JOPLIN, Mo. — Karin Herrmann suffers from lilaspsophobia -- a fear of tornadoes.

Having spent nearly all of 2011 overcoming the paralyzing symptoms of this phobia, she’s created a weather phobia support group to help others still suffering from the devastation of the May 22 tornado.

The group meets for its inaugural meeting at 6:30 p.m. on Thursday, Feb. 23, in the upstairs conference room at the Miami Public Library, 200 N. Main Street.

“I just felt like it was sort of necessary to start this support group,” Hermann said. “When I was going through this, I didn’t find any actual support. (I don’t want others) suffering in the way I did for so long without getting help.

“I’ve encountered quite a few people in our area that hate (and fear) tornadoes. Some people here in Oklahoma have an attitude that (twisters) are just a part of the landscape.”

Such attitudes changed, she said, after May 22.



Wake-Up Call

Ironically, Hermann was one of those Oklahoma residents who took such storms for granted -- until the Sunday evening of May 22, when an EF-5 tore the heart out of Joplin. Symptoms didn’t surface physically until the following Tuesday, May 24, when super cells gathered on the horizon and sirens once again wailed throughout the Four States area, forcing hundreds of thousands to seek shelter.

While Joplin was spared further damage that night, Oklahoma was lashed by a dozen tornadoes, three of them rated as an EF-4 or higher.

Shocked and sickened by the footage of destruction from nearby Joplin, and terrified by the knowledge of what an EF-5 tornado could do to a populated area, Herrmann was overcome by an unexplained sense of panic.

“My husband called me from work, told me there would be a 100 percent chance of a tornado (strike) between 3 to 5 p.m.,” she said. “We didn’t have a storm shelter at the time so I got into the bathtub.”

Inside the tub, as sirens wailed, she couldn’t think, couldn’t mentally keep track of anything, couldn’t hold on to anything.



Face to Face with fear

“I didn’t realize what was happening until after. It was just a sort of cadence of symptoms. I was hyperventilating, my heart rate was way up in the stratosphere. At the climax of it, I lost my balance and I lay on the floor, feeling nauseated É and feeling faint.”

The panic attack that had forced her to her knees slowly ebbed, though it would leave lasting impressions. Any time she saw images of a tornado, the “fight or flight” sensation would kick in, much like it does to folks who have a mortal fear of snakes or the faces of spiders.

Watching news reports or YouTube videos of Joplin’s destruction would unleash panic attacks. She was plagued by “horrible thoughts.”

When someone would mention a tornado, “I would begin to panic,” she said. “I’d never been afraid of anything like this before, but I had a major phobia of tornadoes.”

When visiting Joplin, she would sometimes drive additional miles to avoid eyeing areas of destruction through the center of town. If she saw the high school or the remains of St. John’s Hospital, it would trigger a panic attack and a burst of tears.

Things got so bad that she would sit -- shivering in fear -- of the idea that a storm might appear, approach Miami and spawn a tornado, even if the sun outside was shining and there were no storms anywhere between Oklahoma and California.

Coming to the conclusion that it was a bad idea to have a fear of tornadoes when living in the so-called “Tornado Alley,” she sought treatment. Much of this was accomplished in-house, she said.

She began doing therapy on herself, and exposed herself to tornado-

related things as a way to toughen herself up. She even thought of riding along with storm chasers as a way to overcome her fear, though in the end she thought better of that.

Regardless, the therapy would at times trigger panic attacks, and unsettling nightmares at night. In most of these dreams, large, roaring tornadoes would chase her, switching directions to keep pace with her.

But the “exposure therapy” worked, gradually. She watched the 1996 movie “Twister.” She eyed the famed tornado at the beginning of the “Wizard of Oz.” She watched real footage on YouTube.

Herrmann adopted another form of therapy that soon soothed her fears. Called “systematic desensitization,” it introduced relaxation treatments -- deep breathing, closing eyes and thinking of something silent and tranquil, back rubs or a gentle embrace by a loved one -- as a panic attack surged to the surface.  

“I was going too fast with my therapy and I was scaring myself to death,” Herrmann said. “Once I learned how to pace myself and make sure I was ready to go on to more scary things that I’d gotten used to, that helped. I really learned how to relax myself and to face my fears and cut the anxiety down.”

She and her husband also purchased a storm shelter, she said with a laugh.

Hermann isn’t alone. Adults and children have been stricken by the May 22 tornado.

“Due to what happened on May 22, I had my first panic attack on that terrible Tuesday (May 24),” said Sharon Espy.

Over the following months, she began having a nagging anxiety with situations completely unrelated with the tornado -- such as a fear of excessive noise coming from some new neighbors across the street, she said. The stress and anxiety grew to such extremes that she finally saw her doctor, who told her she was suffering from “displaced anxiety” -- the trauma from the tornado had caused her to latch her fears onto a completely frivolous situation.

Another Joplin mother, who asked not to be named, said her daughter had been affected by the tornado, even though their house was spared damage.

“Her emotional response is hard to gauge at times, because she withdrew and internalized fears,” the mother said. “But with strong winds or thunder now, she has been visibly shaken and not able to sleep. I pray with her, but it’s hard to calm the fears. She has close friends from church and her soccer team that were directly affected, so it worries her.”

Another good local source for phobia aid is the Southwest Missouri chapter of the National Alliance on Mental Illness, which offers a number of weekly support groups. Two groups that could help with weather-related phobias include “Managing Panic, Anxiety & OCD,” which meets each Wednesday at 5 p.m. and “Post Traumatic Stress Disorder,” which meets each Tuesday at noon.’



For more information about the support group, call Hermann at 918-919-3893.