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It's OKAY to have a phobia.  Phobias are defined as irrational fears.  Yet, most phobias are far from irrational.  The best thing to do is find a competent, caring psychologist (or psychiatrist) who can help you through your fears.  Or who can at least lend an ear to letting you vent about them.

I've never been able to find anyone who will listen about my own phobia:  swallowing.  Right now I'm having a seriously hard time eating because over the past few weeks I've developed some kind of fear that I will choke at any moment.  As I'm chewing, my chest and stomach begin to feel bloated and I feel the need to burp.  Just as I begin to swallow, I burp instead and it makes me start gagging and I don't know what to do.  I try burping right before I swallow to see if that helps, but what I usually end up doing is gripping the edge of the table as I force myself to swallow, or gripping the arm of the chair.  I also usually end up abandoning what I'm eating halfway through.  I go through phases of the problem every few months.  It makes eating at work tough because I'm embarrassed when people can see me eating.

I've tried to tell a few people about this.  Namely, I've told some doctors and my psychology professor from college.  They all laughed at me.  My professor told me he had never, ever heard of something like this (and he was in his sixties).  Another doctor told me I was just ridiculous.  Another looked right at me and asked, "Are you a little sissy girl?"

Sometimes it gets so bad I can't swallow liquid.  Once my mother took me out to eat and I couldn't even eat little pieces of crab.  A lot of times I resort to crunchy food because it breaks down into smaller pieces as opposed to, say, bread, which becomes a giant clump in my mouth and I have to roll it around trying to separate it into smaller bites.

Crazy, right?  I don't know what to do.  I talk to those doctors, hoping they'll give me advice, like what they would tell someone with a narrow esophagus or an extremely sensitive gag reflex.  But instead they laugh at me.  One even told me, when I asked him to reassure me that I won't choke, that I could in fact choke on something as small as a pea.  He said it quite dismissively.  He could have lied.  He could have tried to help me.  Instead he just made the situation even worse.

It's exhausting to eat.  It's a fight.  Should I ask for some kind of anxiety pills that I take an hour or so before eating (which I would have to crush up and put in pudding)?  Is there a trick to sort of hypnotize myself?  Should I start collecting recipes that only use crunchy foods?  I don't know what to do.