Koumpounophobia

Despite being described as a relatively rare condition, I have come across quite a few people who share my revulsion, our Koumpounphobia, which is the term given to button phobia.

I was grateful to discover there is a scientific name for this phobia because I am a fairly extreme sufferer, even finding the actual word – BUTTON – repugnant. And much to my chagrin, most articles online that discuss Koumpounphobia use copious and various images of the much-hated item!

Please allow me a small demonstration of how bad it is in my psyche. When my daughter was a toddler I found great joy in buying gorgeous clothes for her. Clothes shopping can be difficult, but I found clothes for little kids have fewer of those ‘things’ than most. I bought her a cute pair of pyjamas. One day, when folding the washing I discovered the pants had … you know … on the cuffs – and my reaction was like finding a spider in your hair!!! That pair of pants lay on the passageway floor for over a week until my understanding bestie popped in and removed them for me. Crazy, I know, but there you go!

At this point I’m sharing with you a photo of a spider eating a bee. I don’t wish to be cruel to all those arachnophobes out there, but I’m trying to illustrate the visceral reaction I have to clothing clasps! What you’re feeling now if you dislike, even hate spiders, is how I feel whenever I stumble across b…u…t…t…o…n…s!

I have tried to get to the bottom of my phobia and identified a few triggering incidents in childhood – things like getting hair inextricably tangled in the hated thing, getting stuck in clothing I needed to remove because my baby fingers couldn’t cope with them … it could have been something completely unrelated even. I remember once, when I was five or six, I was making friends with a little girl who wore a bright blue, buttoned cardigan and eating a mandarin, when she had an explosive diarrhoea episode … I couldn’t eat mandarins for a long, long time after that! Poor kid.

However, I came to the conclusion eventually that there are far more important challenges in my life and I put the whole button thing on the backburner, deciding I could simply avoid them.

If you’re not the sort to notice BUTTONS, then you’d probably not have an awareness how prolific they are in our world. There are clothing clasps everywhere … EVERYWHERE! Sorry, I’ll calm down a bit, but avoiding them can be seriously problematic.

When I’m dropping by for a cuppa, my best mate usually makes sure she’s wearing button-free clothes, knowing that my horrified eyes would continually drawn to them in a similar way one cannot avoid looking at a car accident.

I remember a favourite English teacher once arrived at our classroom wearing a jumper (sweater) that was quite pretty – to some – but to me it was worthy of a Halloween movie because it was adorned with giant buttons. She instantly became my least favourite teacher and I felt nauseated for the entire session.

Uniforms too can be a problem. In my former corporate life, I had to wear suits and of course the blazers usually had buttons. It took serious energy for me to create little blind spots in my mind to those. I use the same blind spots when washing my daughter’s school uniforms.

Anyway, suffice to say, Koumpounophobia is a pain, it’s irritating to me, incomprehensible to most others (and to me too), and I’ve never really been able to find an acceptable explanation for it. Now, I just put it down to one of the quirks that might make me a bit interesting. And I like to find balance in things like being unafraid of spiders, birds, the dark, and other, more common phobias that pepper our population.