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Hamartophobia – The Fear of Sinning

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Understanding the Intense Fear of Being a Sinner, or Hamartophobia

Do you ever find yourself seizing up in fear whenever you’re in a morally questionable situation?

While a person’s moral compass will always have some effect on their actions, you might be driving yourself into panic at the thought of sinning.

You probably suffer from the constant worry of committing an “unforgivable” mistake. The fear makes you anxious, your hands get clammy. If the possibility of committing a sin terrifies you, chances are you’ve got hamartophobia.

Hamartophobia can cause you to lose your rationale. You could run from any situation where you think you could commit a sin with seemingly disastrous consequences. Read on to understand everything you need to know about the meaning of hamartophobia and how to overcome it adequately.

Some Things You Need to Know about Hamartophobia

First things first. The word for fear of sinning is hamartophobia. The word is often misspelled as harmatophobia—they’re both the same thing. Hamartophobia is a specific phobia. How the fear affects you may vary from others who have the same phobia.

Interestingly, hamartophobia is quite similar to two other phobias. Those include enissophobia, a crippling fear of criticism of any kind, and peccatophobia, the fear of wrongdoing or sinning.

What Causes the Fear of Sinning?

By now, you must be wondering What causes the fear of sinning phobia?

If you think you have hamartophobia, you may want to take a stroll down memory lane to figure out what was the reason you developed this fear.

Generally, a phobia is caused by an external event (trauma), internal factors (genetics), or a combination of both. In this case, there could be a variety of reasons that can trigger your fear of sinning. Some of the most common hamartophobia causes are an individual’s childhood, including how their parents raised them, past experience, and even heredity.

Your hamartophobia could also be induced because of life events involving sinning that may have traumatized you. Such sins typically revolve around the seven deadly sins: gluttony, pride, lust, greed, envy, sloth, and wrath.

Did your caretakers always lecture and scare you about the “consequences” of bad habits? They might have used religion or moral education while doing so. Such practices may make you associate bad habits with guilt. This guilt is capable of multiplying and taking up a lot of space in your mind.

If your upbringing involved those who were constantly on edge about the possibility of making mistakes, you could be taking after them and feeling the same way. You may have also developed the fear vicariously, by witnessing someone else suffer the after-effects of a particularly “sinful” decision.

Or, it could simply be your ancestors passing down their phobia to the next generation.

Symptoms of Hamartophobia

Depending on your level of fear, the symptoms of the phobia will manifest within you somehow.

A phobia can get distressing enough to a point that you experience illnesses like depression. But here’s the kicker: there have been several cases where people with hamartophobia were terrified to even feel anxiety.

Generally, when we experience a phobia we completely avoid being in the vicinity of anything that would trigger us into anxiety. But one doesn’t even need to be in a situation where they could potentially sin in order to feel hamartophobia. Our brain can cause us to react to just the idea of sinning.

Hamartophobia belongs to a list of anxiety disorders where you can experience one or all of the following physical, mental, and emotional symptoms:

Mental/Emotional Symptoms

A deep-seated fear of committing sin could lead to the following emotionally distressing symptoms:

  • Fear of dying, illness, or harm
  • Intense self-blaming, guilt, and shame
  • Isolation from others
  • Irritability
  • Mood swings
  • Feeling hopeless
  • Difficulty paying attention

Physical Symptoms

The primary symptom many experience if they have a fear of sinning is a panic attack. These attacks can occur without any warning, severely impacting the individual. The physical symptoms of such an episode include:

  • Alternating hot flashes and chills
  • Shortness of breath
  • Constriction in the throat cavity
  • Trembling
  • Sweating
  • Nausea
  • Headache and dizziness
  • Chest pain
  • Uneasy stomach
  • Elevated heartbeat levels and blood pressure
  • Dry mouth
  • Ringing in your ears
  • Disorientation
  • Hyperventilation

These symptoms need to manifest over a minimum period of six months in order to qualify for the diagnosis.

Sometimes, you may experience two or more phobias that intertwine to cause complex phobias. These have the potential to completely halt your everyday routine and alter your social life.

How Do You Deal with Hamartophobia

Those who suffer from hamartophobia tend to ignore treating their fear, believing that all they need to do is avoid their trigger. In this case, it would be steering clear of any situation that has questionable morals involved. This usually gives them a sense of control over their fear.

Turns out, that doesn’t work in every case. Consider seeking professional guidance in order to properly tackle your fear and overcome it successfully.

Self-Help: Ways to Help Yourself

The first step towards calming yourself and dealing with hamartophobia is knowing this: There’s a difference between a sinful person and a person who sins.

Think about it. A sinful person is someone who isn’t hesitant to do immoral or unspeakable things. But a person who sins is someone who may unintentionally indulge in a mistake on occasion. Remembering this may help lessen the paralyzing guilt you carry around.

