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For now, that's all still in the realm of research. In my case, my psychiatrist — let's call him Dr. N — practices something called psychodynamic psychotherapy, which is more like psychoanalysis. But for the purposes of treating my phobia, he turned himself into a cognitive-behavioral therapist. For each session, I would arrive with groceries and watch while he ate them. I would calmly try to separate the sight and sound of a person eating from the fear it induced in me. I would try to retrain my brain to be unafraid of something that there was no reason to be afraid of in the first place.
And it worked — up to a point. As the treatment went on, I began to catch my first glimpses of what it might be like to live without wanting to cross the street every time I saw a stranger holding an ice cream cone. But they were just that: glimpses. The spell always faded, and I didn't know how to make it last.
In one session, Dr. N departed from the CBT script and suggested I try to visualize the fear as a creature. As soon as he said that, I saw it: a primitive, eyeless monster visible only to me, like the gremlin on the wing of the airplane in The Twilight Zone. When Dr. N took a sip of milk, the creature would reach out and touch the carton. When it touched the carton, I felt the fear.
Try making it let go, Dr. N said. Don't let it touch the carton. It took a lot of effort, but I did it. The creature wanted to touch the milk, but if I tried, I could stop it. When I did, the fear went away. I practiced that — letting the creature reach for something, making it stop, making it back away. The better I got at controlling the creature, the easier my phobia was to control. I even talked to it. I asked it what it wanted and why it wouldn't leave me alone. It wasn't CBT, but it was working.
The day may come when psychiatrists can wipe out phobias at will, like erasing a whiteboard. Who knows? But I suspect that my phobia is a more complicated animal than the ones they worked with at NYU. It goes back a lot further and down a lot deeper than colored cards and electric shocks.
For now, I'm still living with it. For whatever reason, my treatment has not been successful. I can't always make the fear go away. Maybe that means there's more to the problem than bad wiring. There are feelings down there too — old, dark, unmapped feelings — and I'm going to have to deal with them before the fear leaves me alone. My phobia is a part of me — an ugly part, by the looks of it. I'm going to have to get to know that demon better. Because it's not going to leave till it's good and ready.