Hi, I am new to this forum but have been emetophobic in varying degrees my entire life. I recently got help from my shrink and some other bits of wisdom that has helped me overcome it and I wanted to share it in hopes that it will be helpful to others. I’m sorry if this information seems obvious or unhelpful, but it allowed me to see things that I could not seem to figure out on my own. Basically, all fear stems from either a fear of emotional or physical death. If we keep asking ourselves, ‘what is the worst that can happen’ over and over, it should eventually lead to a loss of life or of self (emotional). For me, my fear was not as much v*ing, but of others seeing me v*. I thought, if others see me v*, they will see I am doing something disgusting, then start to associate me with that disgusting self, and I will never be able to redeem myself (emotional death). Then I thought, is this really true? If I got s*, and people thought less of me for it, I do not think I would hold their opinion of me so highly. I am only human and cannot expect to be a flawless person my entire life. So this fear does not hold up for me. Now every time I am about to do something based on fear, like be overly germaphobic, I run through those steps in my head and see that it leads me to something irrational. If you fear physical death more, it will be a different path of accepting that v* is something that is trying to preserve our bodies rather than destroy it. Something else that helped me was to think of fear as always about the future. If we see a spider we are afraid it will jump on us, when it jumps we are afraid it will bite, when it bites we are afraid it was poisonous, etc. This means that we can really handle what is happening at the moment, it is just the exaggerated future that scares us. I hope that this might have been meaningful to some of you in the same way it was for me.