Analysis Of The Phobia Of Swallowing Pills

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Phobia of Swallowing Pills When I was younger, and even to this day I have always enjoyed sweets, and candy. One day, as a child, I was in the living room by myself eating lifesavers; the hard candy type. The way I would eat the lifesavers would be to suck them until they were not as hard and then bite them into smaller pieces to swallow. However, before I was able to bite into it while sucking on it I accidentally swallowed it. Once it was stuck in my throat I panicked because no matter how many times I tried to swallow it would not go down. I went to go get my mom who was thankfully home in her room. Once I got her she was panicking as well concerned about the fact that I was choking. She then called my Dad and asked him what to do, He then told her to calm down and get some water for me and told her to tell me to drink slowly, and keep drinking until it melted. My mom, unfortunately, was still a little frantic and he told her to hand the phone to me. I then listened to him telling me to calm down and keep drinking. It felt like forever before it finally melted and even then I kept drinking some more water just to make sure it was gone. After that incident I was mostly calm but …show more content…

Through generalization, which is when a conditioned response happens despite the conditioned stimulus not being present and rather being an object or item that can be related to the original conditioned stimulus, I think because the pills are similar in shape, and not considered something easy to swallow. I generalized pills to being similar to lifesavers and became equally fearful of pills as to the lifesavers (Powell et al., 2013, p. 140). Overall, while I realize that “such extreme, irrational fear reactions are known as phobias,” it is because of that I am not quite sure what to do about it (Powell et al., 2013, p.

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