wow its been a while since I actually frequently posted here, I still have my Hatoful Boyfriend icon :0
Well hello all! I'm here just to post a little triumph, might be a long post ahead as I'm gonna talk about my history of this

Ever since I was young the undertones of this phobia was always there with the prime ingredients to become the full blown one it eventually became. I didn't react to feeling ill like normal kids, there was an incredible discomfort and a very obvious extreme aversion.

When it did finally blow up when I was 12, it should have been so obvious that this was the problem, with how I voiced the feeling of being sick whenever the anxiety attacks ramped up and how the agoraphobia was characterized by feeling like that when I stepped out the door - but honestly, growing up with doctors, I VERY rarely had any who actually tried to get to the root of what was going on and who didn't just shove pills down my throat. And of course I'm an incredibly scared and confused kid, homesick in a hospital, so I'm not going to be able to properly piece everything together.

So, it took years after to actually realize 'oh, I'm afraid of this certain thing, and that's what causes all these other things to follow', and a little longer to learn the name of it.

Cue several more years of just...having to deal with it. Basic anxiety breathing methods, doctors trying to prescribe the exact amount of pills that would make me a non functioning zombie, becomes non functioning anyway during an extremely dark period.

The last 4 or so years have been the first real recovery I've had, and this year, over a decade since it started, I was just sitting and the thought popped in: You have emetophobia because you have an overall fear of not having control over everything, and thus a fear of a lack of control over your body. The reason why it ignited at that particular period in time was because you were very unhappy with your situation, and of course as a child you couldn't do that much about it, and the culmination was a breakdown of exhibiting that fear of not being able to make sure everything goes the way you'd like. You can tell this because, even though it's not to the extent that the fear of v* is, you get stressed during other situations like it where things are uncontrollable, such as when you have a cold, are feeling dysphoria, or having any other physical discomfort that you can't simply shut off. It's why after you experienced those especially nasty panic attacks years ago you experienced symptoms of PTSD, because the thought of being like that again is more terrifying than anything else.

I could write a 20 page thesis about how having to take literal years to figure things out myself and have almost zero help from those who were supposed to help with that has left me feeling extremely stunted and still suffering with a menagerie of various problems....but it's nice to finally get to the root of it. Even if it took so long!