You may want to keep some grounding techniques handy for whenever you have panic attacks. Try calming yourself using positive affirmations each morning, and visualize the practical sequence of events that would happen if you committed a sin.

Professional Help for Dealing with Hamartophobia: Available Options

By placing yourself in the care of a licensed professional, you give yourself a chance to express your feelings and fears in a safe space. Your mental health professional would recommend the treatment that fits your diagnosis.

Talking Therapy

Counseling, psychotherapy, and other talking treatments are quite useful in treating your fear of sinning and mistakes. The whole experience is casual and non-intrusive. Your thoughts, behaviors, and emotions are analysed by a professional. They then help you recognize what fuels your hamartophobia and how to change it.

In talk therapy, any change or extra activity you implement in your life is your choice. A non-judgmental space will prompt you to pour out your thoughts and feelings and hopefully help you better understand how you function.

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT)

If you’re looking for effective hamartophobia treatment, your health professional may recommend cognitive behavioral therapy. The treatment here is based on the concept of how your thought process and perception of the world around you impacts your behavior.

Continued anxiety can alter your perception of reality and cause distress. This can be eliminated through CBT by identifying your outlook on reality and employing strategies to set it on a healthy path.

In the case of hamartophobia, the effects of a strict morality on your emotions are analyzed and altered to allow a conscience that experiences healthy feelings.

Medication

While therapy has had remarkable results over the treatment of phobias, you may need some extra help battling the side effects of a phobia. Medication is essentially a short-term solution to treating the physical effects of your anxiety. The following medications may be prescribed:

  • Antidepressants
  • Anxiolytics
  • Beta-blockers
  • Tranquilizers

Never self-medicate under any circumstance. Always acquire a prescription from a licensed health practitioner when considering medication.

Learning to Cope with Hamartophobia

Each individual suffering with hamartophobia may have a differing series of triggers.

In certain cases, it may be possible for you to simply not entertain even the thought of sin at all. However, this wouldn’t work if your triggers are present everywhere.

You may want to further explore your views on morality and sin while in a safe space. This might help you understand yourself. You might be able to work toward adopting a healthy morality that doesn’t drown you in guilt.

Read up on different sources about how an individual can let their morality influence their life, and integrate yourself into relaxed thought processes. Avoid intense and extreme schools of morality.

Wrapping It Up

The presence of hamartophobia indicates that you are in fact someone who values morals. Now that you’re aware of hamartophobia, you can begin to work on your fear. You can focus on improving the quality of your life.

FearAZ.com is looking for personal stories of any 'fear of' or phobia. If you have an interesting story you'd like to share, we welcome your submission. If the story fits with our content and guidelines, we'll add it to our site.
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Your Fear Goes Up and Down

Are you someone who would rather climb the stairs than take the elevator? You call it squeezing in a workout after being sedentary the whole morning. Or perhaps you claim it's a faster route. These are both typical, normal, and acceptable reasons. But what if you need to be in the conference room on the eleventh floor in five minutes, and you're wearing your business suit and wingtips? Would you still prefer to take the stairs? If your answer is yes, then maybe it's time to take a closer look at your reasons for avoiding elevators. Elevators stir all sorts of emotions in passengers. From the discomfort of closeness to strangers to the sensations in our gut, elevators can be a source of the heebie-jeebies for many, but for some, they can also be a source of terror. Let's dig a little deeper into the latter, and see what this terror is all about and what can be done to manage it. To begin with, does being inside an elevator give you chills or the sweats? Or does it trigger an unpleasant memory? Perhaps you remember movies you've watched where something terrible happens inside an elevator. From Silence of the Lambs, The Shining, Final Destination 2, or the king of all elevator horror films, 2010’s Devil, the elevator becomes witness to something sinister and horrible. And you want nothing to do with any of it. You know that you're not claustrophobic. You can deal with heights just fine, too. And you know that you're not going to be trapped inside. All of these contribute to a fear of elevators—but they don't apply to you. Yet being inside one does something to you. It's hard to explain.

What is the Fear of Elevators Called?

What you have is a fear of elevators, which is called elevatophobia. It is most commonly triggered by an experience of getting stuck inside either due to a power outage or technical maintenance. Hearing about other people's experiences or watching a movie about similar circumstances can prompt a fear of elevators getting stuck with you inside. Usually, claustrophobics and agoraphobics may also develop elevatophobia because the triggers and objects of these fears are related. Claustrophobia is the fear of closed and cramped spaces, while agoraphobia is the fear of being trapped without any means of escape. Put the two together, and the elevator becomes the perfect combination of both phobias. The space is limited and closed, with only one means of entry and exit. You can add another point of access if you consider climbing the cables like they do in the movies, but that certainly isn't ideal.

