People with emetophobia often don’t live in either the present moment – they live in the past and the future. Asking “what if _____________” moves you from the here and now to a future time. “What if,” grammatically, is conditional. That means it’s not reality or what’s actually happening – it’s taking you to a future time when something might happen. But also, it might not.
You live in the past in the sense that when something triggers your emetophobia, your body “flashes back” to a time in the past, usually in childhood, when you felt emotionally alone, vulnerable, or afraid. This is not about blaming your parents for some terrible, heinous crime like child abuse. You hear stories of parents who hook their kids up to the clothesline outside or lock them in a dog crate in the basement without food or water. If you had parents like that, you may very well have emetophobia and/or a host of other problems, but more than likely your parents were just not emotionally available to you as a child and probably not when you were sick. There are other contributing factors to emetophobia besides these, but that’s not the point of this blog.
“What-if” Thinking goes something like this:
- What if I touched something with norovirus particles on it?
- What if I forget to wash my hands?
- What if the food I ate was expired?
- What if they’re not very clean in the restaurant kitchen?
- What if my kids pick up something from the other kids at school?
- What if I get so panicked that I throw up?
- What if I get sick on the plane?
- What if I sit beside someone else who is sick on the plane?
You get the idea. Sometimes, it’s tough to get yourself out of thinking this way once you start. It’s as if the thoughts go round and round in your head and just won’t stop plaguing you.
You can help change these thoughts by:
- Telling yourself they’re not helpful thoughts
- Telling yourself “STOP!”
The method, above, doesn’t work for everyone because some people experience the thoughts just coming back within a few minutes. If that’s the case for you, you can try:
- Change the “what if” to “right now” and find something you can see, something you can hear and something you can touch, and name it. So for example, “Right now I can see a pen, I can hear kids playing outside, and I can feel the blanket on my couch beside me.”
- Try grounding yourself in the present moment.
- If it’s warm enough outside you can take off your shoes and socks and walk outside on the grass. Feel the earth under your feet.
- Tell yourself what year it is, and how old you are.
The techniques above also don’t work for everyone. You may have to just leave those “what if” thoughts alone, as though they’re a jerk who crashed your birthday party. Instead of spending all the time talking to the jerk to convince them to leave, just ignore them and enjoy your party.
Commit yourself to doing things that you find important. Those things could be mundane, like the dishes or walking the dog. But you find your family and pets important in your life, so therefore those things are important to do.