#1. Is there a cure?
I hate to sound like a politician here by not exactly answering the question, but the thing is, we don’t use the word “cure” in mental health. That’s because mental health conditions and disorders aren’t diseases. Diseases have cures. Conditions and disorders have successful treatment. Now sometimes people misinterpret this and think that I’m saying you can never really get rid of emetophobia, you can only learn to live with it or cope with it. NOT TRUE! I have been successfully treated for emetophobia and although I work in emetophobia treatment exclusively, I honestly never think about being afraid of vomiting outside of work. And by that, I mean I don’t think about nausea, sickness, viruses, contamination, how others feel, what I eat, etc. etc. I don’t have a diagnosable phobia anymore. But I’m savvy enough to know that if the stress went up in my life (right now I don’t even have any stress – lol) that it might rear its ugly head again. But nothing like before. We call this “neuroplasticity of the brain” which is a fancy way of saying we can create pathways for information in our brains (with a lot of work and time). What we can’t do is erase the pathways that are already there. Not without serious consequences like erasing all your short-term memory. So there isn’t a cure but there’s a cure.
#2. Nobody likes vomiting but you only do it once every 10 years so how does emetophobia ruin someone’s life?
As you may have guessed, this is the #1 question that people WITHOUT emetophobia ask me. And the answer is that being afraid you MIGHT vomit at any moment, for any reason or no reason is what emetophobia actually is. Many people with emetophobia think they’re sick all day every day. Their anxiety makes them nauseous, and their nausea makes them anxious.
2b, if you will, is that people with emetophobia KNOW that vomiting isn’t dangerous, and it won’t kill them. So you can save your logic and reason for your political science class. Logic and reason resides in a part of the brain unaffected by emetophobia (or any phobia). The part that is affected is called the amygdala and it is responsible for your survival. So it’s literally telling the person with emetophobia that they’re about to die. It also fires signals at a rate of 5,000 per second, where as your logic and reason part of the brain requires at least 1 second to register the logic. So it’s literally 5,000 times too slow. Emetophobia treatment involves slowly getting the amygdala used to feeling the anxiety at low levels so it stops sending signals eventually. The person may be a little anxious but if they hang in there and don’t fall back into avoiding situations or using safety behaviors like medicine or gingerale, then soon enough the anxiety will stop bothering to show up.
#3. What causes emetophobia? Trauma? A bad incident with vomiting? What if I can’t remember anything like that?
Good question. Yes, trauma or a bad incident can lead to emetophobia, but it doesn’t necessarily have to have happened. People with emetophobia may have had happy childhoods with good parents. The truth is we don’t know much about the cause, other than it appears to be about 50% nature and 50% nurture. So people with emetophobia probably have a family history of anxiety or depression. They seem to be born with a predisposition to be anxious. There are anxious babies and non-anxious babies! The other 50% is probably a “perfect storm” of things that contributed to it. Once a kid latches on to being afraid of vomiting it doesn’t go away on its own because they won’t vomit often enough. If they latched on to being afraid of dogs, for example, there are enough dogs around all the time for kids to get used to them. But not so with vomiting.
The GOOD NEWS is that you don’t need to spend time and money trying to figure out the cause of your emetophobia. Because no matter what contributed to it, the treatment is the same. The gold standard or evidence-based treatment is CBT (cognitive behavioural therapy) with exposure and response prevention. Gradual. And no, that doesn’t mean you have to vomit to get over it – in fact, we already know that doesn’t help.
For more information about emetophobia go to https://www.emetophobiahelp.org