Emetophobia: Why it's not about being sick!
Channel: Emetophobia-Free
Date: 2022-12-16

Emetophobia: why it is not about being sick

Really? Are you serious? How come everyone thinks it is then?

Most people don't really understand how and why phobias are formed - and this certainly includes most psychiatrists, doctors, psychologists and therapists. We're not saying that to disrespect those professions - rather just to make it clear to you that WE DO UNDERSTAND. You need to know that we know, in order for you to take us seriously and to recognise both the depth, and insights, contained within our programme.

Every phobia is actually the same... every single phobia, that anyone could suffer from, is actually the same thing. Someone who has a fear of spiders, actually has the same phobia as someone with a fear of lifts, or death, or heights, or cancer, or driving on the motorway, or being sick.

Thats because people don't have phobias of something outside of themselves, what they fear is something inside.

People - unknowingly - create a phobia in order to avoid a situation in which they don't believe they could cope... they don't believe they would cope and so they MUST avoid it, at all costs. That's a phobia.

Imagine you don't like spiders... you don't like them, but you can tolerate them. What I mean is that you are able to manage your emotional response to spiders, to keep yourself from panicking, you can calm yourself down a bit, keep a lid on it, you can stop your stress-levels going into the 'red zone'. We experience this every day... we are constantly managing our emotions - they don't stay at the same level, the same 'volume' all day, every day - they are constantly changing, going up and down in response to the different situations we find ourselves in. There will be lots of situations you don't-like-but-can-tolerate, like spiders.  Most people don't like public speaking, but very few have a full-blown phobia of it...

So you don't like spiders, but you can cope. If there's one in the kitchen, and there's no-one home but you, you could get a glass, pick it up and put it outside. You wouldn't like it, but you'd do it. Well some people have taken their dislike of spiders and gradually, over time, built up more and more negative thoughts and feelings about them to the point where they now work themselves up so much when they see or think about one, that they have created a phobia, and believe they have to avoid them completely.

Imagine you have a 'stressometer', which goes from 1 to 10.  Up to number 3 there's really no stress at all - just some surface emotions. 4 and 5 are quite stressful, 6 and 7 very stressful, and 8 is awful, horrible. You can't go to 9 or 10... they have to be avoided at all costs, 'cause you wouldn't be able to cope. Basically, if that's you, you'd create a phobia about any situation where your emotions would hit 9 or 10 on your stressometer. For you its 9 or 10, for others it's 7, for some it's 4.

There are lots of cognitive components involved in creating and maintaining a phobia as well, it's not just your emotions. Most phobias involve some 'unhelpful thinking styles' like: brooding, black and white thinking, or catastrophising. It's the over-use of these thinking styles that can turn a dislike, into a phobia.  Emetophobes have nine or ten unhelpful thinking styles - as well as things like 'disgust propensity', 'perfectionism' and 'social anxiety' - and that's the main reason why their phobia is so bad, so all-encompassing, so stressful.

So there you have it: a fear of being sick isn't a fear of being sick at all, it's a fear of your emotional response to being sick, and your emotional response is something you can change relatively easily.

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