What is Liomenoprosopophobia?

Disclaimers & A Quick Note

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Before I get into how my liomenoprosopophobia developed, I just want to clarify a few things.

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1. Despite the fact that my mom and I coined this term, I want to mention that I am not a medical professional and this is just my experience with liomenoprosopophobia; yours (if you suffer from it) may manifest differently or stem from different traumatic events, because the only criteria for this phobia is that you have an irrational fear of m***ing faces. So please just take anything else I say about it with a grain of salt

   1. If you suffer from this phobia and are comfortable with talking about it, feel free to sign up as a writer and share your story on the blog, so that:

      1. Even better information can be provided for people who have it

      2. We can all learn how to better avoid triggering each other

      3. We can all feel a little less alone in our mental health struggles!

2. Any people I mention here that were involved in the development of this phobia that are close to me (like my family) are people that I have since reconciled with about it, so I no longer have any ill feelings about them on this front. I'm just mentioning them here to help explain how everything unfolded.

3. I have censored the M word in my story and all across the site (either by referring to it as "m*lt," "m***" or simply "the M word"), but this is not because I am personally triggered by this word anymore (like I used to be); it's to help any other people reading the information on this site who also may suffer from liomenoprosopophobia so that they can get information on it without being triggered.

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My Liomenoprosopophobia Story

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My fear of m*lting faces first activated when I was 11 years old; just as a little bit of backstory, it started on my birthday (February 10, 2007), and my then 17 year-old brother and I went to the local video rental store to pick out a movie to watch with the family that night. 

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Being the naturally childlike person I was, I went to the Kids section and picked out the movie Just 4 Kicks (2003) because I had a huge crush on Cole Sprouse at the time and I had no idea up until then that he'd been in anything other than The Suite Life. But when I showed my brother my selection, he shot it down because he thought it wasn't mature enough for my age.

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It was then that he showed me his choice from the Teen section: Agent Cody Banks (2003), starring Frankie Muniz and Hilary Duff. I remember him telling me that he thought our mom would approve of that one a lot more - but boy, if she had seen the kind of stuff that was in it, I don't think she would have (and not just because of the m***ing face)! But anyway, I remember feeling incredibly hurt by his implication that he thought the movie I picked was too childish, and I felt pressured by him into getting the movie as a result, even though it was my birthday and I wanted to watch Just 4 Kicks.

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We ended up getting both movies, though, which thankfully were too scratched up that night to be playable (and ironically, we resorted to watching Ice Age: The M***down on Pay-Per-View instead). But little did I know, those earlier comments from my brother had sowed a seed of resentment in me that would mutate into fear when I watched Agent Cody Banks for the first time later that week.

 

The first time that I sat down to watch it and witnessed the fate of Dr. Brinkman after he got an ice cube with silicon and carbon-breaking nanobots shoved down his throat, my dad's voice yelling out in disgust was heard from behind me in the same moment as the close-up on the mad scientist's face was shown. I remember thinking at first that the blue blood protruding out of Brinkman's lab coat looked kinda cool, but as soon as I heard my dad's disgusted voice, I immediately looked up at the guy's face and in one moment, my mood went in an entirely different direction as before.

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Over the next few days, my OCD in combination with my brother's insensitive comment planted a seed of fear in me that I could m*** if I ever consumed ice (which also stemmed from a line in the movie, delivered by Frankie Muniz's character, Cody: "Ice cubes. That's what they're using to distribute the nanobots. Everybody uses ice cubes. Nobody would know what hit them."), and I started demanding to my family members and everyone else in my life to never use the M word around me in order to avoid being reminded of the image of Dr. Brinkman's face (and thus, avoid feeding my fear that it could happen to me, too) or serve me any beverages with ice in them, no matter where the ice came from.

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Most people I interacted with didn't understand my wish for them to not say the M word around me, and some even deliberately used it just to "help desensitize" me to it - but honestly, this just made it even worse! The way I saw it, the phobia was a wound and the M word was a fingernail. The way you heal a wound isn't to continuously pick at it, but rather to leave it alone - and the people using the M word around me were not leaving it alone. Whether it was deliberate or not, they were picking at the wound - and thus, not allowing it to heal properly.

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Eventually - a couple of months before my 12th birthday - I got over my fear of ice, which happened during my younger brother's 11th birthday at a local restaurant when I ordered a Coke with ice in it. Throughout the meal, my dad and brothers joked about different parts of my face m*lting off - which was annoying, don't get me wrong (especially since I was still triggered by the M word) - but I stuck it out, realized that nothing would happen to me except maybe some dehydration and never had a problem consuming ice again.

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It took much longer for me to move past the triggering effects of the M word, but it eventually happened sometime shortly after my 14th birthday; my family and I were watching American Idol (season 9, to be specific), and it randomly occurred to me that the word wouldn't actually hurt me; right after this, I told my parents about this revelation and that I didn't hate the word anymore - and thus, that they could use it around me again.

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Persisting Hurdles

 

However, even though I got over both of these hurdles, that didn't mean that my liomenoprosopophobia was completely eradicated. You see, there were some other movies I'd seen already (namely, Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark, Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith, and Troll 2) that had similar images as Agent Cody Banks; thankfully, I was properly warned before I saw any m***ing face parts, but I was still so scarred from seeing ACB that I wanted to avoid watching any movie like that ever again. And if I ever did watch one, I didn't want to either 1) scroll over the progress bar of a particular movie I was watching on my computer to see the timestamp of the image so I could avoid it but risk getting triggered in the process, or 2) miss a huge chunk of totally safe content by letting the movie play in a different tab just to avoid that risk.

