Ok ok. So I’ve been thinking about emetophobia. Before I start, I’ve never done psychology, but I would like to do it one day and become a phobia therapist perhaps. As well as a designer and owning my own brand name of stuff. But that’s another story.
Anyways, I think I figured out how exactly we could tackle our emetophobia strategically.
Look see.
Ok, so here is a diagram of emetophobia. The v* in the middle is the actual thing itself, right? The whole idea of v*, in this case, the v* = our emetophobia. Dun worry, it won’t make you v*, ok. I trust it. Anyways, as you can see, we have “sub fears.”
If you want, you can do one, put v* in the center, and list around it, all the things you fear about it, like “can’t eat meat, can’t do X, hate doing Y”. Like this diagram. Put it wherever you feel comfortable with it.
The v* is NOT the thing you fear, if you think about it. You fear everything else but the actual thing. Do you get what I mean?
I’ll explain it better. You don’t fear v* itself, trust me. Personally, I don’t fear the actual event, and from cured emets, they say the v*ing itself isn’t that bad. They say they feared the build up far more, and when they v*ed, the tension just all released that instant. All gone. What we fear are the surrounding things about the Emetophobia.
Like the “what ifs” and such.
The n*.
The wondering if one will get an sv*.
THAT’s what we fear, and those are what our emetophobia is based on. We do not fear the actual thing itself but surrounding events. You get it? These change the topic of v* into something we fear.
Let’s take a cup for instance. Plain old regular cup. Nothing about it. Now let us pretend we’re cup-o-phobes. How would you be a cup-o-phobe? Most of the fears would stem from things about the cup, wouldn’t they? Oh I don’t like the handle. I don’t like the cup because every time I drink from it, it smashes.
If you think about it, most of our emet comes from bad experiences, and we then associate these bad experiences with our emet. V* then becomes a negative thing because of these bad experiences, which we then associate with emetophobia. These associations are what we need to target.
So basically, again, surrounding factors, not the v* itself. You see what I’m getting at here?
Like for instance, some of you won’t eat X food in case it makes you v*. Others don’t watch Y movie because it has v*. And these are the things we actually fear.
And this, I think, are the things we need to tackle. Say for instance, you fear eating chicken because you think it’ll make you v*. You tackle that part, directly. One day, just aim to eat chicken. When you’ve done that, try sitting backwards on the metro. Every time you conquer a goal, cross it off your little v* spider diagram.
Let’s do this on the chart.
Ok, so instead of thinking “I’m gonna try X and y and b and z”, just try to conquer X. Whatever that may be. For instance, watching 2 v* videos a day. Next, step that up to 4, and 5, or watch worse ones, or anything, until you feel no more panic about that situation.
There’s no point trying to take on all of it at once. It’s better to concentrate on one small area of it. Like the v* video. Or the “eating chicken”. Whatever. Take it one step at a time.
I'll explain it. So pretend your emeotphobia chart is there in front of you. You have a gun to destroy it (which is your courage and overcomingness and all that) You can't shoot all your bullets randomly at it. That'll do you no good because there's too little spread over too much.
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