Globophobia or fear of balloons often happens when a child has had one burst on their face as a youngster. This happened to me. My sister, after her birthday party, pushed the balloon against my ear and popped it. Not only causing temporary ringing in my ears but also globophobia.
After that moment – which she thought hilariously funny – whenever I walked into a room which contained balloons, I would feel panicky. I would spend the entire party in another room or – if it were in a church hall – at the furthest point away from them.
I couldn’t blow balloons up or even stand holding a deflated rubber balloon. The texture of the rubber made me shudder. It meant that going to social occasions where I might be in a room filled with balloons would be fraught with anxiety.
Famous People suffer from Globophobia
I was pleased to find out that other people suffered from globophobia, so it wasn’t just me! Oprah Winfrey was one such person. And it was whilst studying to be a hypnotherapist that I cured myself of the fear.
case study 1
Kathryn came to see me to help her with social anxiety. It wasn’t clear at first when this anxiety started. She had always been nervous around groups of people, but parties were difficult. She had found that her friend’s 21st party was difficult and when I asked her to describe the scene, I would have been too. Her friend had hired a band and at the end of them playing “Happy Birthday to you”, balloons dropped from the ceiling and guests kicked them around the floor. Kathryn just panicked and ran out.
I asked her if the problem might not be the numbers of people but the environment. Was it the large hall? Lots of people in a small space? The balloons themselves? She wasn’t sure.
But when we had finished our first session with trance, she told me that what popped into her mind was of a birthday party when she was 8 and a boy called Patrick; she didn’t like had popped a balloon in her face. She had thought she didn’t like parties because she couldn’t choose the people there – but realised in that instance that it wasn’t Patrick or strangers, but balloons.
A Eureka moment
That Eureka moment was very useful. I asked her to visit somewhere which might have balloons to see if her guess was right. At the second session, she told me she had reacted to it. From that moment onwards, we changed tack to specific phobia, and we completed a rewind and reframe on the original incident and finding the balloon in the shop.
Then, after the reframe, I asked her to test her reaction once more in the shop and asked the assistant to pass her the balloon. Although it was plastic and helium, she could hold it happily.
Also see A- Z of phobias