As I said last time, there was no session this week as I couldn’t make it (dental check-up), although I have now done the exercise I was asked, of summarising the diary so far and analysing the (if we’re being honest) 10 pages of phobic ravings that they represent.



In no particular order, the points I identified were:
  • Over-reaction to any perceived threat of a stomach bug, with no mitigation as I must keep myself “safe”.
  • Imagination is key. The example I gave last week was textbook, as I speculated on what had happened and almost instantly decided that this was “fact”, or at least took the safety first view that I would be better off assuming so.
  • A lot of the anxiety is anticipatory, thinking “Wouldn’t it be awful if I was right about xyz and I did catch something…” suggesting a failure to live in the moment. (All so far, needless to say, have come to nothing.)
  • A worse example of imagination in overdrive is the “touch touch” principle (see below), which accounts for an awful lot of the scares. But again, it’s largely imaginary. I don’t know how far these speculative chains of logic actually stretch, but simply assume they go on and on, so my anxiety similarly goes on and on.
  • Psychosomatic element. I’ve apparently “smelt” vomit in so many places in public since February. I never seem to see it, but again the safety first mentality kicks in, as I assume it is around somewhere and so have to take precautions accordingly, thinking that I might have touched something that had it on etc. My rational side knows that I’m taking the law of averages to absurd extremes by supposedly keep on smelling it (the town centre on a Sunday morning aside I'm actually struggling to remember the last time I saw a pool of vomit in public) so am I just imagining it all or perhaps taking anything that smells a bit “sharp” and simply filling in the rest for myself?
  • Food Poisoning – Looking for it. I must’ve thrown more food away in the past 3 or 4 months than the last 3 or 4 years! Excessive caution.
I think they’re clear enough by themselves, but I can summarise them still further as:
  • Need for control, whether it’s my environment (ie excessive precautions if I think someone has a stomach bug) or by what I eat (hyper-awareness of food poisoning).
  • Hyper-vigilance, seeing (metaphorically or literally) it almost everywhere.
  • Imagination. A lot of this actually rests on things I don’t know for sure, which is kind of ironic given how much this is about control and being definite all the time…
"Touch-touch" incidentally refers to the tortuous and torturing logic that goes, "Suppose I stepped in some vomit in the street, so it's now on the bottoms of my shoes. So I go home and track it inside, putting it on the floor. So anything that goes on the floor also picks it up, as would I if I touched something that had touched the floor..." You get the idea. As I said last week, the single most ill-advised, badly thought through and simply stupidest thing I ever did with this phobia was to Google stomach bugs when it all started, so giving myself the idea that noro is everywhere. In short, if noro didn't exist then the insanities of "touch-touch" wouldn't exist either.

This also brings up the point that you can sometimes have too much information. Before this all got bad I must have (by current standards) been at "risk" of noro all the time yet I never caught it. However, once I was "armed" with the info, I can't stop thinking about it. By any measure, I feel worse for having researched noro on the net, not better.

Still, there are a couple of causes for some optimism. Firstly, I've nearly finished the Anxiety Workbook I referred to last time and much of it chimes with what my private therapist says, that anxiety is overcome by a holistic, multi-treatment approach and not a simplistic, "That's the cause of the phobia so go and tackle that." (An early chapter talks of ten risk factors for developing phobias and anxieties and I ticked seven of them!) In practice this would mean that, say, working on control issues (whether directly linked to the phobia or not) would by definition have a positive effect as control is part of it. I see the treatment as not so much searching for the key to fit the lock but more as a war of attrition, wearing the phobia down by attacking its constituent parts in a variety of different ways.

The second (and final point for this time) is that a lot of the scares, however threatening they are at the time, seem a lot less so the following morning, especially if it's on to the new day's worries. Now by the "rules" of exposure to stomach bugs 24 hours may well not be long enough to feel fully in the clear yet I am (up to a point) thinking that. Plus, I really mean the second point, in that nothing makes me forget yesterday's scare than today's new one, in spite of the fact that yesterday's may still be technically "valid".

What this tells me is that however I may perceive the "risk" of a particular situation is actually not the whole story and this is as much about almost the habit of thinking this way as any actual "risk". That in turn tells me that this really is just rogue thought patterns, which is encouraging. When this phobia is just fear it's hard to get a grip on - where do you start? - but if I can see it for what it is (thought patterns) then it all of a sudden looks much more manageable and beatable.