frogs, and other reptiles.

It is believed that about 15 percent of the general population may be affected.

Odd images are disturbing. Our minds find optical illusions puzzling as we can't reconcile them to the physical world.

Pictures of people in physical distress cause an emotional response: We feel for the napalmed girl in that famous picture; the images of self-immolating Vietnamese monks disturb us.

Edvard Munch's The Scream—a widely reproduced image that seems to accompany every psychology textbook in its introduction to the topic of anxiety disorders—is unsettling. It forces the observer to contemplate an existential anxiety endemic to the human condition.

This is all completely understandable. But to sufferers of trypophobia, the physical response is so strong that one knows one is experiencing something on a completely different scale.

That was the second time that I had read about a psychological issue affecting me, and on both occasions, I was troubled to learn that I had something wrong in my makeup; that there was something not right with me.

The first time this happened I was a freshman in college taking an introductory psychology class; I was doing my assigned reading in the textbook and it hit me while covering the treatment of anxiety disorders that I had this condition.

I knew immediately that the material was describing me. It affected me greatly, that experience, realizing that I was different, that I had a problem that psychiatrists had the need to name and categorize.

It happened again when I read up on trypophobia. And this time it bothered me more as now I feared I might be responsible for having passed it on to my son.

Genetics is thought to play a role in the propagation of this condition. Perhaps evolution has provided this as a defense against disease and decay as those irregular hole patterns are an outward manifestation of what might lead to, or result from death.

Maybe it's a passed-down aversion to serious health risks. Maybe it's nature's way of saying: "CAUTION! Stay back."

A few years or so ago, at a family reunion attended by my parents before they passed, my four siblings, their kids, my wife, my two kids, and me, I had come prepared with printouts of trypophobic images to conduct an informal survey.

The results were that four out of 20 of us were affected: My mother, my niece, my son, and me. What did not surprise me was that it seemed to be a binary dynamic; there was no degree of exposure. It was all or nothing.

The four of us who were affected were very affected, with complete revulsion to the images; the others were able to look at the images without any reported automatic nervous system response.

In my case, I felt there might be a real connection to the undiagnosed OCD I've felt I've had since I was a child—not the handwashing variety, but the type that simply craves order in life, in the world.

It is, I suppose, what makes me line up all the water bottles in the fridge with the labels perfectly faced forward. I want order in my world and these clustered and irregular holes belie disorder.

But an unmade bed or disorganized room also speak of disorder and those images produce no such effect at all on me and presumably don't for anyone else with this condition.

The condition is not listed in the Bible of mental disorders, the so-called DSM-V (The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) and I'm not suggesting that it should be.

I'm not too concerned about this being or becoming debilitating but I am so curious as to why it causes such a strong reaction in some people and none at all in others.

Repeated and frequent viewing desensitizes one to the harsh physical symptoms; I get that. But this all just seems so peculiar to me.

Anxiety is ubiquitous to the human condition. If you're alive, you have it. Some people just deal with it better than others. Is that all that this so-called condition is, or is it that something much deeper is going on?

I suspect it is the latter, but like the very anxious, I will evade that which is evadable and which knowingly makes me feel very uncomfortable, and where avoidance isn't a hindrance to my life. I don't like feeling that way and won't if I can help it.

And as someone who attempts to control everything that I can in life, I will escape from these clustered holes.

If I come across them unsuspectedly, I will, if possible—as I did in the snow fifty-plus years ago—make them go away quickly so that my eyes and others need not see them anymore.

John Sergio was a founding partner of Maxim Group and was COO for over 20 years. He has enjoyed a long and rewarding career in the securities and investment banking industry and has written a number of articles for the general, academic and financial press. He is an avid reader of US and world fiction.

All views expressed are the author's own.

Do you have a unique experience or personal story to share? See our Reader Submissions Guide and then email the My Turn team at [email protected].