Philosophy of Emetophobia - from a 30 year sufferer
Greetings fellow sufferers.
I've been brewing this post for about a year now and it's probably time I jotted down my thoughts. This may well be a long-ish post and it's intended to help us all think much more deeply and systematically about this naughty little glitch of the human brain, in the hope of taking us closer to some kind of tolerable level. It is my hope that readers will find something of use and share it with others.
**Mild warning - I don't like to abbreviate words as I think it gives them too much power and, I mean, if we can't stretch ourselves by reading a few words then are we even trying? Not that there's anything overtly graphic though
Background (Usual obligatory background stuff - skip if necessary):
I was around 6/7 years old when I was in the playground and saw a kid vomit. I'd never seen it before. Hard to imagine at that age, hu?. I remember it was red and that confused me. In fact, the whole damn experience confused me. But what I think kick started the phobia was the damned kids around him that were running around yelling "get back, don't go near him!" queue the cementing of a phobia - text book.
From that point on (having no memory of vomitting myself) I would be utterly terrified if any kid felt sick near me. When I was 12 I was in Florida, my dad, his friend and his friend's son in the car. Son says to his dad that he feels sick, son sits by the window and throw up out of it while we're moving. Nothing TOO dramatic but I was so terrified I remember sort of curling up into a ball and speaking in tongues. Messed up!
At 16 I had a nervous breakdown and the phobia - which was previously an incubating egg and only really manifested when someone else felt sick (as I had hardly ever thrown up AT ALL) - hatched and developed into a powerful full-time terror.
I was terrified of eating meat, drinking alcohol, smoking pot, travelling in cars or busses or boats, sometimes eating in public and I felt nauseous constantly. Again, text book. I also had a kind of agoraphobia and never really ventured more than a few miles from my home.
When I was 18 I met a bunch of people who were incredibly loving and passionate about spirituality and eastern philosophy. I began meditating and doing tai chi and in a couple of years I could basically live a normal life. Just about do all the stuff I previously mentioned that I couldn't do.
This lasted until last year when, due to a LOT of financial pressure (quitting my job and then getting married!) it all came tumbling back. I'm now 34.
Here's the recent kick in the balls. Previously, my haven was driving. I couldn't BE driven but I always drove. I drove everyone all the time and could do it forever. But my panic attacks and vomit paranoia found their way... into my driving.
So here's where my recent studies and this story/chapter begins...
You remember my meeting of the bunch of spiritual folk? Well, one of them is possibly the wisest person I have ever known and possibly will ever know. His understanding of the mind and the ego is of a level 99.999% of us will never happen across by accident. I dedicate much of my understanding to his influence.
My new findings began with a meeting with him where we strolled by a pond and discussed the phobia at length. He said something about a buddhist principle (won't go into detail) around the issue of surrender. He said that it sounded like this was an issue with me.
And then it hit me, that I'm fairly certain, that the core root of emetophobia is not vomit, but surrender! (or a resistance to it).
Think about it. Vomiting is a thing that happens to the body, that we have varying degrees of control over, from a lot to none at all, and we resist it like hell.
I myself have a TON of claustrophobia, which manifests in any and all forms of letting go and 'letting be' and surrendering. So...
QUESTION: How many of you reading this also have similar surrender phobia off-shoots? Fear of being out of control? OCD? Claustrophobia? Agoraphobia? Don't like being drunk or being stoned or not being the 'driver'? Please answer this in a response! It will help with my theory.
A model for revovery...
PART ONE - PARANOIA/TRUST.
Ok, so what emets suffer from is an abundance of the 'what ifs'. I call it the what-if impulse.
- What if I get sick?
- What will it feel like?
- Can I handle it?
- What if I CAN'T handle it?
- What if someone sees me?
- What if people make fun of me?
- What if I can't find somewhere to be sick?
The list is endless.
Now, what is this? It's paranoia. What is paranoia? The opposite of trust. Think about that for a minute.
Let's further define trust. Trust is the convenient taking for granted that X is ok, is fine, because we have some data that it's fine. Hence we can relax. Or maybe we have no data that it's a threat, so we can relax. Either way we have data that it's fine or no data that it's bad. A dog might have this toward people and just be relaxed when a total dog torturer walks in the room. But I've had experience of a dog that HATES women because it was a rescued dog that was hard done by a woman during its infancy. Bears its teeth at any women that comes near it!... Trust, see. Or lack thereof. Now it's paranoid. Well, around human women.
This may be somewhat obvious ...? But, well, it's necessary to drill down in order to address panic attacks before they happen and build a system of recovery...
PART TWO - FROM ALWAYS TO SOMETIMES TO NEVER.
So the same friend above pointed out that I said that I "always" panic when I do X. But in the same conversation I had said that I didn't panic at one point. So he corrected that my linguistic programming there was reinforcing my phobia. I should rather say that I "sometimes" panic when I do X (be that driving, eating, socialising etc.)
This is important to tell ourselves so we have an answer to our 'what if' impulse.
What if I panic? - I always panic >> This changes to 'I usually panic'. With some practise we can progress it to 'sometimes'.
PART THREE - CONTROLLED PANIC EXPOSURE
Ok, so to manage panic levels and start bringing back normality to certain daily tasks we need to practise and build up our trust bank.
This is fairly simple. There are two things we tend to do when not doing all this deliberately:
1. Do a task, have a major panic attack and then add that task to our list of DON'Ts, or to be more specifically, our 'always panic' list.
2. Do a task and don't have a major panic. This task is then on our trust list.
So let's try this. Avoid tasks that are FULL ON and will likely trigger a panic and start with easy ones for a while. Bring a few mental crutches such as the bottle of water, the friend who we trust, the gum, the peppermint, the ginger, the antacid etc. and do the lesser of the tasks. The easier ones.
Do these until we can say that we sometimes or rarely panic. Then move on to the next thing. Start to slowly drop the mental crutches as your trust grows. Start to transfer all the major ones from the 'always panic' pile and into the 'rarely panic' pile. This will take time and deliberate effort.
All the while, add the following truth to your "I didn't panic that time!" trust evidence... I didn't vomit. That's one that MANY of us here can and should add to our trust bank. The thing we're afraid of never happens anyway! Consistently! And if... if (very hypothetically here) it did... well, that's a ratio of panic to manifestation of panic of about 10000000:1 - not very much worth realistically panicking about.
Conclusion.
I don't think we're ultimately emetophobes, I think we're let-go-ophobes. We fear allowing things to happen. We don't trust the universe is safe.
One of the people I met (as mentioned above) was a lady that was like our oracle. Everyone (even the wise chap I mentioned earlier) would go to her for council. She was a natural born therapist and when she finally did go for her master's degree in psychotherapy (having already counselled people for years without training), her course tutor described her as a genius.
So I was about 18/19 and was having a lot of panics and fear. I went to her one day and said that I didn't know whether the fear was my natural state and any peace I felt was an abnormality. Or was it vice versa? I had no idea. She asked me to sit down, close my eyes. She talked me through this very tranquil meditation. Eventually she brought me out of it. With my eyes still closed she asked me how I felt. I had strange and peaceful visions of flying - this I explained to her in a sort of sleepy daze. I told her I felt very relaxed. There was a pause.
"This," she said "this is your natural state."
Good luck folks. Would love some feedback! (sorry it was so long, been knocking around inside my head for ages!)
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Originally Posted by andySIW