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I also sometimes have dreams where the image of someone's face m**ting shows up, which was very bothersome to me. Thankfully, whenever it would show up in my dreams, I was able to cover my eyes in time; but I still pretty much always knew exactly what was happening (including what it looked like) - so in that way, I couldn't really escape it. And I am aware (since I have been told this by my mom, and it's also backed up by science) that the reason it kept showing up in my dreams was because my subconscious was simply trying to help me recover from the phobia; but it still felt incredibly intrusive to me (like my own brain was harassing me), because I felt totally out of control when it happened, even though I was doing everything in my power to stop myself from seeing it.

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The Purpose of This Site

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For the longest time, I also didn't have a word for this specific fear; and I really wish that I had - not only because of the other movies I'd seen and heard about that have this disturbing of an image in them, but also because I wanted to know I wasn't alone and what kind of help I could get. However, whenever I would scour list after list of phobias on the Internet trying to find something that could match my experiences, there were never any search engines or an option to search by definition - which made looking for it in these lists incredibly tedious and confusing. And I didn't want to do it the old fashioned way by Googling it, either, because I felt like I would get triggered if I did.

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So, I took this issue to my mom (bless her), who promptly told me she would search for it herself, since she doesn't have this fear. She ended up coming back with no results except for the definition of Aestophobia, which (as we've established) wasn't it.

 

So then, she suggested for me to make up my own word; and after doing our own independent Googling, we came up with the word prosopotikophobia - which derives from the Greek root words prosopo, meaning "face," tiko, meaning "m*lt," and phobos, meaning "fear, horror." A little later on, I discovered from a Wikipedia user on the phobias list talk page that tiko doesn't mean "m*lt" when paired with prosopo, and that Liomenoprosopophobia would be a better term for it, so I changed it to that.

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With all of this in mind - plus having known about JonasAlmostFamous' Emetophobia Help Center website and being inspired by that - that was when I came up with the idea for this website! Because my mom and I coined the term very recently, there's pretty much no information or resources out there to help people deal with the phobia (whether they themselves have it or someone they know does). And I also don't see a lot of content warning guides for movies or TV shows that give timestamps alongside potential triggers (which I think would be incredibly useful for people with any kind of phobia). So, on this website, all of what I just mentioned is what I aim to provide for people with liomenoprosopophobia - because it's exactly what I needed when I was a young person struggling with it!

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How I Overcame My Phobia

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Luckily, this story does have a happy ending: on November 30, 2022 - after nearly 16 years of living in its shackles - I finally overcame my liomenoprosopophobia!

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The method I used may not work for everyone (and I certainly don't recommend it for people who are under 21 - please wait until you are of legal age if you're going to do this), but it worked for me - and I knew that because I had gone through a lot of experimentation with it before ever using to conquer any fears. And the method I used was taking a marijuana edible and intentionally visualizing the image.

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There were a couple reasons I had the confidence to try this:

 

1. I'd done it before with minimal visualization, and not only did it get me more high, but I also ended that trip without any paranoia

2. I had a conversation with my mom where she reminded me that I was basically over the phobia anyway - I just needed a gentle push to really face it.

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So, the night that I finally overcame it - I took a hybrid edible, remembered the previous trip in which I did the visualization... and then I went for it. Full throttle. No movies or shows with the image involved - just pure visualization.

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And then, something amazing happened: not only did I end up getting more high, not only did I end the night without any paranoia - but I also ended up feeling like a badass. I felt like a superhero - and it was the most exhilarating experience ever!

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To put it ironically: I had never felt more alive in my life than I had when I visualized myself facing death!

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And it was all because I knew I was in control. My liomenoprosopophobia was a door that had stayed shut for years because I was terrified to face it. Occasionally, it would open because the thing I'd been afraid of for so long was trying to escape, but I would be quick to shut it again - because even though I didn't know it, I was in control. But in order to conquer it, I needed to know that I was. I needed to feel it.

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So when I finally opened that door, I was at a place where I knew I had that power. I don't have the power to control every possible moment I could come across an M-wording face; but I do have the power to control my response to it - and knowing the difference is what helped me realize I had that power.

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That is why this website has the purpose it does - because before you can get to that point of being ready to open that door, you need to know you have agency over when, how and what you're ready to overcome. You need a safe space - a landing pad - to learn how to navigate overcoming this without the door being opened before you're ready. And that is exactly what this website is and hopes to be.

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A Call to Action

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Because of the fact that so little is known about this phobia - to the point where there wasn't even a word for it until the night I started building this website - I feel like there is a real necessity in spreading this information around (especially about the word itself) to anyone and everyone we know so any sufferers of this phobia don't have to go through what I did and risk getting triggered by Googling the definition because they don't know the word for it. So by all means, feel free to share this website to your friends and family - especially if you have any that are liomenoprosopophobic - because you could be helping someone out a lot by doing so (special thanks to Sam and Danielle of the Book Retorts Podcast for helping us out with this)!