The fear of heredity can travel down at least two distinct paths it can be a fear of what others might think knowing your ethnic heredity or it can be a fear of the health and body image resulting from your heredity. This fear is known as Patroiophobia.
The history of your family could hold dark secrets that would be embarrassing if not damaging if they were known. One look at grandma and you may dread aging. Seeing how family members have been treated as ethnic minorities could cause a fear of your heredity to blossom into a phobia.
What Causes Patroiophobia?
This fear is often based on our own personal observations about life and the future we hope for ourselves. If an aging member of the family has Alzheimer’s disease we might come to dread our own aging process. The same is true for cases of heart disease, diabetes or struggles with weight. As a young person you may feel as if you are immune to some of the effects of heredity, yet as you age you can come to suspect you may be more like your parents and grandparents than you thought.
This fear may have been expressed by a parent obsessed with their own health, looks or public status. That obsessive nature can easily be passed on to young eyes who believe what they see and understand more than you think.
This tendency can also come from listening to classmates in school that spoke negatively about certain attributes common in your family. Such prejudicial talk has caused many to believe they are somehow flawed and fearing that the family they were born into will somehow determine what they can and can’t do, where they can and can’t go and ultimately what they will become.
Symptoms of Patroiophobia
This fear often has the hallmark of profound dread. There may be the sense that you have been dealt a bad hand in the card game of life and you are powerless to stop or change what you are destined to become simply based on the family into which you were born.
Most additional symptoms are only evident when the phobic individual spends a lot of time dwelling on their fear.
- Elevated heart rate
- Air hunger
- Weeping
- Fatalistic thinking
- Depression
- Panic attacks
- Anger
This fear can cause the phobic individual to distance themselves from their own family in an effort to either change what they will become or because they become acutely depressed in the presence of family.
How to Overcome Patroiophobia
This fear can be profoundly damaging to family relationships so special care needs to be taken in dealing with the fear. The important component for recovery is to understand that while you can’t change the family into which you were born neither should that truth stop you from pursuing opportunity and life. If there are health issues prevalent in your family you can work to be screened, take precautions and live a life that is as healthy as possible. If it is a fear based on ethnicity you should pay attention to those who have fought for success and won. You should love the family you have, yet work to become the very unique person you were born to be. Fear doesn’t have to stop you from becoming something more than you think possible.
The fear of heredity is also called
Heredity Fear
Patroiophobia
Family heritage fear