Symptoms of Elevatophobia

If for some reason an elevator stops due to an outage or some technical difficulty, passengers with elevatophobia may go into full panic mode. Even if the maintenance team advises that it will just be a matter of minutes, by then, the person's mind has become irrational with the fear of the elevator falling, being stuck for hours, or other unpleasant thoughts. You would expect a person to exhibit the following physical symptoms: Additionally, you would be filled with that overwhelming anxiety where you feel that you have zero control over the situation. You start fearing the unknown and are filled with negative thoughts about death and imminent doom. You become irrational and unresponsive.

Possible Complications of Elevatophobia

When the panic sets in, the possibility of emergencies related to pre-existing conditions may make themselves known. This might include serious health crises like heart attacks or asthma attacks. When this happens, fear becomes a medical emergency. Elevator rides do not last long; it's just a matter of minutes or even less. But the fact that a person can escalate from panic to a near fatal medical situation classifies the fear of elevators as a 'hard phobia.'

Trying Some Self-Help Methods

Your fear of elevators can likely interfere with your social and work life and relationships. Not everyone understands that elevatophobia, like most phobias, can be crippling. But don't be disheartened. Depending on the level of your fear and level of control, you can gradually face and manage your phobia. Here are some recommendations you can try:
  1. Make a List of Everything that Entails Riding in an Elevator This is a systematic approach to getting over your anxiety. By following a step-by-step process, you can identify where the fear kicks in at its strongest. You can write a list of steps like pressing the topmost button and waiting to arrive on that floor, watching as the door closes and opens, being alone inside the elevator, or having delays with the doors opening. Now try doing the opposite. For example, face away from the door or occupy yourself with your phone so that you are distracted.
  2. Create Your Fear Ladder Although the name says fear of elevators, it is not the whole process that scares you. There are just phases and parts of the elevator riding experience that cause you to panic. So go back to the list you initially created and label the fear level you feel. You can do it numerically, too, like ten being 'really scary,' six, 'manageable scary,' and one, 'not scary at all.' You can put the corresponding fear levels so you can focus more time and effort into activities that are more scary to you.
  3. Face Your Fear By now, you have identified what scares you the most. You can try repetitive action to minimize your fear and increase your sense of ‘normalcy’. Remember that the longer you expose yourself to your fear, the better you get at handling your emotions. If you are feeling overwhelmed, stop. Pushing yourself too fast and too soon can backfire. Modify your pace and go slower instead.
  4. Talk About Your Fear People by nature, unfortunately, are not quick to offer understanding and support. You need to tell them what's wrong before they can empathize. Talk to someone who you trust and ask for their support, especially in the initial phase of overcoming your fear. If you are too afraid to ride the elevator alone, you can ask them to go with you, and before you realize it, you are on your floor, and there was no indication of panic.
  5. Learn To Be Patient Be patient with yourself and your predicament. This is, after all, your fight against fear. It might take hundreds of elevator ride practices before the fear gets under control. Even then, there might be some hesitations and episodes of nervousness. These are acceptable and expected, so cut yourself some slack and congratulate yourself for every progress.

Seeking Professional Help

Along with self-help, you can always enlist a medical professional's aid to support you with your elevatophobia. Talking to someone who has experience with similar cases can be comforting, because you know that you are not alone, and this situation can get better. Talk to your doctor about the severity of your fears and the symptoms that you experience. Explain how you deal with it in an attempt to control it. An exam and a health history are made to ensure that there are no unrelated or underlying problems that your symptoms might mask. Usually, phobias like this are approached with a combination of psychotherapy and medication. Your doctor will talk about these options with you, and it's entirely up to you, with your doctor's recommendation, what you want to pursue. For psychotherapy, the most common type is cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), which aims to help you find different ways of behaving, thinking, and reacting when about to step inside an elevator or when already inside it. With medications, there are beta blockers and benzodiazepines, but note that these can have side effects. Whatever these side effects are, you should promptly share it with your doctor.

Simple Tips to Overcome Elevatophobia

Elevators are not perfect, but their likelihood to malfunction, fall, or get stuck is very low. If you are not fully confident with this information, you can help overcome your elevatophobia by learning common elevator safety tips and basic elevator operations. These should help curb your mild fear until you become more self-assured. In addition to that, here are some of the things that you can do to gradually overcome your fear of elevators—both in getting on and riding one.

Conclusion

Yes, elevatophobia can be a challenge in today's world, but don't allow the elevator to win. Don't let it stop you from taking a job on the top floor or attending a social gathering on the rooftop. Sure, you can take the stairs if you insist and arrive winded and sweaty, with the party about to wrap up. But is this the quality of life you seek? Elevators are designed to make life easier. There are guaranteed ways to help you overcome elevatophobia. Take the first step and seek help. Soon, you’ll see yourself breezing through the floors with those arduous stair climbs little more than a memory.
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