dear friends,
I am going to tell you all how I cured myself of my emetophobia. it was not really that difficult, any of you could do it - honestly! However, it might be easier if you have have vomited within the last few years & can still remember it clearly. However, I'm sure it would still work even if you have not vomited for a long time.
I was born in 1955, and I suffered from emetophobia from about age 6 or 7, until about the end of 2001 - that's about 40 years. During that time, the phobia had affected my life profoundly, almost making me forgo the absolute joy of fathering a child.
What happened in 2001 was that I got the dreaded norovirus (or at least something like it). I spent from about 1am until about 3am desperately fighting the nausea (with the help of anti-emetic pills), until I was so tired I couldn't fight it any longer. I then vomited 3 times until I started to feel just a little better around 5-6am. Later that morning, I realised that vomiting was not really that bad - however this did not last more than a day or two.
In the weeks following this episode I went into a deep depression, because I realised that my will-power and pills could no longer protect me. I also started to become anorexic - I was never properly hungry & had to continually force myslef to eat. I knew that I was going to go downhill fast unless I took drastic action. About 10 years previously, I had psychotherapy which was only partly sucessfull - after watching videos of people vomiting, I no longer feared others being sick, but this had no effect on my fear of me vomiting.
Remembering this previous partial success with the videos, I decided that my only hope was to try to de-senitise myself, using my extremely traumatic & frigheningly clear memory of that night of sickness. So what I did was "replay" my memory of vomiting repeatedly, while at the same time telling myself that it was not really that bad, until all the fear (and associated fake nausea) had subsided). I replayed the memory literally as often as I could remember to do it - i.e. whenever I thought about vomiting or the phobia. At first, this would as many as 10 or more times a day (this is a guess - I never counted), and also especially at night when trying to get to sleep.
I started to see some improvement after about 3-4 months, and this spurred me on to continue, as I then knew it was working. I then really started to enjoy the process - it gave me the one of my greatest ever feelings of achievement to know that I was beating it!
As the months went by, I gradually remembered to replay my memory fewer & fewer times during the day - this was not avoidance, but was a sign that the phobia was being defeated, as thought about vomiting less & less. It was around this time I started eating meat again (I had been too afraid before), and I became much more carefree in my whole outlook. I was only just beginning to realise what an awfull effect this detestable phobia had on my life.
After about 9-10 months I realised I had won the battle, when I got an slightly upset stomach one evening, and started to get nervous. However, I knew instinctively what I had to do, I started replaying memory again - this was rather difficult to do while feeling a bit nauseous, but I was rather amazed to find that my fear disappeared completely! I was still feeling slightly nauseous but I *no longer cared* whether I vomited or not. It was then that I knew I really was cured.
A year or two later, there was another round of stomach viruses doing the rounds, and I was rather taken aback to find that I getting nervous again. So, I simply started replaying my memory, and literally within a few days, my fear had completely gone. Every few years, I find my phobia comes back a bit, but I replay my memory, and within a few days it has gone.
So this is where I am now - I have had a couple of bad stomach bugs