Annalisa Barbieri has had a lifelong horror of cats. But with her family desperate for a pet, she finally relented and opened her home to Sidney. Here, she explains how she overcame her fear
never thought I’d kiss a cat. Or like them, or be in a room with them., to me, were evil and unpredictable. A classic projection, if ever I saw one, of fear manifesting as dislike. Intense fear. Intense dislike.
It’s impossible to explain the fear I felt. I was constantly on edge. I felt I’d let a monster into my house The moment we got him home, everything changed. I felt overwhelmed and terrified. He was terrified, too, of course. I didn’t know what he wanted or what he was thinking. He was unpredictable and I don’t do well with unpredictable for reasons we’ll discover later. I felt he was trying to trap me into stroking him so he could hurt me.
I had not long before recorded a podcast on trauma with psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Dr Jo Stubley. I started to recognise some of the things that were happening to me. Something in me was being triggered, something I hadn’t processed. I hardly knew Dr Stubley, but in desperation I emailed her. She agreed to talk to me on the phone. She said a few things that were enormously beneficial – I don’t think you should give him back, you can do this. Push yourself but don’t overwhelm yourself.
“There’s something with phobias that doesn’t get talked about,” Dr Stubley explained. “We think that if someone is afraid of something, an object or animal or situation, it’s always because they’ve had a bad experience with that thing. But what we can also do is project on to these objects or animals or situations, something that’s linked to these earlier pockets of vulnerability.
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